Death of a Student

The Globe's Margaret Wente has beaten me to the punch on this.

A number of teachers with recent experience at C.W. Jeffreys Collegiate have now attested to servere discipline problems at the school. This was also covered in the Toronto Star on Wednesday.

The statements and letters to the newpapers have document not only that 'teachers were threatened and assaulted regularly by students' and that 'intruders had easy access the the school and were clogging halls during class time. Worse yet, TDSB trustee Stephnie Payne not only claims to have been unaware of the problems - she actually sided with a lawsuit against a vice-principal for daring to report some students to police.

The hidden agenda - of course there's a hidden agenda - was to downplay the need and utility of the Safe Schools Act. Now that the act has been emasculated in terms of the tools available to teachers and principles to bring order to the schools, we see the folly of backing away from it.

While people like Stephnie Payne may not have killed the student - liberal dogma seem to leaps out as a root cause.