School violence is up, reporting is weak, majority of teachers at ‘high risk’ of harm, finds audit

Lauren Phillips, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter, The Coast

In the past seven years, schools across the province have reported a 60% increase in violence. What’s more, weaknesses in what is reported are making it impossible for the Department of Education and Early Childhood Development–EECD–to know the full extent of violence in schools. That’s according to the latest from Nova Scotia’s auditor general, Kim Adair, in a report titled Preventing and Addressing Violence in Nova Scotia Public Schools, released Tuesday, June 11.

Of course, people want to know why–what is causing this surge? The audit highlights reasons educators gave for contributing to this surge, including not enough support for students with complex learning needs, overcrowding, teachers no longer monitoring hallways…race and human rights challenges and insufficient support in schools to help educators manage behavours.”

But first, what can we say for certain is happening in schools right now? How is the Department of Education, each Regional Education Centre–RCE–and each individual school across Nova Scotia supporting its students and staff who are experiencing more violence in school? For that, we needed an audit.

Adair’s report was released online at 9am Tuesday morning. Overall, it determined that there is “an inadequate focus on preventing and addressing violence in schools” within the EECD. Secondly, when violence does arise in schools, the audit found that educators, including teachers and support staff, are “not adequately supported to manage violence in their workplace.”

The audit looked at the period from Sept. 1, 2021 to June 30, 2023, with the aim of determining two things: is the EECD giving “appropriate oversight and guidance” to RCEs and the Conseil scolaire acadien provincial–CSAP–to prevent and address school violence? Are the two school regions with the highest rates of violence reported–the Halifax Regional Centre for Education–or HRCE–and the CSAP–”appropriately preventing and addressing school violence?”

The following criteria was developed during the audit process by Adair’s office to answer those questions:

The EECD should be providing overall direction, policy and support to RCEs and the CSAP to prevent and address school violence.

The HRCE and CSAP should have workplace violence risk assessments and prevention plans and communicate them to educators.

The HRCE and CSAP should require, and track training for educators related to violence in the workplace.

The HRCE and CSAP should monitor whether schools are performing required emergency preparedness drills.

Based on these, the audit found that, no, the EECD is not providing appropriate oversight and guidance to RCEs and the CSAP for preventing and addressing school violence and, no, the HRCE and CSAP are not appropriately preventing and addressing violence in schools.

Highlights from the audit include:

• The primary source used to manage school violence is the outdated Provincial School Code of Conduct Policy, which is six years overdue for its review.

• School violent incidents against students and educators increased by 60% over the last seven years…with roughly 50% occurring in the HRCE.

• Full non-Violent Crisis Intervention training used to be provided to all teacher assistants in HRCE prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, but now the full program (verbal and physical intervention) is only offered to teacher assistants and learning centre teachers “when recommended by a behavioural specialist for HRCE and if it is part of the Individual Program Plan for the students they are working with.” By comparison, the CSAP offers full training to all teacher assistants.

• PowerSchool, the application used to report violent incidents, labelled unacceptable behaviors, does not identify “if a student or educator is repeatedly impacted by violence.”

• PowerSchool is not accessible to teaching assistants

• HRCE and CSAP aren’t making sure schools in their regions have appropriate and up-to-date workplace violence risk assessment and prevention plans as required by the Occupational Health and Safety Act.

• HRCE and CSAP are not consistently tracking lockdowns and hold-and-secures at their schools.

• The EECD does not use PowerSchool to assess overall violence against educators in the workplace.

• There is no regular review of trends of violent incidents by the HRCE and the CSAP.

• The top two reasons educators gave for not reporting incidents were “lack of time,” and “potential lack of action taken in response to [the] incident.”

• School emergency plans lack clear communication protocols, with six out of seven schools analyzed in the audit not having “evidence of communication to parents of what to expect before, during and after a lockdown or hold-and-secure event.”

At 9:30am, the minister of education and early childhood development, Becky Druhan, published the EECD’s response to the audit’s findings, saying “I want to assure all students, families and people working in Nova Scotia schools that preventing and addressing violence in schools is a priority for our government.”

At 11am, Adair addressed a room of reporters. Who was consulted? When? For how long?

It is the practice of the auditor general “not to share detail that is not public knowledge or not in the public report,” Adair told The Coast by email Tuesday. As per the Auditor General Act, “all information contained in the files, audit records and other records of the Office is exempt from the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act and disclosure under any other legislation.” The act also includes a requirement that the office “preserve secrecy with respect to all matters not considered to be general public knowledge.”

What the audit has published is that its data and conclusions were made based on a “review of policies and procedures; interviews with departmental staff, HRCE and CSAP management as well as school staff; [and] responses to a provincewide survey and detailed work at the seven schools within HRCE and CSAP, which the report says were chosen based on “location, enrolment, grade levels within the school and number of reported violent incidents” in the 2022-23 school year.

The audit says the voluntary provincewide survey was sent out to “principals, vice principals, teachers, teacher assistants and any other staff who work in schools such as student support staff” and that it received over 5,200 responses, which represents almost 28% of those asked to participate. In an email Tuesday, Adair tells The Coast that this survey “was intended to support the work of the office in carrying out this audit…however, the [EECD] or the [Nova Scotia] Teachers’ Union may have survey results they wish to make public.”

On Tuesday, a reporter asked Adair what surprised her the most from the audit.

Adair pointed to the finding that educators experience violence from parents or guardians of students, and that these incidents are not tracked in PowerSchool.

There are overarching problems that the auditor faced, as anyone would, when looking into the issue of school violence and prevention:

Definition of violence: How is school violence defined by the Department of Education? By individual regional centres for education? By individual schools? Do these definitions match?

Inconsistent record-keeping: When these definitions of violence in each region are used to report incidents, how is data kept, tracked or analyzed? How is it shared? Is it sufficient? How are incident reports used to prevent other incidents from happening? Are these incidents, within the boundaries of PowerSchool, telling a full and helpful picture? Or, is there important information left out, such as the location of the incident, whether others were involved, whether this is a first or repeated incident and whether this incident resulted in others being injured or not?

Reporting: If educators don’t have time to properly report or don’t trust action will follow from reporting, or are fearful of retribution at work if they do speak up, does that discredit the data that exists? If PowerSchool is limited to teachers and administrators and excludes teaching assistants, how many incidents aren’t reported? Or aren’t reported accurately?

A major finding from the audit related to educators is that the HRCE and CSAP are currently not complying with Occupational Health and Safety Act’s Violence in the Workplace Regulations.

The audit found that, within the HRCE and CSAP, “workplace risk assessments and prevention plans [are] not being properly completed by schools,” that “adequate training [is] not being provided to educators exposed to violence in the workplace,” and that there is a “lack of documentation of actions taken on reported incidents.”

While the audit was underway, five out of the seven schools analyzed were not able to provide their 2022-23 workplace risk assessment and prevention plans to Adair’s office. “For the remaining two schools who did provide their plans…they were not fully complete with missing prevention plans for identified workplace risks and [lacked] documentation that risks were communicated to affected employees,” finds the audit.

“Based on the increase in incidents reported by educators in PowerSchool, as well as the results of our provincewide survey and our interviews, we concluded educators in schools in Nova Scotia are at high risk of experiencing violence in the workplace.” In response to the audit’s provincewide survey, 65% of educators who responded said they had “witnessed or experienced violence in schools at least weekly…with 31% indicating they experience violence in schools daily.”

Further, more than 70% of educators who responded to the survey said they “do not receive enough training to manage the violence they are experiencing in schools.”

The Nova Scotia Teachers Union–NSTU–released a statement in response to the audit on Tuesday. It reiterated that a membership survey in spring 2023 found that more than 55% of teachers and specialists “have been the victim of violence or threats at the workplace, and that approximately 87% believe that rates of violence have grown worse in the past five years.

“The auditor general’s report is a clear confirmation that educational practitioners have been correct in their concerns.”

Next week, on Wednesday June 19, the provincial Public Accounts Committee will convene to review the auditor general’s report. The NSTU will be there as a witness as will the Public School Administrators Association of Nova Scotia and members of the EECD.

The Coast will report on the meeting and provide more detailed coverage on this audit and what’s really happening in our schools. Subscribe to our newsletter to stay up to date.

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