POLICE ASSOCIATION OF NOVA SCOTIA 153 Province to track school suspensions Schools are safe, says former boss By JoAnn Sherwood / Education Reporter A 15-year-old Chester youth brings a loaded handgun to school just to be cool. A 16-year-old in Sydney Mines stabs a schoolmate in the stomach with a knife during an argument. Both are examples of some of the reasons Nova Scotia students were suspended from school last year. Education Department officials say such severe incidents aren't common. "They are the anomalies, really," said Ann Power, director of student services. "Those are the ones that get the attention. Those are the ones that everybody knows about." Education officials can't say, though, how often weapons were brought to school because they don't track suspensions. Suspension records obtained through a freedom-ofinformation request show students were suspended at least 96 times last year for having weapons - half of them in Halifax-area schools. The total could be higher because the province's Acadian school board - Nova Scotia's smallest at 4,200 students - kept no suspension records. David Reid, former superintendent of the Halifax regional school board, said while serious incidents do occur, schools are safe places. "I would say that there is violence, in some form, in every school. There's probably violence in every workplace," he said. "But to suggest that all our schools and workplaces are in chaos, that's not true. You have human beings interacting. Inevitably, from time to time, those interactions may become violent." There were nearly 18,700 suspensions between September 2000 and June 2001 - 96 suspensions each school day. It's difficult to say how many students were involved because most boards didn't keep track of students suspended more than once. The Cape Breton-Victoria and South Shore boards, the only ones that did, said about half of suspensions involved the same students. Like the Education Department, most school boards can't say how many suspensions involve violence because they don't track it. The only place that does is Cape Breton-Victoria, where more than half of all suspensions involve some form of violence, anything from physical assault to verbal abuse. The Strait board, in response to our inquiry, developed a definition of violence and used it to calculate that about half of its suspensions involved violence. "We felt it was something that we needed to have," said David Forgeron, co-ordinator of human resources development. Neither the Acadian board nor the Annapolis Valley had any data on the reasons for suspensions. The Valley board would only say it had 10 weapons incidents. The province's two largest boards, Halifax and Chignecto-Central, had compiled no data on suspensions until this newspaper asked for it. Both boards say they're doing so this year. "It's a work in progress," said Doug Benedict, assistant superintendent of programs and students services in Chignecto-Central. The Education Department will also start monitoring suspensions, starting this fall, as part of a new school code of conduct. School boards will have to track suspensions in a standardized format - there's much variation out there now - and report the findings annually to government. Mike Sweeney, the province's senior executive Bullying in our Schools continued...
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