A SCHOOL PROGRAM HAS BECOME THE LATEST CASUALTY OF ‘THE TYRANNY OF A MINORITY.’ THIS LIST GROWS DAILY, WITH STRIDENT VOICES AFFECTING EVERYTHING FROM RODEOS TO PUBLIC HEARINGS.
The Toronto District School Board can call the ending of its copsin-schools program a “temporary” suspension until the cows come home, but no one is fooled, least of all those who pushed for its demise.
The program, which began about nine years ago following the 2007 shooting death of Jordan Manners at C.W. Jefferys Collegiate, is done, the latest casualty of the tyranny of a minority. Across the country, this list grows daily, with strident voices and violence real or threatened affecting everything from rodeos (animal activists in British Columbia) to public hearings (the National Energy Board sessions cancelled this week in Montreal, police board meetings disrupted in Toronto) to comedy shows and university forums.
The School Resources Officer program, as it was called in eduspeak, isn’t coming back and nowhere do they know this better than at the TDSB.
No doubt, in furtherance of the useful false appearance, the board will still hold its “community consultation” meetings this month, and perhaps even send out its survey to staff and students.
It was to do just these things, of course — to find out how the program was seen and if it was wanted —
the board made the decision it made late Wednesday night.
That was the plan, to have evidence-based decisionmaking. It was kiboshed when, shortly before the meeting, trustee Marit Stiles (also the president of the federal NDP) moved the “temporary” suspension under “new business.”
Trustee Ausma Malik seconded the motion, and it passed by a resounding 16-6 vote.
The rationalization veneer for the board acting without evidence — either from its own proposed review and/or the one the Toronto Police has asked Ryerson University to conduct — is contained in Stiles’ motion.
If there are still officers working in the board’s 45 schools, the motion says, students, especially the “most marginalized,” might be potentially intimidated and not feel comfortable and safe speaking honestly.
This is a such a monumental crock it defies belief: A student, asked anonymously to say what she thinks of SROs, would be bullied into silence or not being truthful by the very knowledge that somewhere in the school was a uniformed cop? Oh please.
No one, including the board, knows how well or not the program was working. All they know is that activist Desmond Cole, Black Lives Matter and others in the black community wanted it to end, and that the program has been controversial in some quarters from the get-go.
But the program was hardly foisted upon the Toronto board by the oppressive police.
It had its roots in the shooting of the justturned-16 Grade 9 student, Manners, who was shot to death in a hall of his own high school, on May 23, 2007.
Shortly after, the board hired lawyer Julian Falconer to convene a panel and produce a report on what went wrong, and the result was an almost 600-page, fourvolume tome.
Falconer did not directly recommend having cops in schools, but he and his fellows considered (and abandoned, mostly for cost reasons) airport-style weapons detectors, and urged the board to set up its own gunsniffing dog teams (with non-threatening pooches, of course) and random sweeps of student lockers at all city schools.
In other words, they didn’t entirely shy away from tough measures — though, in retrospect, the report is as much a political treatise as anything else. But the SRO program was not inconsistent with the Falconer cry for action, and it came to life the year after Jordan’s slaying, with school and police seeming equally keen.
The Falconer panel uncovered hidden violence in the school system, notably an alleged sexual assault upon a young Muslim girl by a group of male students in a boys’ bathroom at Jordan’s school. The incident was reported up the line to a vice-principal, and there it stopped.
It also found that violence, drugs, guns and other weapons and gangs are facts of life for students and teachers at many city schools. The intimidation in those days, at least, was coming from other students.
That the Stiles motion says, “Whereas, the Falconer report, Roots of Youth Violence, recommended more caring adults in schools such as social workers, child and youth workers, hall monitors, etc.” in its preamble, without any reference to the gun-sniffing dogs and locker searches the report also recommended, and the violence rife in the system, is just too precious.
What is lost is the opportunity to get to know “the other,” as liberals like to call it, for kids to get used to cops and cops to get used to kids, to see past the uniforms they each wear (and anyone who doesn’t think high school kids don’t wear uniforms, of a sort, is wrong) and the stereotypes each had and the “school to prison pipeline” nonsense activists promoted.
Perhaps having police in schools was wrong-headed.
If the underlying notion was that the biggest benefit was that cops automatically would make the schools safer, it may have been.
But I don’t think that ever was the real gain.
It’s another link to the people of the city gone that the police had. They can’t march in uniform in the Pride parade. Now they’re not welcome in uniform in city schools. They are, as a smart friend said, further de-legitimized, and that’s a sad thing, and a troubling one.