A recently released report paints a grim and frightening picture of schools in the Toronto District School Board. The School Community Safety Advisory Report, commissioned last year after the shooting death of 15-year-old Jordan Manners at C.W. Jefferys Collegiate Institute, found many district schools are rife with violence, sexual harassment and a “culture of fear” preventing both students and teachers from coming forward regarding these incidents.
Equally frightening as the violence itself is witnesses’ reluctance to report violent incidents—indicating how afraid students and teachers are of singling themselves out for the same treatment.
The report also mentions the failure of transferring troubled or troublesome students from one school to another. It’s clear juggling students from school to school accomplishes nothing but make them someone else’s problem while transplanting students who are already having a hard time functioning in their school environment, denying them the they need.
This 1,000-page report presents a damning view of a system so broken it makes the Ontario Liberals’ “Safe Schools Act” a bitter joke. But the prevalence of violence in this school district is certainly not unique to Toronto or Ontario: police started patrolling Calgary schools last year, and have been doing so in Guelph since 2001; last May, a Fredericton high school suspended a student with a gun in his backpack and, a week later, suspended another, found with explosives.
It’s apparent efforts to reduce violence in Canadian schools isn’t working.
At best, they address superficial problems on a haphazard level: merely punishing students caught with weapons or assaulting others addresses a tiny portion of those incidents and does nothing to prevent their recurrence.
At worst, they push a problem under the rug enough for it to be out of sight and out of mind, allowing violent or troubled students to be shuffled from one place to another as they continue to pose a threat to their classmates and themselves.
This, and other school boards, need to take a hard look at the environment in which Canadian children are going to school—and what they’re learning there.
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