Horror as probe finds students on deadly trip couldn’t swim
Jeremiah Perry, with his sweet face, should never have been on that canoe trip to Algonquin Park. He couldn’t swim. He had failed the mandatory swim test, and it was hardly arduous — a forward or backwards roll into a lake, a minute of treading water, a 50- metre unaided swim. Fourteen other students from C.W. Jefferys Collegiate Institute in Toronto also failed. Results for two more aren’t known.
Students who f ailed the test weren’t supposed to be allowed to go on the excursion into one of Ontario’s biggest, wildest parks. If they failed, they were supposed to be offered one- on- one coaching and a second chance, and if they failed that, they’d be staying home.
All the right policies were in place at the Toronto District School Board ( TSDB) to ensure a safe trip. The rules were crystal clear.
Had they been followed, Jeremiah would be starting Grade 10 in a couple of weeks.
Yet he, his older brother Marrion, and the other youngsters who had failed the test apparently were never even offered the second chance.
They were all on the trip last month, with the 15 students who had passed and, on July 4, while some of the kids were washing up in Big Trout Lake after a couple of days in the bush, 15- year- old Jeremiah got into trouble and disappeared beneath the water.
Neither he nor some of the others were wearing life jackets, which were supposed to have been the unofficial failsafe.
His body was found the next day.
“I am deeply troubled by these findings and that such a critical safety requirement in our procedures appears not to have been followed,” TDSB director John Malloy told reporters Wednesday at a briefing.
After Jeremiah died, the board hired a third-party investigation firm to examine its processes and how this might have happened.
Its preliminary report is done, but the investigation isn’t complete because two other investigations are underway, one by the Ontario coroner’s office, the other, a criminal probe, by the Ontario Provincial Police, and the two teachers in charge of the trip “on the advice of their legal counsel have exercised their legal right not to speak to them at this time.”
But it appears those two teachers, at l east one of whom had run a similar trip last year, either sanitized the swim test results, failed to disclose them to senior officials or otherwise misled them.
In the immediate aftermath of Jeremiah’s death, while his father Joshua Anderson was telling reporters that his two boys couldn’t swim, board communications officers and others were saying with equal confidence that the board had a hardand-fast policy — you fail the swim test, you don’t get to go.
As Malloy said Wednesday, “We trust our staff … we have clear expectations and procedures and we need them to be followed … We’ve now learned that some of our expectations were not followed. These children should not have been on that trip.”
Later in the day, speaking to Ryan Doyle on Toronto radio station Newstalk 1010, Malloy explained that when the paperwork appeared on the desk of the relevant superintendent for approval, the requisite signatures were on the forms suggesting that “everything (the policies) had been followed … We believed the students had passed the test.”
The logical inference, then, is that the paperwork went up the chain but was incomplete or falsified.
Malloy wouldn’t say if he was disappointed but asked how he felt when he learned the truth, said, “It’s exceptionally troubling and very upsetting and tragic.”
He told the radio station, “I’m very, very angry about it actually.”
The board already has tightened its procedures: In the future, such “high- care” trips, as multi- day canoe excursions are called, will be approved only after the school principal sees the test results, and the results will also be given directly to students and to their parents.
The TDSB is the largest school board in the country, with about 250,000 students and about 16,000 teachers.
As with other big bureaucracies, and to a lesser degree every company on the planet, trust is an inherent part of the bargain the board makes with its staff. It goes like this: We have rules and policies and we trust that you will follow them.
Wednesday’s was t he fourth update Malloy has provided since Jeremiah died; it’s evident that within the constraints imposed by a continuing criminal probe, he has been as forthright and transparent as possible.
Malloy met with Jeremiah’s parents before the briefing, expressing his “most sincere apology and regret.” The parents of the other students were notified by letter.
It doesn’t require much imagination to know that for all of them, it must have been extraordinarily painful.
There is bedrock truth in something the great Ernest Hemingway once said: “The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them.”