‘They Don’t Belong’: The Solution is Not Cops

by Rayon
Basics Issue #13 (Apr/May 2009)

A few weeks ago, our high school, Weston Collegiate Institute, had a few people from the NO COPS campaign (Newly Organized Coalition Opposing Police in Schools) pay a visit to us at lunch time. They set up a table across the street and had stacks of free BASICS newspapers to give out. While BASICS organizers are well known for distributing the papers in Toronto communities, the members of NO COPS who were there that day, strapped with their BASICS issues, had another purpose.

What these guys had was a petition to the remove the “Special Resources Officer” - the uniformed armed police officers in high schools – from the 30 or so TDSB secondary schools across Toronto.

For the majority of the students at Weston, this petition is allowing us to voice our concerns about having a cop in our school. There was a lack of community consultation in bringing this cop here in the first place. The Toronto Police Services initiated and funds this program and the Toronto District School Board approved it at an executive level. The feelings among most of the students at Weston C.I. is that they do not want a cop in their school and they feel threatened by the presence of an armed police officer in the school for numerous reasons. The students cannot identify with an individual who wears a massive bullet proof vest and carries a loaded gun and taser, which is quite intimidating particularly for people coming from T.O.’s “priority neighbourhoods” – let’s be honest, ghettoes – who witness and experience police activity in a whole different light than youth from more affluent areas.

On a day-to-day basis, the police harass, bully, and brutalize people from our communities and get away without being held to account for their actions. How can we accept having police in our schools to “build relations” with us if they are getting away with daily brutality and sometimes murder in our communities? (Anyone remember Alwy Al-Nadhir or Byron Debassige?) We have already experienced police (SRO) harrassment at Weston C.I. There was a conflict with two young women and the SRO used unnecessary and excessive force on the two young women. This incident was captured on video.

The effect of having police in schools is going to push more and more marginalized students out of school altogether, furthering the divide between youth from financially-stable homes and communities and youth from working-class homes and communities. We cannot let this happen. We will not let this happen.

We want cops out of our schools!

If you are interested in becoming an organizer with the NO COPS campaign , please contact us at nocops09@gmail.com.

Numerous Studies Show Cops in Schools Make Matters Worse

by James Campbell
Basics Issue #13 (Apr/May 2009)

The first School Resource Officer (SRO) programs began, unsurprisingly, in the United States. The goal of the first programs, started in Flint, Michigan during the 1950s, was to “improve relations between police and young people”. Despite the long history of these programs and their growing expansion to school districts all over the U.S. and Canada, a report by the International Center for Crime Prevention (ICCP) suggests that these programs have no long-term measurable benefit to student engagement or school safety.

If these programs have no measurable benefit, then why would Toronto Police Services (TPS) and the Toronto District School Board (TDSB) be spending invaluable financial and institutional capital on an SRO Program at a time when our schools and our students are in crisis?

The answer, according to the ICCP report, is the move made by most police forces in the 1990s towards “community policing”. In the wake of the release of the Falconer Report, in response to the shooting of Jordan Manners at C.W. Jeffries Collegiate Institute, Toronto's own champion of “community policing” Police Chief Bill Blair made his own pitch to the TDSB to install armed police officers in schools.

In keeping with the history of SRO programs, and despite the dire warnings of the Falconer report, about the urgent need to make schools safer places for students, teachers, and staff, the goal of Blair's program is not to make schools safer but to “improve relations between police and young people”.

Despite being explicitly part of the TPS's 'community policing' mandate, there was absolutely no community consultation before the pilot program was implemented in September 2008. The decision to create the program was made in a series of back-room meetings with members of the Safe and Caring Schools department of the TDSB and members of the TPS.

Not only was the program created without consultation, it explicitly ignores two major community consultations done at the cost of millions of precious taxpayer dollars. Both the Falconer Report on School Safety and the Curling-McMurtry report on the Roots of Youth Violence spent months talking with and listening to students, parents, teachers, and school support workers. Out of these direct and extensive consultations, both reports painted a picture of a system in critical need of repair, and outlined extensive and specific recommendations to both engage marginalized youth and make our schools safer. Not once did either report recommend putting armed and uniformed officers in schools. In fact, the Curling-McMurtry report explicitly points to the racial profiling of racialized youth by Toronto police as a major contributing factor to the increased climate of fear for many youth:

“Many youth also told us that they felt uncomfortable walking through policed areas within their neighbourhoods for fear of being harassed. One senior civic official highlighted this for us when he explained that in one community the youth favoured the use of surveillance cameras in public areas because they created zones where the police did not harass the youth”

While the TDSB is still struggling to come up with funds to hire the highly-trained youth and social workers recommended by the Falconer and Curling-McMurty Reports, the TPS has stepped in with funding to replace social workers with the very police officers many youth fear.

Despite explicit assurances that the SRO program is not about school safety, the TDSB continues to justify the program on the grounds that it's making schools safer. This February, the TDSB released its preliminary report on the 5-month-old SRO program. In glowing articles in both The Globe and Mail and The Toronto Star, school administrators as well as TDSB and TPS officials told seemingly charming stories about police officers staying late to coach teams and participating in school-wide events by dancing in tutus. Based on these stories and other “anecdotal” reports, journalists and administrators happily concluded that the program was so far a great success in making schools safer.

Not only did these stories ignore the numerous reports by students, teachers, and staff of police harassment and an increasing climate of fear and repression, but they also ignored the TDSB report's own data.

While TDSB data shows a reduction in suspensions and police charges in schools with SROs, there is nothing to support the claim that these reductions are the direct result of the SRO's presence. Indeed, these drops are consistent with a similar drop in suspensions and police charges in schools without SROs, which have been credited to the changes made to the Safe Schools Act explicitly intended to reduce suspensions and the intervention of police.

There is only one significant difference when it comes to data comparing schools with and schools without SROs: while the report indicates a 24% drop in violent incidents board-wide, it shows a 15% increase in violent incidents in schools with SROs. (Officials blamed this increase in violence in SRO schools on two major incidents in two different schools, and then conveniently chose to exclude these two incidents from the data set because it “skewed” the results.)

With no contemporary or historical data to suggest SRO programs have any measurable benefit for students, and with much historical and contemporary data that suggests that increased police presence alienates and marginalizes many youth, both the TDSB and the TPS continue to struggle to come up with a rationale for the program. At a time when there is almost universal consensus on what our schools and students need, our police force and school board are spending precious time, energy and resources on a program whose stated goal is not to benefit students in need, but to benefit the police force itself.

Armed Cops Moving into Toronto Schools in Sep ‘08

by Kabir Joshi-Vijayan
Basics Issue#10 (Aug/Sep 2008)

High School students have another thing to look forward this September - police with guns patrolling their hallways. On June 23rd, the chair of the Toronto District School Board (TDSB), John Campbell, announced that at least 22 public and 8 Catholic schools will each get a police officer this fall - for security and to supposedly ‘build relationships’ with students. Campbell first said the cops would be walking around in jeans and golf shirts “meeting… and talking to kids”, but he was corrected the next day by Toronto Police Chief Bill Blair, who made it clear that the officers would have both their uniforms and their weapons in the schools.

While we’re told that the police are supposed to help with security in schools, a School Safety report released in January (in response to the Jordan Manners killing at CW Jeffreys last year) did not make any recommendations to put police in schools. This Safety Report was written by a three-person advisory panel, after surveys of students and teachers at two west-end schools, and made many recommendations on how to improve school security - none of which included police being sent into high schools. However, the report did talk about the devastating effects of the social service cuts to Ontario in the 1990s, as well as the destructive use of the Safe Schools Act. Surveys showed that Black youth feel that racial discrimination by teachers is a major problem - and that they experience racism from the police outside of school. So the decision to put armed cops in Toronto High Schools made by the School Board ignored advice both from a community panel they appointed, and the feelings of their own students.

You only need to look at the US, which has put armed police in the schools of many of its major cities, to see what this policy will mean for students. In New York, youth are regularly brutalized and arrested for swearing, being late for class, having cell phones or not having hall passes. A number of times, teachers and even principles have been arrested for trying to protect their students. On a regular basis across the United States, youth have to be sent to hospital for injuries received from police while in school.

Will Toronto cops be very different? The announcement from the School Board was made a week after Toronto police were cleared by the S.I.U. in the murders of 17-year-old high school student Alwy Al-Nadhir and 28-year-old Byron Debassige, both of whom were unarmed when murdered by police. And according to the School Board, police will be put primarily in “schools who have the highest suspension rate and highest crime rate”. We know this means schools with the highest number of poor, black, brown and native kids. These are youth who are already threatened, brutalized and arrested by police on a daily basis in this city. There’s no reason to believe that the way police treat youth every day on the streets will be any different in the halls of a high school.

TDSB should focus on implementing community services and after-school programs for youth, and dealing with its own systematic racism and discrimination, instead of making schools a more intimidating and oppressive place for youth.

University of Toronto Students Occupy President's Office

Press Release

March 21, 2008 - Toronto

March 20, 2008 thirty-five University of Toronto students occupied
Simcoe Hall, the home of the President's Office, to protest a 20% fee
increase. The nonviolent sit-in was accompanied with a peaceful rally
outside the building--until the police began brutalizing those inside.
This was captured by multiple video cameras.

The students had three simple demands.
1) To be granted a meeting with President David Naylor;
2) To have the proposed fee increase removed from the University
Affairs Board meeting, scheduled to take place on March 25; and
3) To be given 15 minutes at the University Affairs Board meeting for
a presentation and discussion on broader issues of access to education
and the impacts of high tuition upon students, families and
communities.

Students attempted to deliver their letter to the University of
Toronto President, David Naylor, and to speak to other members of the
administration in Simcoe Hall about the rising costs of education in
Ontario. The administration refused to meet with the students. The
response of the University of Toronto was to violently remove students
from their peaceful sit-in. Police aggressively grabbed students and
dragged them away from the entrance of the office. The students
feared for their safety and after four hours in the building, the
police violence forced the students to leave.


Video of these events has been posted on YouTube and it can be viewed
here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ketNtnZQIwQ

Images can be viewed here:
http://www.edwardfwong.com/uoftact/9.jpg
http://www.edwardfwong.com/uoftact/10.jpg

Students are continuing to demand a meeting with President Naylor, and
the right to accessible and affordable education.

For more information contact:
Farshad Azadian, student member and organizer with AlwaysQuestion:
416-569-7471

Ryan Hayes, President of Arts and Science Students Union: 416-421-0879
Michal Hay, Vice-President University Affairs, University of Toronto
Students' Union: 647-802-4131.

Black-Focused School Approved for Toronto: TDSB approves Africentric school for 2009

by Kabir Joshi-Vijayan


On January 29th, school trustees at the Toronto District School Board (TDSB) headquarters overflowing with students, parents and teachers, voted 11-9 in favour of opening the city’s first Africentric or Black-focused school. This decision came after over 10 years of meetings, debates, reviews, and a tireless campaign of black parents and community workers demanding that the school board finally take some sort of action to deal with the crisis of a 40% high school drop out rate among black youth. The school is set to open by September 2009 (with details being hammered out in the interim.)

So what exactly is an Africentric school? Any racialized, poor and/or marginalized person who has gone through the public education system knows how isolating and discriminatory it can be. Much of what is taught has no relevance to racialized and working-class youth and their experiences. The hope is that black-focused schools would be an alternative to this.

It would be an environment where students would learn about their own history, culture and experience in every part of the curriculum. Africentric schools are based on the vision that education is a shared community responsibility and so parents and the wider community would be included within the education environment. And contrary to popular belief and corporate media distortions, the schools would be open to students of any background because it is believed that an Africentric program can help any student feeling pushed out of the mainstream system.

Many community groups who understand the devastating affect the school system is having on black youth have hailed the vote, such as the Jane-Finch Concerned Citizens, Jamaican-Canadian Association, African Canadian Heritage Association, Canadian Alliance of Black Educators, the Ontario Parents of Black Children, the Ontario Council of Agencies Serving Immigrants, the Black Action Defence League.

However, the corporate media, including all major newspapers, has pushed strongly against the creation of the schools. Through twisting the message of black community activists, and even openly racist editorials, the media have unfortunately been successful in encouraging the wider Toronto community to oppose the decision. We all have heard the arguments that black focused schools would “return segregation” and further divide Canadians. In fact it is the complete opposite.

Segregation is when ruling groups in society force marginalized people out of public institutions (arguably what is effectively happening right now with “revitalization”, or the privatization of medical services). Instead, Africentric schools represent a demand from within the black community for a little bit of public space to help their youth and mend some of the damage done by the mainstream system. The shameful thing is that investigations and reports have been calling on the TDSB to implement an Africentric program for 15 years. However, the TDSB did nothing. Yet in the same period they opened a number of other alternative schools with varying specialities in order to, according to the TDSB, “offer (disengaged) students and parents something different from mainstream schooling”.

Meanwhile Ontario’s Premier Dalton McGuinty has said that he won’t give one cent to the establishment of such a school because he is “uncomfortable with the concept”.

There are those who say that Africentric schools are not the solution because they don’t really address the problem, which is the system as a whole. Some say that opening a couple of schools may help a small number of students, but it would still leave the majority of youth to struggle in a toxic system.

Yet Africentric schools in no way contradict this point. Those who have fought for them are faced with a crisis right now! They understand very well that our school system is broken and is failing kids from all different ethnic, social, economic and cultural backgrounds. It is not just a question of race, but also a question of class. While 40% of Black youth do not complete high school, 43% of Portuguese students and 25% of all students are dropping out as well. Advocates see Africentric schools as just one step and a small part of the larger discussion about how we eliminate racism and inequity in the system.

The lessons learned through an Africentric program can and will be fed into the mainstream public system. Angela Wilson, one of the leading members who fought for Africentric schools, recently said after the TDSB vote: “we’re happy, but as I said the struggle continues – we have layers and layers of things to do”.

Do We Need Tuition Fees in Ontario?

Last fall the Ontario government lifted the tuition fee freeze which students fought hard to secure in 2004. Based on the scheme put in place by McGuinty’s Liberals college and university tuition fees will rise between 20 and 36 percent over the next four years in Ontario.
The mainstream media and political parties have centered the debate about tuition fees on what is a fair price to pay for post-secondary education. Not one source has stopped to ask if people should have to be pay for college and university at all.
Back in the 1940’s, getting a high school education used to be expensive. However, people realized that this was the basic level of education required just to get a halfway decent job, so they got organised to demand fair access.
Today, over 60% of new jobs created require a college or university education. Attending university is becoming more of a necessity than a choice. It is now the basic level of education required to get a job that pays enough to support a family.
Canada is a rich, industrialized country. College and university education here could easily be free for everyone. Much poorer nations provide free college and university education for their citizens at all or some levels, including Argentina, Ireland, Cuba, Venezuela, and France. There is absolutely no reason why people here can’t have the same, other than the lack of political will by the politicians.
Our representatives are totally disconnected from the realities of working people. As the provincial election approaches, we must demand that representatives who want our votes stand up for a liveable minimum wage and free college and university education. We must continue to organize our communities into a political force to demand what we deserve – better opportunities through fair wages and free education.