By Anna Lise Burnstein
Lindsay Moir trained to be a travel guide when he retired from the Ministry of Education in 1997. He had been with the ministry for 31 years in various jobs dealing with education for students with special needs, and it was time for something different. But Moir never got around to his retirement plans. Parents of children with special needs kept calling him for help when their kids got into trouble at school.
“I’m busier and busier every year,” says Moir. He believes this is the result of the zero tolerance policy of the Safe Schools Act.
A year and a half ago, the parents of a 16-year-old girl from the Ottawa area called Moir for help. Their developmentally challenged daughter had bitten a staff member and was suspended from school for 10 days for assault. The girl didn’t understand why she had to be kept at home. What she needed was not a suspension, but punishment with more relevant consequences, says Moir, like having to eat lunch by herself, for example.
“This overuse of suspension solves the school’s problem, not the child’s,” says Moir. “The impact of this is that we’re not dealing with the child’s exceptionality. We don’t have to be flexible. We don’t have to be creative. We’ll just kick them out and let somebody else do the work.”
According to a report by the Ontario Human Rights Commission, “a practice of zero tolerance (in schools) inevitably conflicts with anti-discrimination legislation.”
ARCH, a Toronto-based legal resource center for persons with disabilities, says the Ontario government should amend the Safe Schools Act to ensure the rights of students with disabilities are protected. An ARCH report says the act “has established in Ontario a situation in which public education for children with disabilities is no longer guaranteed, and can be — and is presently being — taken away at any time.”
Education Minister Gerard Kennedy says the act has led to an overall increase in suspensions and expulsions, and he is aware of the particular concerns being expressed for students with disabilities.
The ministry is organizing a public action group to evaluate how the act is working at the school level. The group, gearing up this fall, will look into allegations of discrimination against students with disabilities.
The act calls for mandatory suspension for swearing at a teacher or uttering threats and mandatory expulsion for physical or sexual assault. The problem, say critics, is that a student who is developmentally delayed or autistic may not be able to control their actions, or even understand why their behavior is wrong.
The act includes a notwithstanding clause which allows a principal to waive a mandatory suspension or expulsion if there are mitigating factors. These include: the student not having the ability to control their behavior, not having the ability to understand the consequences of their behavior, or if their continued presence in the school isn’t a risk to others.
If they are a risk, the act says students can be denied access to school premises. There is no formal process for this exclusion and no appeal route for parents. Robert Lattanzio, a lawyer with ARCH, says most of the calls he receives from parents of disabled students are about this issue. Often the threat of exclusion is enough for a parent to decide to keep their child at home, Lattanzio says.
Sometimes they never go back.
Zero tolerance in the schools is good in theory, says Moir. Every action should have an appropriate consequence. The problem is that for many students with special needs, removal from the school environment is not an appropriate consequence.
Moir says principals sometimes tell parents their hands are tied when children get into trouble at school. But the small print of the act indicates that their hands are never tied, and parents don’t often know the rules. “The playing field is unbalanced, information is power,” says Moir.
Frank Boyer, vice-principal at Cairine Wilson Secondary School, disagrees. Boyer says the act has an effective system built in to protect the rights of special-needs students. Principals can use their own discretion and common sense, he points out.
“The act can be circumvented. You can work around the act when you want to.”
Moir, based in London, trains special education teachers and does contract work with the Children’s Aid Society and the Geneva Centre for Autism. Maybe when his phone stops ringing he’ll get a chance to work as a travel guide, like he planned to do seven years ago.