According to the March 15 report by Guiyang Evening News, in the beautiful spring month of March, parks across Guiyang are in full bloom. In the past, many schools would organize students to go on spring outings together to relieve academic pressure and allow them to fully enjoy the season. But nowadays, most schools in Guiyang rarely organize outdoor activities other than the annual tomb-sweeping trip during Qingming Festival. In the eyes of most school authorities, “spring outings” and “safety concerns” have always been a contradiction, leading more schools to choose to reduce or cancel outdoor student activities.
It is not entirely fair to simply criticize schools, as spring outings come with numerous safety risks, such as injuries, fatalities, and traffic accidents. Moreover, without exception, whenever a safety incident occurs at a school nowadays, the school is almost always held fully responsible. Even if the school has fulfilled its duties and is not at fault, it still ends up paying compensation and becomes a victim who is “in the right but unable to argue,” leaving the school in an awkward and passive position. To protect itself, the school would rather sacrifice the essence for the nonessential, giving up and banning spring outings altogether.
To provide children with a humane, childlike, and relaxed educational environment, to prevent and handle personal injury incidents among primary and secondary school students, to protect their legal rights and interests, to maintain normal teaching and educational order, and to prevent another case of “chaining kids to their spring outings,” it is necessary to reduce teachers’ “safety pressure” through administrative directives and to create a socially “safe spring outing” environment for children with effective judicial safeguards.
To this end, Jiangsu Province specially issued the "Jiangsu Province Regulations on the Prevention and Handling of Personal Injury Accidents Involving Primary and Secondary School Students," which lists several types of injury incidents where schools can be exempted from liability. These include: when a student has a special physical condition or disease that the guardian failed to inform the school about in writing and the school could not reasonably have known; when the injury or death is caused by the student’s own actions or mutual fault; when harm results from sudden or accidental external infringements; or when accidental injuries occur during competitive or risky sports or competitions.
The regulations also further define student injury incidents where “the school has fulfilled its educational, managerial, and protective responsibilities, and the student or their guardian shall bear legal responsibility.” Examples include: when a student violates laws, regulations, social behavioral norms, school rules and disciplines established by law, or discipline, and engages in behavior that they should, given their age and cognitive ability, know could endanger their own or others’ personal safety; when a student’s behavior is dangerous, the school has fulfilled its duty to warn or stop, but the student refuses to correct it; or when the school knows the student has a special physical condition or disease but fails to inform the school in writing in a timely manner.
Educational safety is not solely the responsibility of schools, but also of parents, children, and society as a whole. As long as the school, as a guardian, has fulfilled its duties and responsibilities to the utmost, such dedication should be met with exemption from liability and objective understanding and recognition. The greatest social benefit of these regulations is that they bring order to the previously lawless state of responsibility determination in educational safety incidents, clarify the detailed criteria for determining such incidents, especially freeing schools from the passive situation of a “legal vacuum in safety,” and releasing them from the habitual assumption that “schools must bear all responsibility,” returning to rational and fair determinations based on facts. This is undoubtedly something to look forward to.
With impartial legal standards for determining responsibility in educational safety incidents, schools and teachers can be freed from the “safety obsession,” truly taking responsibility for student safety, and the phenomenon of “daring not to organize spring outings” will no longer occur.