The Truth

I found an article that was written in The Star about the Falconer Report.

Jordan Manners died of "pure neglect" – a result of the cutbacks to the kinds of supports at-risk students need, says the head of a panel that has delivered a stinging indictment of safety in the city's high schools.

The Toronto District School Board is "nowhere near sufficiently funded to manage" the diverse students it serves, and, to this day, doesn't provide enough social workers or child and youth workers to C.W. Jefferys Collegiate, where Manners was shot to death last May, Julian Falconer said.

"Jordan Manners died on May 23, 2007, of flat neglect – pure neglect," he told reporters at a press conference at board headquarters yesterday.

"There were insufficient supports in place in our system to encourage him to make better choices," he said, adding society at large is to blame for what's happened "and we need to fix it."
During the months of interviews and research for the report, the three-member panel heard from countless teens about weapons in schools.

"You could fill a Home Hardware with the amount of knives kids bring to school," Falconer said. "But we don't find them."

Full of graphic, even gripping findings, the 1,000-page tome includes a five-page retelling of the shooting death of Jordan Manners based on interviews of those at the school that May afternoon – from the moment the 15-year-old boy asked to be excused from his business class to go to the washroom, to the moment some 20 minutes later when teacher Eric Colquhoun found him lying on his stomach near a stairway, in medical distress.

Too, there are disturbing details of the alleged assault of a female Muslim student in a school washroom by six males, who have since been charged with gang sexual assault. The report devotes a section to a troubling climate of sexual aggression in the halls and recommends many changes to address the problem.

"This report is a call to action, and act we will," said board chair John Campbell, adding, however, that "the school board cannot solve all the problems that face our youth."

Trustee Cathy Dandy, who heads the board's working group on student safety, said the group is meeting tomorrow and will develop a timeline for implementing the panel recommendations as well as decide what can be implemented immediately and what's already underway.

"We are not just going to blunder forward on this," she said.

Falconer said that while the province is putting money back into school boards for counsellors and hall monitors, "it's not enough and not fast enough."

In Ottawa yesterday, Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty said he looks forward to working with the Toronto board on the report's proposals.

"We'll be taking a close look at the report and seeing what more we can do together, in order to ensure that when parents send their kids off to school, they are genuinely safe.

"The fact of the matter is that there are millions of children who attend school every single day in Ontario and they do so safely and without incident. Not to say that there aren't some real issues in some communities and we need to do more to address those."

In the report, Falconer paints the picture of a school system where some black students tell authorities "it is easier to get a gun than a job."

At yesterday's press conference, where the board officially released the final report, Falconer said, "The truth is, there are guns in our schools in non-trivial numbers across the city and neither the police or the TDSB are in the position to track guns at any given school."

Among his recommendations is for the board to consider locker searches as well as bring in gun-sniffing dogs for random searches in high schools around the city.

Gerry Connelly, the board's director of education, said board staff are working with the police to keep guns out of schools.

"We're going to have to consider" both those suggestions, she said, adding police told her they don't have sniffer dogs for weapons, although such specially trained animals do exist.

"The report addresses a really important and complex issue that we don't have the answer to," Connelly said. "We can't search out every gun."

Falconer yesterday said to forget visions of tactical officers with big dogs roaming the hallways – he was talking about springer spaniels who would do a sweep down a hallway of lockers.

His report also condemns the use of suspensions as discipline, saying sending students home if they live in a shelter, or simply waste time waiting to return to school, serves no purpose.
"We suspend in droves, and it fails."

He also made it clear that violent incidents occur across the city, and not just in the northwest end. In fact, his panel found that of 54 gun incidents from January 2006 to November 2007, just three were in that area.

Some 30 incidents with knives or Tasers were reported in high schools, and 31 sexual assaults on school property.

"Nothing could be further from the truth that this is a problem involving the black kids at Jane and Finch," he added.

He also rapped the board for its culture of fear, where teachers and staff and students are afraid to speak out.

And despite the violence, he argued against a return to zero-tolerance plans, which he said "do not work."

"Marginalized youth cannot be punished into becoming engaged," he said.

-The Star