Videos obtained by NR show massive brawls, some involving weapons. The assaults went unpunished, according to teachers.
Editor’s Note: This is the fourth installment of an ongoing investigation into Ontario’s public-school system. The first installment, on the district’s adoption of “progressive discipline,” is available here. The second installment, on the district’s compromised mathematics curriculum, is available here. The third installment, which covers the push to abandon individualized education in the name of equity, can be read here.
James Murphy has been part of Ontario’s Dufferin-Peel Catholic school district since he was five years old. After graduating and going through teacher’s college, he was hired in 1981 by his former high-school principal. Over the coming decades Murphy’s kids would matriculate through the district.
“Anything that needed to be done in my school, I would do,” Murphy told National Review.
The high-school biology teacher, now 60 with a thick shock of flowing white hair, fondly recalls playing guitar for students, serving as a liaison for the district’s Environmental Youth Alliance, being a union representative, and coaching football.
“I carved out a really good career,” Murphy said.
That all changed one wintery November day in 2019 when Murphy was leaving St. Thomas Aquinas Secondary School.
Bracing for the frigid commute home, Murphy hurried to his car to get a few things before leaving for the day. Walking through a crowd of uniformed students congregating outside the school’s main entrance, Murphy saw a pupil hurl a bike towards a group of people, narrowly missing the assembled students and crashing just outside the front doors.
Murphy intervened to put a stop to behavior he saw as a threat to students, faculty, parents, and property. As Murphy tried to grab the bike to bring it inside the building, the student confronted him. “Get your hands off my f***ing bike,” Murphy recalls the student screaming. “You think I’m going to let you take my f***ing bike?”
Throughout the exchange, the teenager repeatedly called Murphy a “F***ing idiot.” The teen and his brother, a fellow student, tried to wrestle the bike out of Murphy’s hands. The incident caused lasting damage to Murphy’s wrists, X-rays tests shared with NR confirm. A fellow educator helped Murphy corral the student into the school’s office where the boy threatened him again. “Do you want me to say I’m going to punch you in the face?” the teen said, according to Murphy.
The incident left Murphy shaken but resulted in just a four-day suspension for the student who injured him. St. Thomas Aquinas, Murphy argues, failed to follow a host of policies ahead of the student’s eventual return, including instituting a proper safety plan. “I’m kind of rattled now. The kid’s coming back to school. He told me that he wanted to fight me and that he was gonna punch me in the face,” he said.
Murphy decided to take a stand and refused to teach due to unsafe working conditions following the student’s return the following week. The “work refusal” triggered representatives from the provincial Ministry of Labor to visit the school and investigate the matter. “That was a big shock to everybody,” Murphy reflects.
“You can’t provide a safe working environment. The kid’s coming back. I don’t know what’s gonna happen. It’s unsafe. I’m not going to work,” Murphy insisted, visibly passionate about the situation years later.
After refusing further demands to return to work, Murphy was banned from school premises by the principal and received a letter from the superintendent informing him that his duties were “hereby restricted” due to “allegations of inappropriate conduct.” Murphy believes the suspension was an act of “reprisal” for demanding the school uphold provincial safety protocols.
A Dufferin-Peel spokesman declined to comment on the specifics of Murphy’s case.
Years later, Murphy remains in employment purgatory, ostracized from his social circle, living on reduced wages, and locked in a legal battle before the Ontario Labor Relations Board. Meanwhile, Dufferin-Peel insists Murphy, and not the student, acted improperly. In a June 2022 letter obtained by National Review, Superintendent Stephanie Strong argued that Murphy’s approach to the situation displayed a “lack of judgment.”
“More specifically, the evidence does not support that you attempted a non-violent intervention with the goal of ensuring student safety,” Strong wrote. “In fact, evidence suggests that you made no attempt to address the situation in a non-confrontational way; rather the way you intervened served to escalate the situation unnecessarily. The Board also finds that you spoke to the student inappropriately.”
“Under the Education Act, I have a responsibility and a duty to maintain order and discipline,” Murphy counters. “To me, not engaging is an abdication of my responsibility.”
The board’s detachment from reality astonished Murphy. “I imagined somebody coming out of the school getting hit by the bike, a pregnant lady, a colleague, a kid breaking their leg.”
Rather than address what Murphy describes as the high schooler’s extensive record of bullying and violent behavior towards other students, administrators and union leaders made Murphy the scapegoat. Unsurprisingly, given the incentive structure of progressive discipline, three years later, the same student was arrested for robbing a pharmacy as part of a narcotics ring, Murphy said.
Murphy’s perspective shouldn’t have been news to Dufferin-Peel administrators.
One Catholic school teacher with decades of experience wrote an email to Murphy’s union representative in January 2021, entitled “Scared,” vouching for the horrendous state of school safety at St. Thomas Aquinas.
“I write on behalf of both staff and students to give testimony to the terminal decline in student behaviour that we have endured in the past few years as a consequence of empirically weak or absent administrative oversight and a discipline policy that is entirely subjective, often impotent, sometimes deflective and increasingly dangerous,” the teacher wrote in a letter reviewed by National Review.
“Student behavior at Aquinas has been permitted to devolve at an ever quickening pace to levels that have routinely proven dangerous and is, in my opinion, bordering on criminal.”
Timothy’s letter cited five instances in which teachers had been violently threatened by students. He described open drug dealing in bathrooms, marijuana smoking in stairwells, and a failure to uphold the student uniform code making it “near impossible to tell student from intruder.” Timothy signed off with the prophetic words: “It is growing more violent by the day and at this point I just pray no one is seriously injured because of the dangerous culture that I believe has been permitted to develop under this administration.”
Video footage obtained by National Review confirms that a troubling pattern of violence has been allowed to take root at St. Thomas Aquinas. Many of the recorded incidents took place in front of the very same entrance where Murphy intervened that fateful day. Virtually no Canadian media outlet has written about the disciplinary issues as the district has sought to suppress stories and press coverage, teachers from the district who spoke with NR confirmed.
On February 9, two female students came to blows, tussling and grabbing one another’s hair. One of them had brought a knife to school and dropped it during the altercation. It took administrators half an hour to locate the weapon, one teacher said. Administrators failed to institute a school lockdown, in apparent violation of protocol.
On the last day of the 2021-2022 academic school year, June 24, at least two vicious fights broke out between students, neither of which resulted in a police or administrative investigation. In one video, a fight between two male students devolved into a swarming attack with multiple bystanders joining in, stomping and pummeling a downed student. At one point, the dazed kid is kicked directly in the face.
The knot of students surrounding the fight then transforms into a scrum wrangling over a metal baseball bat. A middle-aged bystander, who is not a teacher, fortunately wrestled hold of the weapon screaming for everyone to “Go home!” repeatedly until the crowd dispersed. A short time later, in front of the school’s infamous main entrance, two female students got entangled in a violent altercation. Dozens of students cheered and filmed the fight without intervening.
No students were suspended or disciplined because of the brawls, according to Murphy.
‘I Wouldn’t Want Your Job’
The normalization of violence across Ontario public schools is the direct result of administrators discouraging teachers from proactively intervening to stop altercations, several teachers said. Teachers are now instructed by administrators to close their doors, focus on teaching, and ignore the mayhem that routinely unfolds in hallways and near school entrances.
Attempts to enforce Catholic school uniforms are futile. “They start swearing at you. Who the f*** are you? Do you know who you’re f***ing talking to?” Murphy says. Ask a student for their name? Don’t even bother. “We’ve lost the hallways,” Murphy, who keeps tabs on developments at St. Thomas Aquinas, confessed.
Murphy found it odd that administrators began to view school discipline as a potential liability not worthy of their time. After all, he had entered teaching with the very mindset, expressed widely by the teachers who spoke to NR, that “as soon as I put my foot out my car, I was at work. I teach at this school. Everybody is my student.”
However, according to Murphy, St. Thomas now orders educators to notify police only if a violent incident involves a gun or knife. Often vicious beatings, like those captured on the videos shared with National Review, are not reported to police, teachers said. The resulting environment led police officers to privately joke with Murphy, “I wouldn’t want your job.”
Indeed, many teachers are walking away from a profession that has become markedly more dangerous in recent years. “I already wouldn’t tell someone to go into this profession. I’m going into my job every day stressed. I’m in fight-or-flight every day. I’m going to work, I’m getting hit, I’m being sworn at, and I’m only dealing with Grade Ones,” one twentysomething teacher in the greater Toronto area, told National Review.
In recent months, the deterioration of school safety – particularly across Dufferin-Peel and its secular equivalent, Peel District – has become so bad that teachers are walking off the job, protesting unsafe work conditions, and begging the province for help.
Michael Teper, a Toronto resident active in the public-education space, received and publicized a series of alarming disclosures in May from a teacher at Tomken Road Middle School in Peel District warning that a “state of crisis at our cherished school” had made it “impossible to maintain any sense of dignity.”
“Students will come up to your face and tell you to ‘f*** off’. Students will ignore any boundaries or structure remaining at our school. Students have shown time and time again that they are unwilling to uphold any type of decency towards staff and students in the building,” the letter reads.
The plea included a laundry list of other instances of “disorderly conduct” that had “transpired from September until now” including students defecating “on the floor of bathrooms and rub[ing] their feces on the wall” and “threatening others with Exacto knives or hitting each other so hard with a meter stick that their tooth falls out.”
The educator signed off: “Please help us.” The revelations prompted the school board to investigate the allegations.
The following week, Teper publicized another submission from a teacher at Homelands Senior Public School, another school in the Peel district, echoing the same concerns. However, this note took it a step further, adding that more than ten staff members at the institution were on “mental health leave directly as a result of working conditions” that had taken hold over the previous two school years. Predictably, the “superintendent claim[ed] that she was not aware of these occurrences over the years,” despite numerous staff emails informing of her the conditions, which Teper reviewed.
A Dufferin-Peel spokesman refused to comment on specific instances of violence but noted that “violent incidents have increased post-pandemic across DPCDSB and many jurisdictions across North America.”
“Student behaviour is assessed against the requirements dictated by the Education Act and its regulations, which outline which progressive disciplinary consequences are appropriate and required based on the behaviour,” he added. “DPCDSB is committed to responding to all acts of violence according to appropriate legislation, policy, and procedure.”
The Peel district did not respond to a request for comment.
‘Third Path’ Learning
Virtually identical stories have unfolded across the wider province.
After teaching for 23 years, Michael Sternberg decided to raise awareness about the dire situation at Pinecrest Public School in Ottawa. In June 2022, in the heart of the pandemic, Sternberg sent an email to staff drawing attention to growing concerns over unsafe work conditions stemming from unchecked student violence.
A profile in the Ottawa Citizen reported that elementary students roamed halls freely during class, intimidated staff, and bullied students. On several occasions, students brought knives to school, shouted racist slurs, and conducted “swarming” attacks against kids in bathrooms. Pinecrest declined to comment, citing an ongoing investigation into the matter.
The violence at Pinecrest became so pervasive that some students told their parents that they had begun skipping class to escape the chaos. When Principal Naya Markanastasakis asked other teachers for feedback on Sternberg’s complaints, several teachers confirmed his account. Many anonymously reported widespread verbal abuse, sexual assault, and physical violence. Others claimed that sending troublesome students to the principal’s office accomplished nothing.
Remarkably, Principal Markanastasakis professed to never having felt unsafe amid the growing unease among teachers. Asked by a reporter about chronic skipping, Markanastasakis responded by rattling off a series of rhetorical questions: “Are they engaged? Are they looking for something? Is the work too hard? Is the work too easy? Did they have breakfast this morning?”
The approach derives from Markanastasakis’s support for so-called “Third Path” learning, a progressive pedagogical philosophy that recognizes “the underlying unmet emotional needs that are being expressed.”
“We need to be trauma-informed. The majority of students at our school fall into avoidant, ambivalent, disorganized attachment pattern categories. When we choose not to be Third Path, trauma-informed educators, we are not serving our students well,” the principal wrote in a June 2022 newsletter.
In another, Markanastasakis added: “As caring and committed educators, we cannot serve students well, if we are not constantly examining our current practice, biases and assumptions.” The work, the principal warned, can be uncomfortable, though she insisted she remains “committed to sitting in this discomfort alongside” fellow teachers.
As students’ feelings and emotions were placed on a pedestal, Pinecrest transformed into an institution where the student’s “voice was all that mattered, and basically they silenced the teachers’ voice,” Sternberg told the Citizen. “We were always questioned, we were always undermined, we were always told [the bad behavior] must be our bias, or our classroom management, or it must be because we’re not listening to the students.”
The day after Sternberg sent his email alerting staff to unsafe work conditions, he was asked to report to Markanastasakis’s office. There, district superintendent Shannon Smith accused him of contributing to a “poisoned” work environment. Sternberg was consequently ordered to leave school premises, instructed not to speak to anyone, and placed on “home assignment” for the remainder of the year – the same treatment Murphy was subjected to by Dufferin-Peel.
According to Sternberg, at least five other teachers have faced similar consequences and have been removed from Pinecrest. Although the local Ottawa school board reportedly opened an investigation into the allegations in April 2022 of a “poisoned” workspace, as of June 2023, no official report had been released yet.
Pinecrest is not alone. In May, the Elementary Teachers’ Federation of Ontario (ETFO) published a survey on school violence based on responses from roughly 25,000 educators across the province. Over three-quarters of respondents had personally experienced or witnessed violence and 80 percent saw the threat of violence increasing. Almost 90 percent agreed that it was having a negative impact on the learning environment.
Nearly half of ETFO teachers said that written or verbal disciplinary reports aimed at curbing student violence “were ineffective in preventing a recurrence of the violence incident(s). Only 8 percent deem it “effective.” Buried in the report, 35 percent of teachers confirmed that they had “participated in a classroom evacuation due to a violence incident” in the last year.
Murphy sympathized with Sternberg’s plight because he has seen it happen to several teachers he’d worked closely with over the years. “So many of my poor colleagues I see counting tiles and not doing their jobs. People are just trying to cope. If they’re mid-mortgage and they have young kids, nobody’s opening their mouth. Our schools are unsafe because of that,” he said.
Administrators, Murphy argues, have chosen to adopt a posture of “covering themselves” as “mayhem” reigns.
“Positive change can only occur when a problem is identified and the key stakeholders collaborate to identify, assess and implement viable solutions,” Murphy closed in one plea to a school-board trustee in March 2022. “The continued obfuscation, denial, and dismissal of everyday violence in our schools renders them unsafe for staff and students alike.”
At the bottom of the email Murphy appended a James Baldwin quote: “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”