VIOLENCE IN THE CLASSROOM
An Investigative Look At High School Bad Boys
By JORDAN H. GREEN In the be-bop-rock era the ‘Blackboard Jungle’ ruled. Tough thugs in leather jackets, armed with switchblades and their token blonde bimbo dangling on their arms scared high school teachers -- welcome back Kotter meet the devil -- albeit one with an attitude . . . TIMES HAVE CHANGED Back then, doormen didn’t wear bulletproof jackets. If a teen was packing a weapon, it was probably either a sharpened screwdriver or a flick knife. Despite the threatening looks, ducktails and slicked back hair, today’s high schools are more deadly. Now, schools in some U.S. cities have weapons detectors to prevent guns and knives from being carted in one’s gym bag. Things have changed drastically over the years, al- though every school has a bully, and some schools are known as rough areas, now kids aren’t playing with GI Joe -- they are acting like him. When I was in high school, the worst I remember hearing about was the occasional student smoking in the washroom. Two years ago, a Scarborough high school student was knifed by another, prompting the Scarborough Board of Education to take serious measures which since have been enacted by other boards. The Scarborough Board created Ontario’s first Zero Tolerance policy, a tough, hard-line policy which kicked out violent offenders. The York Region Board of Education and the York Region Roman Catholic Separate School Board both have long since adopted similar policies, which have been called Safe Schools Policies. Have they worked? Have they curbed the violence in our schools? “Principals are saying that they are confiscating fewer weapons from our students,” said Christine Tomaselli, the York Region Board of Education’s Administrative Assistant to the Director of Education. “They are involved in fewer drug charges with our students, there are fewer incidents of assault and intimidation, so students are taking this policy very seriously.” Stu Auty, chair of the Canadian Association for Safe Schools, was a little blunter when contacted on the issue. “Violence in our schools? There is no question it is increasing.” His organization was set up 12 years ago to examine this on-going problem. Auty points the incriminatory finger in part at the mass media and blames aggressive television and movies as key factors influencing today’s youth. Simply put, if the Power Rangers or the World Wrestling Federation’s ‘Diesel’ can beat up the bad guys, why can’t Johnny? Also, he maintains that the Young Offenders’ Act has little meaning to teens, simply because there aren’t tough enough punishments. “The Young Offenders’ Act makes teens feel that nothing can happen to them,” says Auty. He believes that the lack of payback -- the stick -- is evident in today’s young criminals. Just this past June, an 18-year-old student at C.W. Jeffery’s High School in North York was stabbed after being ambushed by 10 young men out for revenge. A 15-year-old has been charged by police with aggravated assault and several weapons offences in connection with the stabbing. Early in November a student in a downtown Barrie high school was stabbed. A 14-year-old was charged under the Young Offenders’ Act. This past Halloween, there were numerous incidents of violence in York Region caused by kids, the most serious involving a pellet gun, in which the 15-year-old victim underwent plastic surgery after being hit 10 times in the head and face with pellets. Last year in York Region’s public school system there were 88 serious violent incidents, according to Bob Harper, the Board’s Executive Assistant to the Superintendent of Education and Community Services and a former veteran principal. “A serious violent incident, defined by the Ministry is an incident for which the police were called and a suspension or expulsion was issued,” he said. This means there could be more or less actual violent acts in our schools, as the only ones the provincial government is interested in are ones serious enough to involve the police. School boards until recently were not required to collect statistics on violent incidents in the schools, so the board has the total numbers of incidents, but nothing to compare them with. Of the 88 incidents: •two students were under 12-years-old •11 were over 18, while the remaining 75 students fell between 12 to 17 years of age That means 90 per cent of all violent incidents were committed by students between 12 and 17 years of age. Out of the 88 violent incidents, only 14 were female students, so young men were more violent than women. Still with violent movies like Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs and the continued increase of violence among youth, Auty feels safe schools policies are working. “The process is there in a lot of action taken by school boards,” he said. “The focus of school boards is to make schools safer (and) there’s no doubt our schools probably are. Scarborough’s Zero Tolerance reduced weapons by two-thirds in Scarborough’s schools since last year.” Studies and educational packages from Big Brother help boards cope with this problem. A recent study by Ontario’s Ministry of Education and Training claims more than 80 per cent of female grade nine students complained of some form of sexual harassment from other students. Education minister John Snobelen called this haras- sment a form of violence and has since issued a kit called ‘The Joke’s Over’ to all high schools, aimed at reducing it. The fact that police walk the hallowed halls of academia doesn’t hurt either. York Regional Police can be seen strolling the halls of public schools through a program called ‘Adopt-A-School.’ Police talk to students about their jobs and how to protect themselves in these dangerous times. “Basically what the police want to do is create a positive rapport between themselves and students. There is this sort of aura around police I think that people have, they might not be friendly, you might not want to talk to them, so the police try to create a positive rapport at a very early age as being someone that children can trust and look up to,” said Tomaselli. No doubt, the police are also there as a deterrent as well to keep the peace. “Our students are very accustomed to having police in schools . . . a lot of our younger students in our elementary schools have a lot of questions for them,” explained Tomaselli. “I mean our police officers are talking with them about talking to strangers, protecting themselves against unwanted advances from strangers, they talk about neighborhood watch, they talk about all the things you’d expect a police officer to talk about with children. And they are quite ac- customed to having them in the schools.” The Separate school board is relying on God rather than cops to patrol its schools, but things may change when the new and improved safe schools policy is re-released later this month. Why The Violence? “There’s a lot of research that suggests that youngsters who are identified as bullies when they are in elementary school, by age 23 something like 60 per cent of them have three or more criminal convictions,” said the chief psychologist of the York Region Board of Education, Glenn DiPasquale. “So there clearly are links coming out in the research showing that it does tend to be the same kids, I mean the little guy who’s running around beating up his friends in grade two at age seven is the same kid who 10 years from now is going to scare you to death when you get on the subway at night in Toronto,” he said. Still, society must be more violent, or else we wouldn’t need these policies in the first place. Where did we go wrong? What caused our once peaceful society to become more aggressive, more violent and create the need for safe schools policies? “I think as a society we have not only glorified violence in our media, but we’ve tolerated it far too much in the real world,” explains DiPasquale. “In hockey, another perfect example, you can’t get more Canadian than a hockey game, again violence on the ice is somehow different and more tolerated than violence out in the com- munity. As though we’re able as human beings to turn it on and off, there are a lot of kids that can’t.” Auty agrees, citing the top ten movies tend to be violent. Still, the biggest cause may be more evident when Ontario premier Mike Harris’ cuts take effect. “In my opinion . . . I think a far greater concern to me personally is the slashing of social services is a far greater threat,” said DiPasquale. “I think that a large part of the violent cycle is fed by poverty, and when you’ve got a lot of youngsters out there who are experiencing poverty, what it’s like not to have what you see on tele- vision and what it’s like not to have what other people have.” Poverty not only affects the attitude of the student, but the whole family can breakdown because of it and this is the main cause of violent behavior according to DiPasquale. “When you have a single parent who has to work, works long hours, or you have a single parent who’s unemployed and is under financial stress and becomes a less effective parent because they are coping with so many psychological and economic problems of their own, when you put families under stress, one of the things that tends to suffer is parental monitoring and that’s the best predictor of students getting involved in all kinds of criminal behavior, including violence,” said DiPasquale. Parents stressed out working overtime to pay the rent, just don’t have the time to be parents and their kids may fall into the pitfalls of violence, according to DiPasquale. The solution involves us all, as violence in our schools is a mirror image of violence in society, according to Tomaselli. “I think the safe schools policy is certainly having an effect, I think that from the school end we can only do so much, violence is a community problem, it involves not just the schools, it involves the parents, it involves the police, it involves politicians in the communities, and it involves the society as a whole. It is a very wide problem,” said DiPasquale.
