LOCKDOWN Learning Activity Guide

For students aged 12-19.

Before the play

Reflect on the title, Lockdown. This word seems to be in the newspapers a lot these days. What sort of play are you expecting to see? (This might be a group discussion prior to the first viewing)

Google "high-school"+"Lockdown". Collect and print out newspaper articles, editorials and other documents that you come up with. Discuss it with a group partner and, together, make a list of five questions that you both agree that you would like to have answered. Keep these until after the play. (An activity for partners)

Write down any personal experiences you may have of a Lockdown.

During the Play

Students should focus on the content (that is, the storyline, topics, issues, ideas, etc.) as well as on how the content is presented (language, music, drama, movement, etc.) If at all possible, students may jot down notes as they watch.

After the play - Group Discussion

What are the main topics/ideas of the play? Give reasons for your responses.

Get together with the partner with whom you created five questions. Decide which questions were answered while you watched the play and what remains to be answered.

Prepare to share your questions and the answers “received” during the play with your class.

What questions were the most common within the group? Were answers similar? Discuss differences and similarities in the questions and the answers. (#1 & #2 could be debriefing exercises for the whole group right after viewing.)

(The following may require seeing the play more than once)

Discuss the methods of presentation. Then, discuss their effectiveness. Would you have done anything differently? What and How? Why? Explain. (This could be a small group or partner activity.)

Individual assignments

Either:

Write a newspaper/magazine review of the play. Remember to award stars!

Or:

Discuss the play (on tape or video that you have created) as if you were a television film critic. Remember to give “thumbs up” or “thumbs down”.

Or:

Design a Lockdown Playbill. This should include a brief outline of the play as well as a short review.

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

School violence blamed on poverty, gangs

from The Globe and Mail

Mayor's message overshadowed by stabbing at a suburban Brampton high school yesterday

TIMOTHY APPLEBY AND JOHN LORINC

With reports from Anthony Capuano and Unnati Gandhi

Negative headlines stemming from a contentious report on violence and sex assaults in Toronto high schools could trigger a middle-class exodus from Canada's largest public-school system because the coverage has failed to stress that problems occur predominantly in neighbourhoods plagued by poverty and gangs, Mayor David Miller says.

Within hours, however, came more bad news, and from no urban ghetto: In the foyer of a normally placid high school in suburban Brampton, northwest of Toronto, a 16-year-old boy was stabbed and seriously injured yesterday morning.

His alleged assailant, 17, was swiftly arrested on school premises and charged with aggravated assault, assault with a deadly weapon and carrying a concealed weapon.

As half a dozen Toronto high schools held open houses last night for students about to make the move from Grade 8 to Grade 9, there seemed little sense of panic among parents who spoke up.

"Every parent worries about their child and whether their school is safe," said Teodora Miloradovic, whose 13-year-old son will attend North Toronto Collegiate Institute in the fall. Ms. Miloradovic said she has entertained the thought of switching to the private school system but decided otherwise.

"Some people say [violence in schools] depends on the part of the city you're in, but I certainly think it can happen anywhere, regardless of economics."

The stabbing at Chinguacousy Secondary School near Bramalea Road happened shortly before 10 a.m. As tactical response units from Peel Regional Police arrived, the 1,600-pupil school was locked down for two hours.

"The suspect is a student at this school, the victim is not," said Constable J.P. Valade of Peel police.

"We heard a scuffle outside the cafeteria and I heard someone yell, 'Knife! Knife!' " said student Brian Ramarine.

The victim sustained four stab wounds on the left side of his body and is expected to recover, police said. A witness said a brawl preceded the stabbing. "They all started fighting, one guy came up from the side and stabbed another man in his legs," the teen told CTV.

Commissioned by the Toronto District School Board after 15-year-old Jordan Manners was fatally shot at North York's C.W. Jefferys Collegiate eight months ago, the 1,000-page report authored chiefly by Toronto lawyer Julian Falconer cites scores of violent incidents in city schools.

Among its key recommendations: sniffer dogs to detect guns concealed in school lockers; closer scrutiny of school entrances; a provincial portfolio focused on school safety; and fresh thinking about gender-based violence and cyber-bullying.

While not rejecting any of those proposals, Mr. Miller said in an interview he was dismayed at the way the leaked report was portrayed.

"I'm very, very concerned," he said. "It's not the report, it's the headlines that come from it. I'm worried those headlines will make the problems worse. The school system has to be safe, and it has to be felt to be safe."

He said he also has a sense of déjà vu.

During the Falconer panel's consultations, the mayor voiced frustration over the fact that a city-led initiative to improve community safety in 13 "priority" neighbourhoods - launched in 2004 after several high-profile shootings - appears to have foundered, chiefly because of poor co-ordination with other levels of government.

And in the interview, Mr. Miller reiterated that theme, noting that while issues of student safety and behaviour resonate citywide, schools in impoverished areas with a lack of services are radically more afflicted by violence than those in affluent neighbourhoods.

Toronto Police Services Board chair Alok Mukherjee concurred. Before joining the board, he was part of a school board task force that probed the question of safety.

"We found patterns [of violence] in certain parts of the city, especially Scarborough and the northwest," he said. "Those have been the two most affected areas."

That task force's conclusions were very similar to those of Mr. Falconer's panel, Mr. Mukherjee said.

"But the board chose not to implement them. Three years and $750,000 later, we are talking about safe schools again. My question is, what happened to those recommendations?"