Violence plagues school support staff

Education support workers are facing a growing amount of violence in schools across the province, according to a new report released by the CUPE Education Support Workers Steering Committee.

The survey received responses from more than 1,000 education support workers in Saskatchewan and more than 70 per cent of them said they had experienced violence in their schools in the last three years.

Of those who had reported violence, 40 per cent said they experienced violent incidents daily, weekly or monthly.

Jackie Christianson, chairperson of the CUPE Education Support

Workers Steering Committee, presented the survey results and its accompanying report with seven recommendations to the provincial ministers of education and labour relations and workplace safety.

One of the main actions Christianson wants to see implemented is more training for education support workers. “We have zero professional development. That was taken away from us three years ago when school divisions started finding efficiencies,” she said.

“There’s more complex needs. There’s more children coming into our system with undiagnosed mental health ... Our school system is not even equipped to handle these kids, and yet they’re with us for six hours a day.”

Eighty per cent of the reported violence came from students, but Christianson said she puts no blame on the kids and instead pointed to increasingly complex classrooms.

Because of this growing complexity, Christianson — who is also an educational assistant in the Regina Public School Division — said she has put her own time and money into training on how to work with students with greater needs and prevent violent situations.

According to the report, the most common forms of violence education support workers face in the classroom are being yelled or sworn at, being hit with a hand or foot, being scratched and being emotionally abused.

Education Minister Gordon Wyant said Tuesday he has been in conversation with the CUPE Education Support Workers Steering Committee, so he was not surprised by the survey’s findings but said they are “a bit concerning.”

He also noted that it is because of the increasingly complex classroom needs that an education committee was recently formed.

“We really think that the whole issue of class composition is tied up with the issue of violence in the classroom,” he said.

“Certainly the recommendations in the report are ones that we’re very interested in pursuing.”

The other survey finding that troubled Christianson is the low number of violent incidents being reported to the schools. Of the workers who said they had experienced violence, nearly 40 per cent did not report the incident.

The most common reasons given for not reporting it were that they did not know they should report the incident or they did not think the injury was serious.

“There’s a huge education part here that needs to be done and it starts with workers knowing what their rights are,” she said.

Wyant agreed that making sure people are educated on what their rights as workers are and how to report a violent incident is important.

“We think that whenever there’s an issue of violence in the workplace, that needs to be reported,” he said.

“Without having that information, I’m not really sure how we can properly address that.”