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Ontario Schools Are Getting More Violent. Don’t Blame the Kids

Ford’s Conservatives have spent the last eight years stripping the education system of resources

Nearly two decades ago, when a teenager named Jordan Manners was shot and killed at C W Jefferys Collegiate Institute in northwestern Toronto, it sparked broad public condemnation. Something had to be done to address the scourge of youth violence. No one else should die or get hurt going to school. Fast-forward to the present. A fourteen-year-old is charged with murdering two men outside of his school in Etobicoke; a group of teens in Hamilton fatally stab a classmate; in Scarborough, eighteen-year-old Jahiem Robinson is shot by a classmate four years his junior.

The number of violent events reported by Ontario school boards has increased 77 percent since 2018

Funding cuts to education contribute to fewer resources and more violent incidents

Addressing social issues as root causes for youth violence is recommended as a path toward improvement

It would be impossible to write about violence in schools without acknowledging the recent mass shooting in British Columbia. In February, an eighteen-year-old in the town of Tumbler Ridge killed an education assistant and five students at a local high school, as well as two members of her own family. Mass casualties at Canadian schools are devastating but extremely rare. In Ontario, the problem involves smaller but still alarming attacks.

By all counts, Ontario’s schools have never been more violent. According to the province’s own numbers, acquired by Global News last year through Freedom of Information requests, the number of violent events reported by school boards has increased by 77 percent since Doug Ford’s Conservatives took office in 2018. Meanwhile, in a 2024 survey by the Ontario Secondary School Teachers’ Federation, 75 percent of members surveyed said they had seen violence increase over the course of their careers. Episodes included kicking, hitting, and biting. Another survey of more than 12,000 education workers across the province revealed that three out of four had experienced violent or disruptive incidents at work—with a third of them reporting facing them daily.

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It might be easy to blame the students, the pandemic, social media, and even parents. (When asked about the issue in 2023, the premier suggested violence-prone children weren’t getting beaten enough at home, saying if he’d ever hit a teacher, his parents would have given him “twice the hit” when he got home.) But the real reason violence is surging has been understood for decades.

After Manners’s death in 2007, then premier Dalton McGuinty launched a commission into the roots of youth violence. It was led by former Liberal member of provincial Parliament Alvin Curling and Roy McMurtry, a luminary of the Conservative Party who served as attorney general under former premier Bill Davis.

After hearing from hundreds of people including ministers, students, teachers, and neighbourhood advocacy organizations, the pair released an incisive 450-page report. Their first recommendation for the premier was to repair the “social context” surrounding youth violence. This meant addressing its root causes, including “poverty, racism, poor housing, youth mental health, education, the need for supports for families and youth engagement, and issues arising in youth justice.”

From this perspective, it should be no surprise that schools are now getting more violent. After all, it is this very social context that Ford’s Conservatives have spent the last eight years feeding into a shredder.

The numbers are startling. Of Ontario’s homeless population, nearly one in four are under the age of twenty-four. According to the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, half the students in Ontario report a “moderate-to-serious level of psychological distress” which they note has doubled in the past decade. One in five report harming themselves on purpose; one in six reported thoughts of suicide.

The problem of youth violence must be situated in this landscape of distress. Students today face greater challenges and have fewer school-based supports than they did even ten years ago. Schools now receive $260 less per student than they did in 2018. According to the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, accounting for inflation, this gap means that Ontario’s schools are facing a cumulative funding shortfall of more than $6 billion.

In practice, says Joe Tigani, the president of the Ontario School Board Council of Unions, this “lack of investment translates into less people in schools to support students . . . You’ll have less money for custodial support, for IT, for clerical support, and obviously, this is hitting the classroom significantly with a lack of investment in educational assistants, child and youth workers, and teaching staff.”

So, when violence erupts, education workers including administrative staff do not have the time or resources required to address it.

Mary Fraser Hamilton, a teacher in Peel Region, has been teaching for eighteen years. The biggest change she has seen in that time is that “there’s just no time or money to prevent incidents from happening or to help kids come back when incidents have happened.”

She gives the example of a behaviour support room, where high school students are sent when they are on the verge of expressing aggression, like hitting or yelling. “But those teachers are stretched, and that room is understaffed,” Hamilton says. “So, there isn’t always a space to send a kid if you know they’re going to blow up.”

When a violent incident does occur, Hamilton says, teachers are offered little more than a cursory check-in from administrators. Worse yet, many feel blamed, questioned by higher-ups about the circumstances leading up to the incidents.

The sources of such incidents are complex and differ for each student. There are the usual challenges of childhood and adolescence, and there is some evidence to suggest that exposure to social media and parental stress play a role. But these, too, are influenced by experiences of poverty in the family, with low-income students reporting both greater screen time and parental stress. For racialized students, this impact can be disproportionate.

Still, she cautions against blaming students directly for violent incidents. “They’re kids,” she says. “Their brains are still learning how to differentiate good choices from bad choices.”

“These kids are just being failed,” she says. “They’re being failed by the system, and we’re complicit in it. I imagine that’s why administrators shrug their shoulders when a violent incident happens, because they know there’s nothing they can do, nothing they can offer, nothing they can say that makes it okay.”

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Instead of giving school boards the resources they need to address this growing problem, the province has invested its energies into finding ever-greater efficiencies. This past June, Ontario appointed provincial supervisors to four school boards, citing “growing deficits, depleting reserves, and ongoing cases of mismanagement.” They targeted some of the biggest school boards in the province: the Ottawa-Carleton District School Board, the Dufferin-Peel Catholic District School Board, the Toronto Catholic District School Board, and the Toronto District School Board.

At the TDSB, the provincially appointed supervisor is Rohit Gupta, an advisor with a lengthy background in finance and no experience in education. In the eight months since he has taken control, he has removed caps for class sizes (as well as increasing the size of high-needs special-education class sizes) and has not moved to close the shortage of teachers, educational assistants, and support staff.

“I’ve heard the minister of education indicate that a lot of the reforms he’s making in terms of governance are to redirect resources back into the classroom,” says Martha Hradowy, the president of the Ontario Secondary School Teachers’ Federation. “Well, he’s been saying that for six months now, and we’ve not seen any money being redirected back into the classroom to get the kids the help they need.” That would look like hiring more teachers and support staff, decreasing class sizes, and reinvesting special education.

Instead, the province passed Bill 33 in November, sweeping legislation that gives the government more control over schools, including the power to remove elected trustees. Bill 33 also introduces the province’s sole provision to address the problem of school-based violence: increased police involvement in Ontario’s schools.

The “school resource officer” programs place police officers directly in schools and have increasingly come under fire in the past few years. In 2017, after the Ontario Human Rights Commission found that the presence of officers overwhelmingly made students feel unsafe, impacting academic engagement and performance, the Toronto District School Board abandoned the program entirely.

The OHRC cautioned the government against making such programs mandatory last year. Hradowy says that investing in police officers without funding social workers and child and youth workers does little to address school-based violence. “You cannot have a police officer come into a school and deal with the unique mental health needs of students because they’re not trained to do so,” she says.

While money is earmarked for the salaries of provincial supervisors and for police officers, teachers are left scrambling for everyday requirements. Hamilton, the teacher from Peel, tells me about colleagues who do not have the money to purchase soap for their elementary classrooms—leaving students to wander the halls for a quick hand wash—about slashed photocopier budgets, about purchasing paper towels out of her own pockets. “You can’t run a hands-on class that’s going to keep kids interested and engaged with pennies,” Hamilton says.

Earlier this month, the Ford government announced that elementary homeroom teachers will receive $750 cards each year to purchase classroom supplies. But Ontario Secondary School Teachers’ Federation sees this as an admission of underfunding.

All of this chips away at the teachers who face both austerity and violence first-hand. Unsupported, she has seen teachers going on extended mental health leaves or exiting the profession altogether. Those gaps are often covered by “emergency replacements”—people who have been screened and recommended by administrators but do not have a teaching degree. According to The Local, the use of emergency replacements has increased more than tenfold in the last seven years.

“Part of the reason that educators, teachers, and education workers get so upset about it,” says Hamilton, “is because we know the solutions are out there, and no one’s doing anything to implement them.”

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