Administrators pin the blame on teachers
‘When a teacher released an anonymous public plea for help with chronic student misbehaviour, the school board instead began investigating who wrote it’
At Tomken Road Middle School in Mississauga, Ont., in the suburbs west of Toronto, the last day of school on Friday cannot come soon enough.
The school of 900 or so students in grades 6, 7 and 8 (aged 11 to 14) is in crisis, not only because of uncorrected misbehaviour by students that puts safety at risk and undermines every student’s education, but also because of bitter acrimony between teachers and board administration about how to respond.
This blew up in public late last month, when a teacher at Tomken Road released an anonymous public letter, a dramatic plea for help. It was explosive, with lurid details of feces smeared on walls, of violence and fear in the hallways, of blatant threats to teachers, of ineffective discipline in a disordered educational environment.
But the Peel District School Board saw it more as a privacy violation. It received far more attention than any school board is accustomed to, including media reports across Canada. In the days since, the board’s response to these teacher complaints has been marked by further chaos, as the board investigates the whistleblower teacher, threatening reprisal under the privacy and confidentiality terms of their employment contracts.
