Put the Acts into Action

By Valence Young

Work­place vio­lence is a major haz­ard in our schools. It gets in the way of teach­ing, learn­ing, and well-being; deal­ing with it is stress­ful and trau­matic. ETFO mem­bers are get­ting hurt on the job, some­times sus­tain­ing seri­ous injuries (includ­ing bro­ken bones) that require med­ical care and may take months to heal. School boards lack the finan­cial and human resources to pro­vide con­sis­tent and sus­tained sup­ports. Com­mu­nity resources and men­tal health ser­vices for stu­dents with vio­lent behav­iours are often limited.

Recent changes to the both the Edu­ca­tion Act and the Occu­pa­tional Health and Safety Act (OHSA) have intro­duced new and chal­leng­ing require­ments for school safety. It has been dif­fi­cult for school boards, admin­is­tra­tors, and edu­ca­tors to fig­ure out how to meet their oblig­a­tions for report­ing and respond­ing to seri­ous vio­lent inci­dents. The result is that risks of work­place vio­lence are not being dealt with soon enough.

Here is a sum­mary of the report­ing and response require­ments in three provin­cial doc­u­ments. The doc­u­ments – a law, a report­ing form, and a pol­icy – were writ­ten to make schools safer. Let’s take a look at how each of them can be put to good use.

The law

The Occu­pa­tional Health and Safety Act pro­vides a broad def­i­n­i­tion of work­place vio­lence that leaves room for early recog­ni­tion and intervention:

“work­place vio­lence” means

1. the exer­cise of phys­i­cal force by a per­son against a worker, in a work­place, that causes or could cause phys­i­cal injury to the worker
2. an attempt to exer­cise phys­i­cal force against a worker, in a work­place, that could cause phys­i­cal injury to the worker
3. a state­ment or behav­iour that it is rea­son­able for a worker to inter­pret as a threat to exer­cise phys­i­cal force against the worker, in a work­place, that could cause phys­i­cal injury to the worker.

Under the OHSA, a school board must pro­vide work­place vio­lence pro­grams. These could be devel­oped for an entire school or a sin­gle class­room, for a school trip, or for a new stu­dent. The pro­gram must include mea­sures and pro­ce­dures to con­trol the risks of work­place vio­lence iden­ti­fied in a risk assess­ment. It must con­tain pro­ce­dures for get­ting help quickly, and for report­ing inci­dents to the prin­ci­pal. The school board and the prin­ci­pal must inves­ti­gate and deal with these incidents.

A work­place vio­lence inci­dent is a health and safety haz­ard that must be reported to the prin­ci­pal. If you are blocked in your efforts to report it, then con­tact your stew­ard and your ETFO local for support.

The report­ing form

The min­istry of education’s Safe Schools Inci­dent Report­ing form (SSIR form) is a sim­ple tem­plate that iden­ti­fies 13 seri­ous stu­dent inci­dents, includ­ing bul­ly­ing, utter­ing a threat to inflict seri­ous bod­ily harm, and using a weapon. Most of these are also work­place vio­lence inci­dents. Under the Edu­ca­tion Act, the prin­ci­pal must con­sider sus­pen­sion or expul­sion for these incidents.

When a seri­ous stu­dent inci­dent also includes work­place vio­lence, then both the work­place vio­lence report and the SSIR form must be com­pleted. The principal’s response to each report is dif­fer­ent. Under OHSA, the prin­ci­pal responds by inves­ti­gat­ing and deal­ing with the inci­dent so that the edu­ca­tor can be safe. Under the Edu­ca­tion Act, a prin­ci­pal responds by focus­ing on the stu­dent, with actions based on pro­gres­sive dis­ci­pline that may include sus­pen­sion or expul­sion. If you sub­mit a SSIR form, your prin­ci­pal must pro­vide you with a writ­ten acknowl­edge­ment of receipt. This is an impor­tant record and should be stored carefully.

When there has been a seri­ous vio­lent inci­dent result­ing in sus­pen­sion or expul­sion, the SSIR form and its doc­u­men­ta­tion are placed in the aggressor’s Ontario Stu­dent Record. These pro­vide vital infor­ma­tion about whether a stu­dent poses a risk of work­place violence.

The pol­icy

PPM 120 is a min­istry of edu­ca­tion policy/program mem­o­ran­dum writ­ten for school boards and prin­ci­pals. Revised in 2011, its pri­mary pur­pose is to col­lect data about seven types of seri­ous vio­lent inci­dents in Ontario schools. These include pos­sess­ing a weapon, phys­i­cal assault caus­ing injury that requires med­ical atten­tion, sex­ual assault, rob­bery, using a weapon to cause or to threaten bod­ily harm, extor­tion, and hate or bias-motivated occur­rences. School boards must include inci­dents com­mit­ted by both stu­dents and non-students dur­ing school-run pro­grams and on school premises.

How­ever, PPM 120 leaves out a num­ber of seri­ous vio­lent inci­dents that could just as eas­ily be part of the school day. For exam­ple, it does not include bul­ly­ing, van­dal­ism caus­ing exten­sive dam­age, gang-related occur­rences, relationship-based vio­lence, threats of seri­ous phys­i­cal injury (includ­ing threats made through social media), or crim­i­nal harassment.

There is a con­cern that the require­ments of PPM 120 may draw atten­tion to the man­age­ment of a few seri­ous vio­lent inci­dents and ignore oth­ers that are equally seri­ous. ETFO is cur­rently dis­cussing the lim­i­ta­tions of PPM 120 with the min­istry of edu­ca­tion, other teacher fed­er­a­tions, and school boards.

There you have it: three provin­cial doc­u­ments designed to make our schools safer. Every time you report a con­cern about school safety you put a provin­cial law into action. A request for a risk assess­ment engages the need for a work­place vio­lence pro­gram. When you rec­og­nize a threat of seri­ous phys­i­cal harm and get help, you assert your right to work safely. And when you need sup­port to deal with work­place vio­lence, your ETFO local and ETFO provin­cial are ready to assist.

Valence Young is an ETFO exec­u­tive staff mem­ber respon­si­ble for occu­pa­tional health and safety.