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, 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........

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