End the violence in our schools

When some teachers in Waterloo Region start wearing personal protective clothing to ward off classroom attacks, we have a problem.

When local teachers, administrators and educational assistants are being punched, kicked, bitten and spat upon by the youngsters they’re hired to educate, we have a problem.

When children and teens trying to learn in schools that are supposed to be safe spaces are being physically attacked or threatened by their peers, we have a really big problem in this region, folks. That problem is student violence. It’s dramatically increasing not only in Waterloo Region’s school boards but in boards across Ontario.

For more than a decade, the province’s teachers have been sounding the alarm about this ugly, dangerous fact of 21st-century life.

But so far, the public and provincial government are either not listening or failing to provide enough support for our educators.

New data brought forward in recent years, however, suggest this do-nothing approach is untenable.

Last school year, there were about 1,300 incidents of elementary-student-on-teacher violence in the Waterloo Region District School Board.

That represented a disturbing increase from the 900 incidents reported the year before.

The student-violence crisis, of course, goes provincewide.

The Elementary Teachers’ Federation of Ontario recently reported that 70 per cent of its members had either personally experienced violence or witnessed it on the job.

And last year, nine out of 10 English-language Catholic teachers in the province said they’d experienced or witnessed violence or harassment in schools, according to their union.

Why this is happening, why playgrounds and classrooms can become little battlefields and why teachers and educational assistants are sometimes wearing protective attire designed for police is a complex, intractable matter.

But let’s all agree that in this pressure-cooker of a modern world, where life is increasingly regimented as well as hectic and where families in which two parents feel the need to work outside the home are the norm, we’re piling new and back-breaking expectations on the school system.

Our society expects schools to provide a first-rate academic education, of course.

But we also demand that our schools provide instruction in social skills, sexual awareness and moral values — while also dealing with students’ difficult emotional or psychological problems.

And, when it comes to our elementary schools, parents often expect to be able to drop their children off at 7 a.m. and pick them up, after a day in the classroom and child care, at 6 p.m.

Perhaps this is the kind of system we need. Perhaps we want schools to take over more of our child-rearing. It clearly appears to be what many parents desire. If this is the case, however, we will have to pay for it. In order to turn back the rising tide of student violence and aggression, and for the sake of our young as well as their teachers, Ontario must hire more educational assistants, nurses, social workers and counselors.

Ontario society has changed profoundly in the past generation.

Now, Ontario’s schools need help to change, too.