HALIFAX — The COVID-19 pandemic, students’ use of cellphones and school crowding may have contributed to the spike in school violence in Nova Scotia, officials say.
Elwin LeRoux, deputy minister of the Department of Education, said Wednesday that data show many violent outbursts in schools involve young children who missed out on socializing in person with peers during the pandemic.
"All the little kids who didn’t socialize are coming to school and causing a lot of incidents. A lot," LeRoux said.
LeRoux said violent outbursts among young students has decreased as they are taught by teachers “to use their voice, not their hands” when dealing with conflict or frustration.
The deputy minister made the comments after a legislative committee meeting Wednesday, which was called in response to last week's report by Auditor General Kim Adair that found a sharp rise in school violence. Adair’s report said training and prevention measures have failed to keep pace.
The auditor found 31 per cent of teachers reported seeing or experiencing daily violence at school, and that staff are left feeling unprepared to deal with the concerning trend. The report also says there has been a 60 per cent increase in reported school violence since 2017.
Violent incidents jumped to 27,000 last year compared to 17,000 in the 2016-17 school year, although Adair said the numbers are likely under-reported. “I think given the level of incidence that is now occurring, parents should be concerned, but to be fair this is not a unique to Nova Scotia problem," she said as she released the report.
Steve Gallagher, with the Halifax Regional Centre for Education — which operates the municipality's English public schools — told reporters Wednesday the school population boom and the time youth spend on social media may be contributing to increased violence.
"Halifax is growing rapidly …. I think people are bumping into each other in the halls," he said, adding that "the cellphone is a conduit to conflict in schools."
Gallagher said social media, accessed through a cellphone, means children and teenagers are part of an "invisible conversation" that has the potential to escalate disputes between students.
"Say a student has a conflict with someone in the hallway, by the time they get to the classroom, many, many people in the school know about it. There’s communication going back and forth, and it can amp up things."
He said he's hopeful a new provincial policy announced this month that requires cellphones to be turned off and out of sight during class hours will help.
When asked about crowding in schools as student numbers grow, Gallagher said it's hard to know if planned school infrastructure projects will be enough to keep up.
"The rate of growth in Halifax ... is such that I don't think that there's a finish line for us," Gallagher said. Last year the province announced that it would build four new schools in the Halifax Regional Municipality.
Gallagher said there are a number of options if the education centre runs out of space for students. He said it would consider adding more modular classrooms to schools, adjusting neighbourhood boundaries for school districts, or moving some grade levels to different schools.
They would also consider leasing space, as the province has done for a pre-primary and adult education classes. A "last resort" option on the table is establishing a split shift, Gallagher said, where half of students would go to school in the morning and the other half would attend class in the afternoon.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published June 19, 2024.
Lyndsay Armstrong, The Canadian Press
