Opinions of school principals on occupational health and safety practices in secondary school (Example of Menteşe district of Muğla province)

Providing healthy and safe environment in schools is probable thanks to the studies of occupational health and safety which are carried out. Paying necessary attention to these studies has great importance in terms of blocking the dangers or at least decreasing the possibility of risks which may occur to the lowest level. According to Erdoğan (2012), first of all, it is required that a school environment needs to be proper for occupational health and safety in order to achieve the goal of raising qualified people. In order to create an eligible environment for education, it can be said that students and personnel primarily need to be in a healthy and safe atmosphere. According to Çoşkun (2008), educational activities which are carried out in a healthy and safe atmosphere can easily reach their objectives. Secondary schools which have a significant role in our education system are the academic educational institutions which help students gain basic skills, reveal their interests and abilities and prepare them for upper education. Secondary schools which are one of the basic educational institutions have different structures in terms of the features of their locations. The importance of occupational health and safety are increasing because of variability of the numbers of students, students' being young, spending excessive hours in schools per week, primary and secondary schools' being located in the same building and existing out-of-school activities. The responsibilities and duties of headmasters has considerably increased recently because Ministry of Education is giving more and more significance to the occupational health and safety and considers headmasters as employers in schools (Ministry of Education, 2014; Basic Laws of Ministry of Education, 1973). Increasing responsibilities and duties seem to agonize headmasters in terms of moral and material who are appointed for only four years and do not have any kind of guaranteed position (Kilitçi, 2018; Oluk, 2018). It is considered to be important for headmasters to interiorize the term occupational health and safety, to have enough training in this field and to be provided with enough budgets in order for all headmasters in secondary schools to be able to solve problems related to occupational health and safety. For this reason, the opinions of headmasters about occupational health and safety are really important. The results which were obtained in the study are considered to shed light for researchers who will study on occupational health and safety. In this research, it was aimed to determine the opinions of the headmasters who worked in public schools in Menteşe, Muğla about what the occupational health and safety implementations in their schools were, what kind of problems they faced during the implementations and how the occupational health and safety implementations were supposed to be. So, this study was a descriptive research study. In this study, interview technique was used in order to collect data. Furthermore, the data which was gathered through interviews was analyzed through content analysis. The participants of this study are nineteen headmasters who voluntarily accept taking part in the research among twenty four headmasters who work for 2020-2021 education year in secondary schools which are located in Menteşe, Muğla. At the end of the study, the results showed that many of the schools did not have enough budgets for occupational health and safety practices and schools were not built according to the rules of occupational health and safety. Moreover, it was concluded that bureaucracy was slow, fire detection and warning systems did not exist, plug sockets were not closed, windows were not proper in terms of health and safety and periodic control, maintenance, restore and changes were not done or postponed. Headmasters cannot deal with the responsibilities of being seen as employers by the law because they do not have any power. Furthermore, headmasters do not see teachers, assistant employees and themselves as sufficient in terms of occupational health and safety. It was conducted that enough training on this field was not provided well. Key Words: Occupational health, occupational safety, secondary school, headmaster, danger and risk