By Lindsey Coad
Milka Gebrekiduce is a thoughtful little girl. The Grade 2 student wears a brilliant pink sweater and twirls one of her many braids around her finger. Her brown eyes grow a bit more serious as she recalls a painful memory: she hurt her tooth last year after being knocked down by an older boy running across the playground.
“I was very sad that he did that when I didn’t do anything to him,” she recalls.
The boy spent the next recess on the wall, as a “time-out” to think about things and she was comforted by the teacher on duty.
Milka, 7, thinks rules like “no body contact” are a good thing so people don’t get hurt.
She reaches into her Barbie backpack and pulls out her elementary school agenda. It spells out the specific guidelines for all students at St. Anthony School on Booth Street in Centretown: Treat others as you’d like to be treated. Keep hands and feet to yourself. Respect property.
“If there were no rules, people wouldn’t follow them and they’d be in big danger,” she says. Milka is sure about what makes her feel at home in the hallways. As she sees it, it’s not always about what you can’t do—it’s what you can.
“Safety is being nice to other children,” she says softly. “Safety is playing with others who don’t have anybody to play with them or who are getting hurt by other big bullies… and sharing things you want to with them.”
Inside the dull, brown brick exterior of this Catholic school, there’s a peaceful energy brewing on the carpet of a second-floor classroom. Here, the tiny arms of Milka’s peers shoot straight up in their air, each of them eager to describe what makes them feel safe.
“We have fire alarms so if there’s a fire we won’t get hurt,” says a curly-haired girl from the back. “Don’t go in the street,” says another. One girl talks of feeling “bad” when classmates didn’t want to play with her. “Play nice and take care of people that are getting hurt,” she says in retrospect.
This is life under the Ontario Safe Schools Act: a rigid policy that was implemented by the Conservatives in 2001.
The key offences outlined in the policy—assaults, drug and weapon possessions, uttering threats—read like the Criminal Code and carry mandatory punishments, including suspension or expulsion in some cases. But these offences aren’t usually a problem at the primary school level. Still, rules about everything from profanity to sexual assault were designed as a wide-reaching code of conduct for all students from junior kindergarten to Grade 12.
When a Toronto boy was recently warned about the possibility of suspension for sexual harassment, after hugging fellow students in his kindergarten class, it sparked a bigger question: How do kids make sense of these tough new rules?
Meron Araya, a Grade 1 student at St. Anthony, says hugs are good and most of her classmates smiled in agreement. “If someone gives you a hug then you feel like you’re friends and when you’re friends you’re a lot more happier.”
Principal Theresa Swanson says she’d never even think of using the term “sexual harassment” in a kindergarten class.
“We have to take it and interpret it for the child at their developmental level,” she says. Instead of hugging, she might gently suggest to the children: “Tell people we like them or want to be their friends with our words.”
At St. Anthony, it’s about common sense interpretation. Swanson believes five key principles cover the rules of the act at a basic level that resonate with kids: Be responsible, be polite, be kind, be considerate and be proud of your school. It’s a foundation of values that children build upon as they get older.
“I think children instinctively know what is respectable behaviour, what is kindness,” she says. Take vandalism, for example. Students are told not to scribble or write rude comments in their textbooks.
But just as warnings should be part of the learning process, so should encouragement. In September, some students were recognized at a school assembly for building and improving their friendships. “If you’re being a good friend, you’re not poking (friends) and leaving them out of situations,” Swanson reminds students.
Fights can happen on the schoolyard. But she hasn’t had a student in her office this fall, and in the last two years, she has issued about 10 suspensions for behaviour like inappropriate language and persistent defiance of authority.
“As you go up the years, zero tolerance becomes the norm but we have to put a lot of thought into how we deal with each child,” says Swanson.
There’s a lot of “why can’t I” that happens at the classroom level, she explains. That’s why she prefers not to hold large assemblies to remind students of the rules.
Discussions with individual classes have been much more effective.
“I can look every child in the eye and make sure, to the best of my ability, that they’re understanding and that they’re listening,” she says of her visits.
Annette Ejiofor, a Grade 4/5 student at St. Anthony, is proof that suspensions can work as a deterrent. “I learn not to do what they did and if I do, I know I should apologize and I say in my mind: ‘I should never do this again,’” says the quiet student.
Annette and her peers grin and say it’s “kind of hard” to follow some of the basic classroom rules like not whispering with a friend while the teacher is talking.
But they are under no illusions. They realize tougher decisions and higher stakes await them at high school, where violence and drugs can be part of school life.
“Some people teach you bad stuff and it’s kind of hard to know which way to listen,” says Karen Yao, a Grade 5/6 student at the school.
But Wardrer Ly is ready for the challenge. The Grade 5/6 student believes the school conduct he learns now might help in the future, so he’ll know not to kick or punch someone.
“Some rules will change and some rules will stay the same when you get older,” he says. “You can do what you want but there’s laws that sometimes say you can’t.”