Is Your Child Safe at School?

BY JIM HUTCHISON

HALIFAX COUNTY, N.S., elementary-school teacher Hetty Adams, 41, had no idea her son, Ben, an active 14-year-old who loved playing soccer, was being harassed at school by a Grade IX student with a reputation for violent behaviour.

   The older boy threw Ben's books out the window and poured whiteout on his clothes to humiliate him in front of his friends. He cornered Ben in the washroom and roughed him up.

   A quiet, good-natured boy, Ben said little to his parents about his torment. Then one day, as Ben stood watching a basketball game in the gym, the bully suddenly ran at him, slamming him into the stage. Ben, who suffered from a rare form of neurofibromatosis that affected his aorta, crumpled to the floor. He died of internal hemorrhaging.

   The bully who caused Ben's death in February 1991 was transferred to another school where, Ben's grieving parents heard, the boy continued his violence against other students.

    "The increasing level of violence in our society is spilling over into our schools," says Adams, now principal of William King Elementary School in Herring Cove, N.S. "It's affecting everyone, not just children in big cities."

    Last November a Reader's Digest/Roper nationwide poll found 88 percent of adults believe school violence is a serious problem.

    "Altercations settled with name-calling or fists ten years ago are now erupting into assaults with knives and baseball bats," says Detective John Muise, with 54 Division's Street Crime Unit in Toronto.

   In November 1996, following an altercation a few days earlier, a 15-year-old student at Vancouver Technical Secondary School attacked a 14-year-old with a machete. Slashed three times across the back, the victim also had nine tendons in his wrists severed as he tried to protect himself. The 15-year-old was charged with attempted murder.

   On May 1, 1994, Marwan Harb, 16, a student in Hull, Que., was involved in a fight between two teenage gangs. A 15-year-old pulled a knife and stabbed Marwan to death. The student was convicted of manslaughter.

   Surveys of teachers indicate that violence is of increasing concern. The Ontario Teachers Federation reports major incidents involving biting, kicking and punching, and the use of weapons on students and staff soared 150 percent between 1987 and 1990.

   The number of Canadians aged 12 to 17 charged with violent offences rose from 9,275 in 1986 to 22,375 in 1995. The number of girls among these offenders rose from 1,728 to 5,125.

   Even more depressing, say police, is the increasingly younger age of offenders. Central Toronto Youth Services surveyed 397 students and discovered that almost a third of Grade VI students had beaten someone up in the past nine months.

   But statistics show only the tip of the iceberg. "The majority of violent crimes in schools goes unreported," says Const. Kevin Guest, an officer with the Community Response Unit of the Metropolitan Toronto Police Service, who has investigated such incidents.

   Teachers are often targets. On Monday morning, March 25, 1996, Surrey, B.C., high-school Vice Principal Carolyn Oram was talking to a student in her office. As she bent her head to write a note authorizing the student to return to class, the 14-year-old pulled a pair of scissors from his pocket, grabbed Oram by the hair and stabbed her repeatedly in the head. Covered in blood, Oram stumbled out of her office for help.

   More than 60 teachers in British Columbia have been attacked by students in the past five years. A survey by the Manitoba Teachers' Society revealed that between September 1991 and January 1993, one in ten teachers was attacked by a student. And almost a quarter of school staff in the Northwest Territories were intimidated or threatened by students during the first term of the 1995-96 school year, with ten percent physically assaulted.

    "Violence is worse in big cities, but we are seeing it in rural areas, too," says Stuart Auty, executive director of The Canadian Safe School Network. "Some parents think it doesn't happen in their kids' school, but it does. The kids are just too afraid to talk about it. The essence of the problem is fear."

WHY ARE children more violent today? "Failed parenting and a lack of social support," says Fred Mathews, a psychologist with Central Toronto Youth Services. "Firm, fair and involved parents with the knowledge and financial resources to care for their kids are least likely to have children involved with serious violent behaviour."

   For many, TV has become a baby-sitter. By the time the average Canadian child leaves elementary school, he will have spent 12,000 hours at school and 18,000 hours in front of the television set, according to a 1995 national school-based violence study done by the Solicitor General of Canada. In that time, a child will have witnessed 8,000 televised murders and 100,000 acts of violence.

   An extensive U.S. study, conducted by the National Institute of Mental Health, found as strong a link between excessive TV watching and violent behaviour in formative years as there is between lung cancer and smoking.

   "Most kids can separate fact from fantasy," says Mathews, "but a vulnerable young child left plugged into television by absent parents is at risk. They mimic what they see, and a steady diet of violent programming provides scripts for them to act out."

WHAT CAN be done to keep schools safe?

   In the spring of 1993, three incidents in Scarborough-area schools shocked teachers and principals to action. A 20-year-old drug dealer was apprehended in a school washroom in possession of a gun and narcotics; a student, 17, walked into school with a handgun and held it to another student's head; and an 18-year-old attacked another student at a school dance, stabbing him with a knife repeatedly in the back and neck.

   On November 1, 1993, the Scarborough Board of Education approved a new zero-tolerance policy on violence and weapons -- the first board in the country to lay out strict rules to curb school violence. It became mandatory for principals to report all acts of violence within their schools; students involved in violent incidents faced indefinite suspension. All weapons-related offences were reported to police.

   The results have been astounding. In nearly four years, weapons offences, including possession, threatening or assault, fell by 60 percent among the board's 81,000 students.

    "What works," says Associate Director Bob Heath, "is sending a strong message that there are consequences for antisocial behaviour and students will be held accountable. I hear of kids walking away from fights now saying 'You're not worth getting expelled over.'"

   Violent kids kicked out of Toronto schools may be referred to Gary Vipond, coordinator of the program for expelled students at the Metropolitan Toronto School Board. With a part-time teacher, psychiatrist, and youth worker, Vipond involves the students and parents in a rehabilitation program.

   "Usually they need help with everything from school work and managing anger to dealing with peer pressure and resolving conflicts," says Vipond.

   If they get through the program, they may be allowed to return to district schools. Since the program's inception in 1995, none of the students who have returned to school has reoffended.

   After administrators at Riverdale High School in Pierrefonds, Que., declared that any student involved in violent incidents would be suspended, Principal Barry Cole went to classrooms to explain that "taxing" -- extortion by a group of kids swarming a lone student -- would result in suspension. Since children were encouraged to come forward, anonymously if need be, taxing has stopped.

    Across the country, students are being encouraged to take a stand against violence. Every British Columbia student in Grades II through XII is given a card with the Youth Against Violence Line phone number. More than 500 anonymous calls are made each month tipping off police to potential fights, assaults, weapon carrying and extortion.

    Marianne Potter is program director of School Watch, a student-run violence prevention initiative now in more than 30 Calgary schools. With support from concerned parents, police and administrators, students perform locker and bike-rack checks to decrease theft and clean up vandalism.

   "If perpetrators know others are watching and will report violence," says Potter, "it reduces their comfort zone."

   At Earl Beatty Elementary School in Toronto, 30 specially trained students patrol the playground in bright yellow vests with "Peacekeeper" emblazoned across their chests. Parents chipped in to buy the vests. As in several other Toronto-area schools, students patrol in pairs, on the lookout for trouble -- a child crying, an argument over a game. They offer to mediate disputes or to take serious problems to a teacher.

   "Since we started the Peacekeeper program three years ago, our school yard is a much safer place," says Vice Principal Bryan McCormick.

   A month after her son, Ben, was killed, Hetty Adams was determined to do something. "I can't change the world," she told her husband, Brian, "but I can help my own students."

    Brainstorming with other teachers at William King Elementary, she sought ways to teach kids mutual respect. In 1994 she published Peace in the Classroom, a book setting out a practical, hands-on approach to coaching kids to solve disputes, which has been adopted in many Maritime schools.

   At her own school, 12 of the 320 children are trained as mediators each year. "The most important skill you can teach kids is how to get along, but teachers can't do it alone," Adams says. She believes it is crucial for parents to intervene when a child first shows antisocial behaviour because it is too hard to change attitudes later.

   "If we all work together we can stop violence in school," she says.