Naomi Buck is a writer based in Toronto.
On a June afternoon in 2022, in the hallway of an ivy-covered high school in Ottawa, 15 year-old Matthew Morris was dragged into a bathroom by a fellow student, knocked to the tiled floor and punched and kicked repeatedly in the head. Several students stood around watching, and one filmed the assault on his phone.
The video ends when a lanky kid in green shorts walks over to the assailant and pulls him off. “Chill,” he says.
Similar scenarios are playing out in school bathrooms, hallways, playgrounds and stairwells across Canada. Violence in schools is on the rise and the implications are concerning; either kids are becoming more violent or the education system that once contained their aggression no longer can. Or both.
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Later that evening, Matthew’s father noticed a blue goose egg forming on his son’s forehead and a tear in his shirt. Matthew said he had fallen off his skateboard. (His name has been changed to protect his identity.)
The truth came to light the next day, when the assailant, summoned to the principal’s office for his involvement in another fight, inadvertently mentioned the bathroom incident. As so often in the social-media age, the adults were five steps behind. The video had long since gone viral on Snapchat.
Schools were never sanctuaries. There have always been bullies and skirmishes and students who dropped the gloves, but for the most part, the structure held. Those scales are tipping. For years, teachers’ unions across the country have been ringing alarm bells about the rise in violence in schools. Now worker safety boards are recording a spike in claims filed by teachers injured on the job. Police forces are seeing a sharp increase in the number of calls to schools.
A police officer escorts students at the scene of a shooting at Weston Collegiate Institute high school in Toronto on Feb. 16, 2023.Arlyn McAdorey/The Canadian Press
The attorneys-general of Ontario and Nova Scotia have both directed school boards to focus resources on the issue.
Matthew was diagnosed with a concussion and whiplash. His parents contacted police, who charged the assailant with assault causing bodily harm. And they honoured Matthew’s wish to never return to that school, where “everyone knew” what had happened to him, as he put it.
The first step in addressing violence in schools is to puncture the culture of silence that surrounds it. Nobody on the ground wants to talk. Teachers are afraid they will be accused of incompetence or of betraying student confidentiality. Principals don’t want to alarm parents or to expose their own weakness as leaders. School boards worry about legal action. Victims fear retribution.
“There’s a real stigma,” says Heidi Yetman, former president of the Canadian Teacher’s Federation (CTF). “The conversation about violence feeds into a perception that the public system is a wreck.”
The veil of secrecy is understandable, but it also allows the problem to persist. As the parent of teenagers, I’ve seen the effects. Among my sons’ peers are kids who avoid school bathrooms, fearing what may happen behind closed doors and others who have stopped attending school in order to avoid online bullies. In Grade 9, one of my son’s friends was “jumped” in a school hallway between classes: an assault that was viewed by tens of thousands on social media. He opted to complete high school online. The problem is systemic and self-perpetuating; as teachers leave the profession, victims become bullies and violence is normalized. Some schools are being brought to their knees.
Such was the case at Elsie MacGill Public School in Oshawa, an hour east of Toronto. In late January, 2024, roughly a dozen parents gathered outside the school to protest. Police had been called to the school twice in the previous week, and 28 staff members at the school were refusing to work, exercising their right, under the province’s Occupational Health and Safety Act, to demand a safe workplace.
In a 2023 survey, 77 per cent of Elementary Teachers’ Federation of Ontario (EFTO) members reported having witnessed or experienced violence, with the highest incidence among teachers of the younger grades. Mary Fowler, president of the Durham division of the EFTO, to which Elsie MacGill PS belongs, says that in the weeks leading up to the walkout, teachers in the kindergarten through Grade 3 classes had been filing violent incident reports “at an unknown rate”: instances of biting, kicking, hurled chairs and weaponized scissors.
Canada’s investment in education amounts to some 11.2 per cent of total government expenditure, significantly below the UNESCO benchmark of 15 to 20 per cent.Nathan Denette/The Canadian Press
“Students’ needs just aren’t being met,” says Ms. Fowler, herself a teacher of 20 years, on the phone from Oshawa.
University of Ottawa criminologist Chris Bruckert agrees. Having recently co-authored a study on violence in Ontario schools, she sees the phenomenon as a reflection of disparities and systemic failures in the larger world. In an ongoing cost-of-living crisis, kids are coming to school hungry. Many have medical conditions that, absent a family doctor or a regular checkup, have gone undiagnosed, or mental-health issues that, given the run on affordable services, are not being treated. At school, they enter a system that Prof. Bruckert says has been underfunded to the breaking point; infrastructure has been allowed to degrade, caps on class size removed, educational support staff slashed.
Prof. Bruckert calls what is happening in schools institutional neglect. “This is a failure to respond to needs that ends up being enacted like violence,” says Prof. Bruckert, from her home outside Ottawa.
By international standards, Canada’s investment in education is on the low side. Amounting to some 11.2 per cent of total government expenditure, it falls significantly below the UNESCO benchmark of 15 to 20 per cent. Over the last decade, some provinces’ per-student funding of education has kept pace with inflation, but in Alberta, Saskatchewan, Newfoundland and Labrador and Ontario it has not. The Canadian Centre of Policy Alternatives has calculated the cumulative funding gap in Ontario since 2019 – the amount that school boards have lost compared to what they would have received had their funding kept pace with enrolment and inflation – at $6.3-billion.
Hundreds of members of the Ontario Secondary School Teachers' Federation picket outside the headquarters of the TDSB at 5050 Yonge St. on Dec. 4, 2019.Fred Lum/the Globe and Mail
Inclusion
These shortfalls are undermining one of the education system’s most ambitious experiments. Until half a century ago, students with disabilities, as they were then called, were educated in programs separate from “regular” community schools. In an effort to better integrate these students, inclusion policies were added to provincial education acts in the 1980s, compelling schools to offer all students the opportunity to learn together. The success of the inclusive classroom depends largely on ratios: the more special needs in a class, the more support staff required. But since the birth of educational inclusion, two contradictory trends have taken hold. For one, the definition of special needs has expanded to include an ever-wider range of behavioural, physical and intellectual exceptionalities; as of 2023, some 17 per cent of the students attending the Toronto District School Board were considered to have special needs.
At the same time, school boards balancing competing priorities on leaner budgets have allocated less funding to educational-support workers. Over the 37 years she taught in the Kawartha Pine Ridge District School Board in eastern Ontario, Wendy Goodes watched the inclusive classroom slowly implode. “When I started teaching, education assistants were mostly helping students with reading, writing and arithmetic,” she says from her home in Port Hope. “By the end, they were just putting out fires.”
Ms. Goodes recalls one Grade 5 class where, on a weekly basis, she had to stand at her classroom door, ushering students out to safety before turning her attention to whichever one was throwing chairs, stabbing pencils or threatening to kill someone. Sometimes the educational assistant who had been assigned to the class for half the day was available to help, but often she was not.
“The biggest problem today is that kids are seeing so much violent behaviour,” Ms. Goodes says. “It’s being normalized.”
Over the years, Ms. Goodes developed strategies. She learned to deprioritize the curriculum, and to use every outburst, rampage and altercation as an opportunity to talk about emotions and respect. She started every day by asking students to do an emotional self-assessment on a five-point scale: That way she knew who to look out for.
“Prevention was key to survival – for me, the child, and the remainder of the class,” she says.
This is not what most teachers sign up for. Most see themselves as educators, not behavioural-modification experts, or psychologists or social workers. They want to see their kids learning, not just surviving the day.
In 2014, there was a teacher surplus in Ontario. Now, the Ministry of Education is trying to entice young people to enter the profession.Nathan Denette/The Canadian Press
Who wants to be a teacher?
None of the educators I spoke to blamed special-needs students, understanding that for some, physicality is simply a means of communication. But they do blame the system that fails to contain that physicality.
As recently as a decade ago, a teaching job was a prized thing; in 2014, some 34 per cent of newly certified teachers couldn’t find jobs in Ontario, due to a teacher surplus. Now, the Ministry of Education is bending over backward to entice young people to enter the profession – adding spaces in teacher colleges and considering a reduction in the program’s length. Meanwhile the Ontario Teacher’s Federation cites the 48,000 qualified teachers in the province who are opting not to work as evidence that the issue is not one of supply, but of untenable working conditions.
Staffing shortages are now chronic. According to a report by the educational charity People for Education, 24 per cent of elementary and 35 per cent of secondary schools in Ontario face daily teacher shortages, and the figures are even more acute (42 and 46 per cent respectively) for support staff. Absent teachers have a domino effect on the day-to-day life of a school. Principals shuffle staff to ensure minimal coverage, and it is often the special-education support staff who are tapped to front a class – and neglect their actual duties. In an open letter to the Vancouver School Board, published in February, 2024, the city’s elementary and high-school teacher unions decried the practice, saying it was contributing to an “alarming increase in reported incidents of violence.”
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As a stopgap measure, some provinces have opened up teaching positions to people without teaching accreditation. Quebec had 9,184 unqualified teachers working in its schools in the 2024/2025 school year, according to its Ministry of Education. It starts to feel like a race to the bottom.
Before going on unpaid leave, Sharon (not her real name) taught for 21 years in the TDSB, both in regular elementary classrooms and in the board’s Intensive Support Program (ISP): small, self-contained classes for students whose intellectual abilities are severely compromised by some combination of physical disability, neurodevelopmental condition and psychiatric disorder. In September, 2024, Sharon was heading up one of two ISP groups in an elementary school in Toronto’s east end. On the first day of school, one of the two educational assistants who had been assigned to her group didn’t show up. Being a very hot day, Sharon decided to take her students to the school library, home to the building’s one functional air conditioner. On the way, they converged with the other ISP group, and one of Sharon’s students went “into crisis” – mauling, biting and scratching anyone who came near. As staff tried to restrain the student, another ISP student broke loose, exited the building and sprinted across the playground, through an open gate and into an abutting ravine.
Sharon ran after the child, and eventually found him, digging contentedly in the dirt in the cool of the ravine. The incident ended well, even if one of the teachers involved in the hallway restraint landed in hospital with bite wounds. But in the days to follow, Sharon felt a continuing sense of uncontrolled chaos. By the end of the week, a second member of the ISP staff had been sent to the hospital with a broken finger. The school principal requested additional support staff from the board and was turned down. Two weeks into the school year, Sharon gave up.
“We’re trained on crisis intervention methods. We’re taught that a ‘hold’ requires three adults. We’re told to take regular breaks. But our staffing ratios never allow for that. It’s all day, every day. Fight, flight or freeze,” she says. Sharon is nowhere near retirement age, but her teaching days are over.
Neuroscience research has shown that teens immersed in social media tend to be less empathetic and more likely to engage in violence.Amber Bracken/The Globe and Mail
Who’s in charge here anyway?
The digital technologies that have swept classrooms in the past two decades with a promise to elevate student learning and engagement and to lighten teachers’ loads, have, in some ways, had exactly the opposite effect. The cellphones that were still being welcomed into classrooms less than a decade ago have become the bane of the educators’ existence. One of the reasons for the very mixed effectiveness of policies restricting cellphone use in classrooms – now on the books in half of Canada’s provinces – is that many teachers refuse to remove them, fearing students’ potentially aggressive response.
Research in the field of neuroscience has shown that adolescents immersed in social media tend to be more impulsive, less empathetic, and more likely to engage in violence. It is no coincidence that the rise of the cellphone has gone hand in hand with a sharp increase in cyberbullying. In UNICEF’s most recent report on child well-being, Canada ranked 26th of 40 countries when it came to bullying, with 22 per cent of Canadian 15-year-olds reporting that they are bullied frequently.
“Canada stinks at this,” says Tracy Vaillancourt, a professor in the faculty of education at the University of Ottawa who holds the Canada Research Chair in School-Based Mental Health and Violence Prevention. “I’ve been thinking about this for 25 years and I still can’t tell you exactly why this is the case.”
In 2011, Nova Scotia struck a task force on bullying and cyberbullying following a rash of teen suicides that resulted from online mobbing. One of its findings was that cyberbullying inevitably spills over into violence in the real world – often at school. Wayne MacKay, a professor of law at Dalhousie University who chaired the task force and authored its culminating report feels that while there is now greater awareness of the problem, progress on the ground has been slow.
“Schools have all the right slogans and statements,” says Prof. MacKay, referring to the anti-bullying posters plastered in school hallways, pink shirt days and assemblies on kindness. “But you can’t talk these things away. This is all about implementation – about more guidance counsellors, resources and teacher training. Ultimately, it’s about money.”
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Violence in schools puts administrators in a compromising position; they need to address incidents, but don’t necessarily want to draw attention to their failure to maintain a safe learning environment. While Ontario’s Education Act obliges principals to contact police if physical assault causing serious bodily harm takes place, many don’t take that step. Their inaction leaves some students feeling vulnerable, and others invincible.
This September, Quebec became the first province to outright prohibit cellphones on school property for the duration of the school day. Among the bodies supporting the ban is the Service de police de la Ville de Montréal (Montreal Police), which sees a clear correlation between cellphones in schools and an escalation in adolescent violence both within and beyond them. Critics of the ban contend that the impacts of social media will persist. But since when did the impossibility of eradicating a problem justify doing nothing to address it?
“It’s weird,” says Lucas, a Grade 11 high school student in downtown Toronto. “When adults see kids fighting, they intervene. When kids see kids fighting, they just pull out their phones. They think it’s entertainment.”
Lucas knows the difference. Outside of school, he trains in a martial art and is nationally ranked in his discipline. Strong and naturally confident, Lucas gets challenged to fight a lot. “People are instigating all the time,” he says. “Everyone wants to see a fight.”
Students at Lucas’s school have set up a private Instagram account where they post allegations against each other, and another where they post videos of the most spectacular fights in their school: an entire ecosystem of violent content operating right under the principal’s nose.
After Lucas was attacked by a group of students on the school’s front steps during lunch – an incident that was caught on school security cameras – his parents asked the school administration to do something. They were told they could go to police. At Lucas’s request, they did not; he was afraid that might make matters worse. Snitches get stitches.
Experience has taught Lucas that in school fight culture, nobody plays by the rules and scores are never settled. He’s also learned that in his neighbourhood, the fights can get very serious very fast. “It’s super normalized for kids to carry knives,” he says.
Violence levels at the TDSB, Canada’s largest school board, have reached the highest ever recorded, a fact that was flagged in the most recent report of Ontario’s Auditor-General, which does not normally weigh in on non-fiscal matters. While COVID-19 is known to have negatively impacted youth mental health and behaviour, the pandemic served only to accelerate a trend that took root long before 2020.
The TDSB’s suspension and expulsion reports suggest that incidents are increasing not only in number but severity. Between the 2014/15 and 2023/24 school years, the number of cases of assault causing bodily harm requiring medical attention rose from 55 to 273: a more than fivefold increase. Over the same time period, the number of students sent home for possession or use of a weapon nearly doubled, from 108 to 205.
It’s tempting to see the current system of “progressive discipline” – which seeks to redirect student behaviour “through a variety of interventions, supports, and consequences, focusing on both correction and support rather than solely punishment” as the TDSB puts it – as the flimsy rod that is spoiling the child. But more punitive regimes have proven to have downsides of their own. The zero-tolerance policies that were added to Ontario’s Safe Schools Act in 2001, mandating automatic suspensions for students who engaged in violent behaviour, were repealed six years later, after their unintended consequences became evident.
To avoid punishment, students were taking fights off school property, where they became much more serious, according to University of Toronto criminologist Scot Wortley, who contributed to an exhaustive provincial review of the causes of youth violence in 2007. He says the policy also had the effect of driving students who had been cast out of school into the world of crime. The Nova Scotia task force criticized suspension and expulsion as disciplinary measures for offering no remedy to victims and failing to address root causes.
Wayne MacKay, the law professor, believes that some form of restorative justice, in which conflicting students meet, talk and seek resolution together, may offer a path forward. But he also feels that violence in schools has reached the point that aggrieved parties – families and educators alike – will increasingly resort to legal means in search of some kind of justice.
It’s already happening. John Schuman, a Toronto-based family lawyer, has seen the portion of his of cases that relate to school-based bullying, violence and discipline balloon over the last 25 years, and the impacts become more severe. “Some of these kids are seriously damaged,” he says. “They’re unable to function.”
The rise of the cellphone has gone hand in hand with a sharp increase in cyberbullying.Emilio Morenatti/The Canadian Press
What to do
In the United States, the traditional remedy to violence in schools has been the School Resource Officer (SRO) program. Designated members of the local police force are stationed in schools, where they are on hand to deter crime and violence, intervene if necessary and engender in students a sense of trust in law enforcement. Urban school boards in Canada began introducing these programs in the 1970s. But in recent years, and particularly since the mobilization of the Black Lives Matter, SROs have faced mounting criticism that they intimidate and disproportionately criminalize racialized students. Many school boards have discontinued them.
The discussion about SROs is heavily politicized, pitting proponents of law and order against human rights and social-justice advocates. Strikingly absent from these debates is the question of the program’s effectiveness. According to Temitope Oriola, a criminologist and professor of sociology at the University of Alberta who is leading a multiyear study of SROs in six Canadian provinces, school boards typically report on students’ perceptions of SRO programs, but not on their actual impact. He says decisions about SROs are informed largely by political considerations and pressure from interest groups, resulting in frequent “policy somersaults.” The TDSB’s cancellation of its SRO program in 2017, after a board-conducted survey revealed that a majority of students supported it, is a case in point.
Now the political tide is turning again. Last week, the Ontario government passed Bill 33, which will compel school boards in the province to operate SRO programs in jurisdictions where the local police force offers them. And last June, after an SRO played an instrumental role in de-escalating a sword attack by a 16-year-old student in Brandon, Man. Premier Wab Kinew suggested that the program be expanded.
Prof. Oriola notes that students who appreciate SRO programs often comment that their greatest benefit is less about law enforcement than the relationships they develop with officers as advisers and friends. Students question whether police are really the right people for the job, or whether schools would in fact be better served by having more guidance counsellors and psychiatrists.
The insight is too common to be ignored. There is no solution to the problem of violence in schools that does not involve more boots on the ground. The more challenging the climate outside schools becomes, the more supports needed within them. The education system must also undertake an honest reckoning with inclusion, one of its most sacred cows. And it must craft policies based on data, not perceptions.
Where violence prevails, schools can’t succeed, and students will continue to take home the wrong lessons. In the statement he made to police, Matthew Morris explained what had led up to his bathroom assault. Earlier that day, he had stood up for an autistic student who was being harassed by an older student. The older student didn’t appreciate Matthew’s intervention, which is why he was waiting for him in the bathroom, fists raised.
To this day, Matthew considers himself the loser.
Editor’s note: A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that Heidi Yetman is president of the Canadian Teacher’s Federation. She is a former president of the organization.