Project aims to end violence at Montreal schools
Goal is to stop problems before they happen
When Howard Nadler hears about a school shooting, he says it’s hard not to imagine that the root cause of the problem is “a kid in distress.”
“Whenever there’s an investigation of one of these shootings or a violent incident that occurs in a school, there are always issues that haven’t been addressed with the youth,” said Nadler, a social worker at Batshaw Youth and Family Centres.
“We have to be there for that kid a lot earlier and to get the kid the right help.”
Nadler is part of a pilot project aimed at preventing violence in Montreal’s schools. The two-year project is partnering Batshaw, the Centre de jeunesse Montréal, the Montreal police and the Vanguard School in Saint-Laurent. It launched at noon on Wednesday and while Vanguard director general Carolyn Coffin-Caputo says she hopes her school never has to use it, she’s glad there’s now a protocol in place.
“There’s regular bullying at our school just like any other, but we want to be pro active, to get out in front of this,” Coffin-Caputo told The Gazette.
“The one thing that’s different these days is obviously the use of social media. Now if there is bullying maybe it follows the students home and it can be a very public and humiliating affair.”
Nadler says the protocol would come into effect if a teacher or student began noticing troubling behaviour from someone attending Vanguard.
“It could be something obvious like a kid saying ‘I know where I could get a gun’ or ‘I have a gun, I took my father’s gun, do you want to see it?’ ” Nadler said.
“But it could also be something threatening that was said on Facebook, something a teacher notices in the classroom or even a picture the student draws.”
Within an hour of a student being flagged to the school’s principal, Vanguard would co-ordinate a meeting between someone at Batshaw, the police, a representative from the school and the child’s parents.
“The idea is to figure out exactly how we can help that kid, what kind of help he or she needs,” Nadler said.
“So it’s not like the kid’s stepping into a room with a police officer, his parents and us.
“We meet together first, see what the best course of action is. It could be that the student just needs to talk to somebody or it could be as serious as the police having to open an investigation.”
The intervention model is based on the work of J. Kevin Cameron, who led the crisis response team after Canada’s first major high school shooting in Alberta in 1999.
Cameron teaches threat-assessment seminars across North America and has worked with the RCMP and Secret Service in the United States.
Of the three high-profile school shootings committed in Quebec, none took place in a high school. It’s also worth noting that none of the men who carried out these killings actually attended the institutions they chose to attack.
Marc Lépine unsuccessfully applied twice to École Polytechnique before murdering 14 women at the engineering school in 1989. Concordia engineering professor Valery Fabrikant walked into the university’s Hall Building on
“We have to be there for that kid a lot earlier.” HOWARD NADLER, BATSHAW SOCIAL WORKER
an afternoon in August and shot four of his colleagues to death with a handgun in 1992. It remains unclear exactly why Kimveer Gill chose Dawson College as a target when he entered the school in September 2006 and shot 20 people, killing one before taking his own life.
But while none of these men may have been students at the schools they attacked, all of them showed signs of disturbing behaviour in the months leading up to their shootings.
Fabrikant had a tense relationship with Concordia and had even spoken about resolving the tension by killing someone at least three years before he opened fire on his colleagues.
Months before murdering 18-year-old Anastasia De Sousa, Gill regularly posted angry diatribes online — laced with violent and profane imagery.
“Police alone aren’t going to solve a problem; we have to get to the bottom of what’s making people feel like they need to resort to violence,” said Carole Lalonde, a chief of the Montreal police’s community relations department. “So we’re taking a multidisciplinary approach. We don’t want uniformed police officers in the school for every problem; we have community relations officers there to listen to social workers and see how they can help. First and foremost it’s about listening and being approachable.”
Vanguard specializes in educating children with learning disabilities. The school has about 900 students from elementary to high school and teaches classes in French and English.