Category: Focus

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.

When the Conservative government implemented the Safe Schools Act in 2001, the education minister’s message was one of restoring “respect and responsibility” in Ontario schools.

Every year, during the first week of class, Peter Giuliani would collect his students’ money for book orders and field trips. He’d tuck it away in his desk drawer for safe keeping, along with the emergency scholastic fund. He was always upfront with the students and told them: here’s where the money is kept, if you’re going to steal it, you’ll do it.

The Ontario Safe Schools Act has done little in the last three years but increase the number of suspensions and expulsions in the province,Education Minister Gerard Kennedy said in a recent interview with Centretown News.