‘Don’t Under React’: The Limits of Compassion and Risk Management in Toronto School Safety from 1999-2007

by

Zachary P. Levinsky

A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Centre for Criminology & Sociolegal Studies University of Toronto

© Copyright by Zachary P. Levinsky 2020 ‘Don’t Under React: The Limits of Compassion and Risk Management in Toronto Schools Safety 1999-2007

Zachary P. Levinsky

Doctor of Philosophy

Centre for Criminology & Sociolegal Studies

University of Toronto

2020 Abstract

The purpose of this dissertation is to situate school safety policies within the emergence of organizational risk management. I argue that the turn to a risk management of everything re-shapes safety and discipline in the school system. Concomitantly, the compassionate and pastoral aspects of schooling re-shapes risk management. This is important because risk management and school discipline practices are often described as cold exclusionary turns whereas my research shows that the inclusionary pull and dream of mandatory education, if never fully realized, impacts how risk management is achieved in the school system. The main question addressed by this dissertation is how does the Toronto District School Board (TDSB) manage risk to students, educators and its reputation by looking at three distinct areas: 1) the disappearance of zero-tolerance policies; 2) the role of the centralized Safe Schools Office in handling student discipline; and 3) the organizational responses to school shooters via lockdown and threat assessments. As part of this turn to risk management, institutions are becoming insular to external research so I had to rely on creativity to collect data. I attended training seminars and received resources normally reserved for school principals and conducted by senior

ii administrators in the TDSB. I augmented the data from the training materials with TDSB policy and procedural memoranda; debates by politicians (School Board Trustees and

Members of Provincial Parliament) and the work that emerged from two TDSB led task forces on discipline and safety. The research provides greater nuance to the literature by focusing on how inclusivity and compassion have implications for risk management strategies. The research also suggests how to approach and stifle purely exclusionary policies.

iii Acknowledgments

A journey of this nature, and this length, means that I have a great deal many people to thank. I was a benefactor of many conversations at the Centre for Criminology and Socio-Legal Studies. These interactions, long or short, helped shape my ideas, thoughts and life. Thank you for letting me grow at the Centre. Thank you to my supervisor Kelly Hannah-Moffat who let me learn to trust my capabilities and the spaces to make mistakes and learn from them. You are a fine role model to have with your tireless work ethic, your sharp intellect but also with your little gestures and words. I appreciate all the time you have spent helping me reach this point. I hope to carry on the lessons learned to future students. Thank you to my committee members, Mariana Valverde and Kathleen Gallagher. I know I can be a trying student sometimes who peculiarly marches to his own beat while not being very communicative so thank you for all your time, patience and work that you have done for me. Because I am not as expressive as I could be in person, you are probably not aware of how impactful your expertise and knowledge has been on my work. I hope this little thanks to you conveys the inspiration your work continues to be. I also want to thank all the Professors at the Centre – every one of you played a major role in my education through classes to informal chats. I wish every developing scholar could be so lucky to have the same experiences but I know that is not the case. We are lucky because of the work you do to cultivate the Centre. I want to particularly acknowledge the funding I received through the John Beattie Research Fund since this dissertation would not have been possible without that support. To Rashmee Singh, Sarah Turnbull, Vanessa Iafolla, Dena Demos, Anita Lam, Amy Spendik, Kerry Sanford and Tara Marie Watson – thank you for allowing me to go on each of your individual journeys. Words cannot express how lucky I am to have shared time with you. To Akwasi Owusu-Bempah, Nicole Myers, Natasha Madon and Holly Pelvin – your enthusiasm always helped re-invigorate and re-stimulate me during times of doubt. To the late David Sealy, thank you for talking with me about anything and listening (and then maybe talking some more). I miss the authenticity of thought you embodied. Monica Bristol, Lori Wells and Jessica Chlebowski – just thanks for everything and keeping me honest (or at least, trying to).

iv I was also lucky (cursed?) to teach during my time in graduate school and I would like to thank all the students who put up with my attempts to work though my ideas and chapters in class. I particularly want to thank everyone at UTM for giving me a home during my thesis. To my friends beyond the throes of academia, but not beyond influencing my intellectual development, I thank you. Gary, Kim, Doug, Michael, Mike, Don, Kevin, Bryan, Bec, Nadine, Gordon, Nhi, Alem, Debbie, John, Don, Claire, Andrew, Alexis – I benefitted greatly from the spaces of conversations you all created, not always related to my work, to keep me grounded and engaged. I could not have finished without my family, developing at the same time as the chapters. My mantra, borrowed from the Simpsons, grew from ‘do it for her’ into ‘do it for them’ and often kept me going. Tatum, your relentless (may I say stubborn?) pursuit of whatever idea enters your mind and your quest for answers keeps me resolute. Camden, your remarkable resiliency and expressions of pure joy keep me filled with awe. Thank you for teaching me in a different way. Jodie, thank you for going on this adventure with me and thank you for putting up with me and encouraging me – even though there were times I didn't want to hear it. To quote a song: “All my troubles and all my fears dissolve in your affection.” To all the students, parents and educators who may happen upon this little dissertation: I have tried to provide a slice of developments in the realm of safety in schools. These are your lived and shared experiences and I am not sure if you will find the stories within these pages comforting or terrifying. The life-long student in me knows it is important to create safe spaces so children can have the chance to grow but he also wonders who benefits from that safety and who is hindered in this rise of risk and insecurity. The parent in me knows how integral teachers are to raising our children but he also wonders what impacts the language of choice and the routinizing lockdowns will have on my two young children. The educator in me knows the responsibility to perform such a vital role can be as rewarding as it is stressful but he wonders how these shifts will make teaching more stressful and less rewarding. I do not pretend to have these answers but such questions will be with me for the rest of my life. Finally, I owe a lot more than I was willing to admit to my mother who passed away before I could finish. She was an educator who worked with students other teachers could not handle. She played important roles in the Women’s Federation of

v Teachers, the Toronto Teachers’ Federation and was given the trust to develop a new program for teaching so-called behavioural students. What amazes me is that in her 30 plus years as a teacher, she never stopped learning how to become a better educator. My mother, even when she was close to retirement, could never sleep before the first day of school (known as Labour Day in Canada). She could never fully explain this inability but we knew it had to be some combination of stress and excitement for a new school year. It was poetic that she passed away on Labour Day – finally able to rest.

This is for her.

vi Table of Contents

Chapter 1: Introduction ...... 1 Risk Management in Institutions ...... 5 Methodology ...... 11 History of the Present and the Genealogical Method ...... 11 Data Sources ...... 15 The School as a Site of Research ...... 19 Chapter 2: A Genealogy of Zero-Tolerance in Ontario Student Discipline ...... 26 Introduction ...... 26 Zero-Tolerance: The History of an Idea ...... 28 The Educational Context in Ontario: From Mike Harris to the First SSA ...... 31 Origins of the SSA : Implicit Zero-Tolerance and Risk Management ...... 35 Zero-Tolerance at the Provincial Level: (Not) Becoming the United States ...... 42 Zero-Tolerance in the TDSB: Grappling with Circuits of Inclusion and Exclusion ... 48 Re-Tooling the SSA : Erasing Zero-Tolerance ...... 55 Theorizing Zero-Tolerance Dissipation ...... 61 Conclusion ...... 67 Chapter 3: The Safe Schools Office - Compassion as Risk Managment...... 70 Introduction ...... 70 A History of the Safe Schools Office ...... 72 Risk Management: “Document, Document, Document” ...... 75 Governing at a Distance: Constraining Discretion with Compassion ...... 80 Reconfiguring Paperwork ...... 80 Suspension/Expulsion Decision Trees ...... 81 Safe Schools Audit: Absorbing Health and Safety Concerns ...... 83 Training Resources: Case Studies and The Safe School Procedural Manual ...... 84 Collecting Statistics, Benchmarking and Trying to Show Compassion ...... 86 Compassion as Risk Management ...... 89 Compassion in Instituting Risk Management Strategies ...... 90 Progressive Discipline in Practice: Risk Management Through Compassion ...... 94 Appeals of Disciplinary Decisions: Student Rights and Compassion ...... 98 Using the Police and Protecting Students from the Police ...... 105 Formalizing the Informal: Informal Suspensions and Safe and Caring Rooms ...... 107 Conclusion ...... 110 Chapter 4: Lockdowns and the Active Shooter ...... 112 Introduction ...... 112 The Lockdown Procedure: The Limits of Safety ...... 114 The Saliency of Images and Blame ...... 121 Lockdowns and the Spatialization of Students, Parents and the Media ...... 124 Theorizing Lockdowns: A Shift of the Panoptic Gaze ...... 131 Threat Assessments: Predicting the Unpredictable ...... 141 Conclusion ...... 146 Chapter 5: Conclusion ...... 155 Works Cited ...... 163

vii List of Appendices

Appendix A – Mother Assumpta Appendix B – Timeline of Key Events, Legislation and Policies Appendix C – Steps to Follow and Checklist and Tracking Sheet for Use of Discretion Appendix D – Safe Schools Audit Appendix E – Case Studies Appendix F – Coordinating Threats to School Safety – Response Among Toronto Police Services, TDSB and TCDSB Schools

viii Chapter 1: Introduction

On May 28, 1975, 16-year-old student Michael Slobodian walked into a bathroom at Brampton Centennial Secondary School and loaded two rifles. His plan was to kill three of his teachers. Before leaving the bathroom he shot two students, killing one and critically injuring another. As he headed towards one of his teacher’s classrooms, he continued firing in the hallway. When he reached the classroom of Margaret Wright, one of his intended targets, he shot her in the head, killing her. Slobodian walked back out into the hall, fired a few more rounds, and then died by suicide. Slobodian killed two people and injured 13 others. 1

A few months later, on October 7, 1975, 18-year-old Robert Poulin burst through the door of a religion class at St Pius X High School in Ottawa and, using a sawed-off shotgun, killed one student and injured six others. Earlier in the day, he lured another student to his house, where she was sexually assaulted and murdered.

Given that these extremely violent crimes were committed so close to each other in both time and place, it is surprising that they were not linked as evidence of the rising spectre of school violence and the threat of school shootings. Instead, the media portrayed Poulin as a misguided youth who was seduced by an oversexed society and finally snapped (see Cobb and Avery 1977). The shooting at Brampton, while resulting in stricter gun control laws, was also attributed to individual psychopathology (see Ford 1995) and was immediately forgotten (see The National 2007; Andrew-Gee 2015). There is no special plaque calling attention to the incident and, as one survivor observed: There was little discussion about what had occurred, instead, students were urged to put the incident behind them and concentrate on finishing what little was left of the school year.

1 Adapted from Brampton Guardian, June 22, 2012.

1 There is a plaque on a wall in the school that bears the name of students and staff who passed away between 1967 and 1975. It includes the names of Slobodian, Slinger and Mrs. Wright (Brampton Guardian 2012).

In the current climate, it seems shocking that such forgetting would not only occur, but also be encouraged. That these incidents were not long for the public consciousness was discussed in a documentary for The National (2007), where former students continued to reconcile the tragedy with the lack of remembrance.

Although the 1975 shootings in Ontario caused discord at the time, there was no call for security guards, metal detectors, or emergency action plans (see Toby 1998). Policymakers and educators of the past were not less enlightened than today; rather, they had at their disposal different ways of explaining, and modes of governing such situations. These two incidents, and their closeness in proximity and temporality, could also have suggested there was an increase in targeted school violence. However, as I will argue, the common narrative of the school shooter needs to be understood in the context of how institutions manage and respond to risk.

Despite the muted institutional response, the shootings of 1975 are often conflated with the school shooting narrative that emerged post-Columbine (see Muschert et. al. 2014 and Community Safety Advisory Panel 2008). The current narrative around school violence is that targeted shootings and school violence have increased since April 20, 1999 – the day two students walked into Columbine school in Littleton, Colorado, armed with assault rifles, killing 12 students and a teacher. Columbine is often used to signal a new epoch of crime and violence in schools. When a shooting occurred in Taber, Alberta just 8 days later resulting in one fatality, a Canadian sub- narrative emerged that these types of events were not limited to the United States. The sub-narrative appropriated the lesser-known shootings of 1975. Despite

2 marked differences in institutional response, the 1975 Ontario shootings took on different meanings when retrospectively using the post-Columbine lens.

Contrast the two Ontario shootings of 1975 with the 2005 shooting death of student Jordan Manners at CW Jefferys Collegiate (CWJ) in Toronto, and the institutional response. Jordan Manners was targeted by someone he knew, (later reports suggested it was a friend), and shot at, or near, CWJ. Subsequent reports strongly suggested he was actually killed somewhere else and staggered back to the school. Despite not aligning neatly with the traditional narrative of the school shooting because the gunman did not open fire indiscriminately, the response by the Toronto District School Board (TDSB), and the community outcry, were both telling. When Jordan Manners was shot, his mother called for an immediate inquest by the TDSB. This inquest was concerned less with the details and the circumstances of the shooting and, in a break from other such inquests into Ontario school shootings, more with what the school, its educators, and the education system did, or did not do, to exacerbate or precipitate this violence. In particular, the CWJ report, led by Julian Falconer, criticized the administration and management of the school, and also argued that the culture of silence among staff and students helped create the conditions that produced the shooting and other forms of violence (School Community Safety Advisory Panel 2008). Silence here can be understood in two ways: First, that school staff did not share information about problems with students with senior administration and other staff members. Second, that the silence emanated from students who invoked a ‘code of the street’ mentality (see Andersen 1995) where authority figures were seen in an antagonistic light.

Young people engaged in shootings are believed to give off warning signs that are either ignored by school officials, or not pieced together in time (see Newman, Fox and Harding 2004; Fast 2009; Cullen 2009). Each time a school shooting has occurred in North America since 1999 (such as Taber, Sandy Hook, CWJ in Toronto, and even post-secondary institutions like Virginia Tech or Dawson College in Montreal) the media often presents a timeline that gives the impression of an

3 increase in school shootings that urban Canadians should fear. A commonly held belief is that there is something wrong with students today, and that compared to previous generations they are more violent and less attached to society – for instance, the shooters in Columbine were associated with violent video games and a socially isolated group of youths known as the ‘trench coat mafia’.

The rise in concern about the school shooter that emerged post-Columbine dovetails with the concern beginning in the 1990s about the rise of the youth superpredator: a young person who assaults with impunity (see Welch, Price and Yankey 2002; Dilulio 1995). This narrative was not just in popular media. Academics were also smitten with the ‘superpredator problem’ and the advent of waves upon waves of problematic youth (for a recap of this scare see Drizin 2014) The post-Columbine narrative suggests this type of incident can happen anywhere and cautions against the notion that serious school violence only occurs in lower-class urban environments. The fear over school shootings carries weight because it is not contained to just the “dangerous classes” and bad neighbourhoods. It is from this environment of heightened anxiety that emerged the erroneous belief that Columbine signaled a new chapter in school violence in not only the U.S.A. but Canada as well. 2

Extreme violence at school is, and has been, rare. 3 When comparing the shootings of 1975 to the shooting of Jordan Manners, we see that the likelihood of school violence in Ontario has not changed, but the institutional reaction to such violence has. This dissertation will situate school safety and disciplinary policies within broader changes to institutional risk management. Specifically, while this

2 One constant in the narrative of school violence appears to be the anxiety caused by youth (sub)cultures. Most famously studied by Cohen in the context of the mods and rockers, each school shooting taps into a moral panic about youth (sub)cultural characteristics: violent video games; goth subcultures; gun culture; social media; culture of silence. Culturally we can trace the use of the school shooting as a plot device from Stephen King’s Rage (1977) which bears more resemblance to a psychological thriller than the later incarnations such as the Van Sant (2003) film Elephant which takes its cue directly from Columbine and presents the killers stalking through the hallways. 3 In fact, schools are generally the safest places for young people to be (see School Panel Advisory Committee 2008).

4 dissertation argues that a risk management ethos reshapes safety in schools, it also shows that the compassionate and pastoral focus of the TDSB reshapes risk management and the governmentality of risk. 4

Importantly, the present study offers a more nuanced approach to the research on the emergence of risk management. Often, this research on institutional risk management becomes a description of the organizational descent into neo- liberalism and hyper-efficiency. Similarly, the study of safety in schools often becomes a discussion about the social justice implications of exclusionary policies, without exploring how the inclusionary pull of mandatory education is enabled and achieved during this turn to risk management. I bridge this gap by looking at three distinct areas: the emergence and disappearance of zero-tolerance in Ontario; the consolidation of the Safe Schools Office; and finally, the lockdown and threat assessment as responses to the threat of the school shooter.

I will argue that risk management, compassion/pastoral power, and safety/security come together in different ways within the Ontario public school system. In the remainder of this chapter, I discuss the literature on risk management before turning to a discussion of the governmentality of risk, compassion/pastoral power, and the methodological approach used in the present study.

Risk Management in Institutions

My dissertation can be broadly situated within the growing body of literature on risk management in social organizations (see Hutter and Power 2005). Although I write about school safety, my main interest is in how shifts in regulation and

4 As this dissertation being completed, there was another school shooting in Parkland, Florida. Some of the surviving students, with the support of their educators, have been very civically active particularly around themes of gun control and, more broadly, about inclusion and safety. It will be interesting to see how this narrative continues to unfold along the lines of compassion and risk.

5 governance are made visible through safe school policies and approaches. 5 The emergence of a risk management ethos has generally been applied to analyzing private corporations (see Power 2004; Ericson and Doyle 2004); NASA and air traffic controllers (Vaughan 2005); law enforcement (Ericson and Haggerty 1997); prisons and prisoners’ rights (see Hannah-Moffat and Maurutto 2010; Murphy and Whitty 2007); psychiatric work (Rose 1998); and crime prevention and responsibility (see the seminal piece by O’Malley 1992). The education system has not been thoroughly studied to examine how risk management is emergent, nor how it blends with student discipline and school safety.

I take my cue from the study of risk management in prisons (see for instance Maurutto and Hannah-Moffat 2005; Turnbull 2016; Watson 2014). The school and the prison are similar welfarist-disciplinary institutions (see for instance Foucault 1977 on the carceral society) and they are often discussed in tandem as in the school-to-prison pipeline literature (see Kim, Losen and Hewitt 2010). Below, I expand on some of the key themes and will draw from these insights throughout my dissertation in order to understand how the school is linked in these broader institutional shifts.

Risk has become a ubiquitous organizing principle for organizations and individuals (see Douglas 1992; Haggerty and Ericson 2006, and Power 2004). However, to say risk is a key organizational principle does not necessarily mean risk governance is always about bad events or catastrophes (despite what Beck 1992 implies). At the root of risk managerialism is a probability statement that provides for some degree of control and guidance in organizational decision-making. I would point out that risk management does not always take the form of explicit or strict quantitative calculations (see Ericson and Doyle 2004). Different institutions will use different methods – but all for the purpose of predicting or controlling for some unknown

5 Certainly the discussion on how to achieve safety in schools is an important one – for the benefit of the reader interested in these areas please see Levinsky (2008) and also Gottfredson, Wilson and Najaka (2002).

6 variable. As scholars have pointed out, there still is a degree of uncertainty embedded in the predictive attempts the institution produces (see Ericson and Doyle 2004; Ericson 2006; Beck 1992; Ewald 2010; Vaughan 1997).

A useful example of how risk governance emerges in an institutional setting, and a function of certainty and uncertainty, is to think of applications to graduate programs. People who apply to most graduate programs send letters of reference from professors (who assess the candidate usually in a statistical fashion with statements indicating whether the applicant is in the top 5%, 25%, 50% in his/her judgment), transcripts, and a statement of interest. This information is then used to produce a risk profile designed to address how likely a student is to succeed and complete a program, how good the fit is for the accepting department, and how likely an applicant is to secure research funding. These do not necessarily take a statistical format, but how program applications are assessed increasingly resembles how other institutions communicate with each other using such risk formats (see Ericson and Haggerty 1997). Power (2004) coined the term ‘the risk management of everything’ to flag how risk has become central to how organizations work. As he notes: “Risk management organizes what cannot be organized…holds out the promise of manageability in new areas…implies a new way of allocating responsibility for decisions which must be made in potentially undecideable situations” (as cited by Ericson 2006: 351).

I will argue there are implications in how school safety is achieved with this shift to a risk management ethos and increased attention to what Power (2004) calls, “organizational proceduralisation” (p.40). With the increased attention to process, procedures, and data collection, organizations are increasingly trying to make their decisions defensible and allow individuals to demonstrate their compliance (see Ericson 2006). This new focus on process means that individuals who show

7 compliance are lauded and, should something go wrong, avoid blame. 6 As Ball (1990) points out, during the 1980s, the dawn of “school-effectiveness research [and the rise of managerialism] provides a technology for the possibility of ‘blaming the school’” (162).

Showing the public that an institution is compliant with policies and following a well-outlined process are aspects of what Power (2004) terms secondary, or reputational, risk management. As risk becomes an organizing principle, organizations increasingly attempt to bring things outside of their control, such as public and media perceptions, into their control. One of the ways they try to address reputational risk is by turning themselves ‘inside out’ showing they are addressing any societal concerns. The audit becomes a technique to not only govern employees at a distance to make sure they are compliant and in line with processes (see Power 1997; O’Malley 1992), but can be publicized to show that the organization is accountable and responsible. Of course, audits in and of themselves do not prove the organization is accountable and responsible, but they are used to give such impressions.

In explaining the shifts in governing school safety, there are two broad areas of thought. Some scholars opt for a war-on-youth metaphor to explain the increasingly harsh punitive environment in which students, particularly racialized students, find themselves. These scholars have relied on the militaristic or prison metaphor, evident in the prison-to-school pipeline analogy, to explain the changes (see Simon 2007; Giroux 2003; Lewis 2006; Lyons and Drew 2006). Setting aside the issue that schools were designed to resemble prisons, and thus it should not be considered as morally outrageous as it is pitched, this line of thought cannot account for the diversity of shifts that have occurred in schooling – particularly in Ontario education and its move to ‘progressive discipline’. The prison metaphor is seductive but neglects to account for productive shifts. For instance, as I have argued elsewhere

6 I will specifically argue in Chapter 3 that the creation of a new department in the TDSB called the Safe Schools Office represents the emergence of a risk management of everything.

8 (Levinsky 2016), during the zero-tolerance years in the TDSB, 7 choice emerged as a way for principals to navigate the push to expel students while trying to follow the inclusive pull of a liberal democratic education system. 8 In the focus on the punitive turn and getting tough on students, scholars tend to ignore how rights and due process exist in student disciplinary practices. The existence of these safeguards may be less about a genuine duty of care for students, and more about protecting educators and the school board from litigation, but critical scholars focus only on how the duty of care is being eroded and not on how it may be reconstituted. As in the case of the issues identified with the justice system (see Garland 2001), the school system cannot completely abdicate its responsibilities by removing all problematic students. Although these punitive shifts do have negative effects on particular student populations (the TDSB has documented the disparate impacts on populations such as Black and Aboriginal students), these scholars cannot account for the diversity of strategies and procedures that have been implemented in the school – governing school safety is not always about exclusion, governing through crime, nor strict punishment.

Rose (2000) is particularly instructive as he maps out shifts in control along what he calls circuits of inclusion (security) and circuits of exclusion (insecurity). He makes this distinction because of the increasing difficulty to characterize modern governance strategies yet, as he argues, despite this “apparent complexity and heterogeneity, contemporary control strategies do show a certain strategic coherence” (324). Mapping these control strategies along the lines of inclusivity/exclusivity shows that regimes of zero-tolerance (and other exclusionary tactics) must also be better contextualized. The problem with focusing on exclusionary circuits is that it ignores a more complete, if still fractured, picture. In particular, circuits of inclusion bring attention to things like training seminars as a

7 I broadly define this period from 1999-2007 when the first Safe Schools Act was introduced and then replaced. I will be discussing this period more in Chapter 2. 8 This is not to suggest that choice is somehow a new concept for explaining young peoples’ behaviour but that it creates new contradictions. Students have no choice to go to school and the notion that students are capable of rational decision-making is often at odds with much psychological literature (see Grisso and Schwartz 2000).

9 form of perpetual assessment and self-monitoring. At the organizational level of the education system, these circuits of inclusion and exclusion co-exist uneasily making generalizations difficult, but also making it difficult to ignore how inclusion circuits are mapped out within the system.

The second view on shifts in school safety mirror Rose’s (2000) discussion by examining the often-contradictory processes that are unfolding (see for instance Casella 2001; Kupchik 2010; Gallagher 2007; Raby 2012, 2014). Kupchik (2010) has pointed out that shifts are not just occurring in bad schools, but that good schools are getting tangled in these new regulatory nets. Kupchik observes that teachers are “teaching to the rules” as they have been similarly observed “teaching to the [standardized] tests.” Kupchik reveals that these shifts in school safety, such as increased securitization, are not just happening in ‘bad schools’, but across schools and school districts. However, he does not explain from where these shifts emerge which is why the literature on institutional risk management may be insightful. As my dissertation will show, educators do still care about their students, but the relationship is mediated by a heightened concern over litigation, and it is from this climate that the impetus to “teach to the rules” emerged.

I will argue that the school’s duty of care toward the student is being re-configured under a risk management ethos but risk management is not the only governmental technique at play. Research has often pointed out that governance strategies co- exist uneasily and contradictorily in institutional settings (see O’Malley 1999, Hannah-Moffat 1999). Although risk management and reputational risk management are newer institutional concern, they do not supplant the original concerns of the education system. For instance, the school is an example of a disciplinary institution where students are normalized and under strict observation in the hope they will become self-governing individuals (Foucault 1977; Jones and Williamson 1979), but also one where teachers are benevolent leaders working for

10 the salvation of their pupils. 9 I will address these complex overlays in the next section because they are important for contextualizing changes in school safety. As this alludes to a Foucauldian framework, I will next discuss Foucauldian methodological tools before I conclude the next section situating the school as a site where different power relations intersect.

Methodology

History of the Present and the Genealogical Method

The scope of my research requires the use of a number of methodologies. What binds them is a commitment to doing a history of the present, which owes its debt to Foucault. As Rose (1999) instructs: An array of questions of this type, the present calls for a style of investigation that is more modest than that adopted by sociological philosophers of history. It encourages the attention to the humble, the mundane, the little shifts in our ways of thinking and understanding, the small and contingent struggles, tensions and negotiations that give rise to something new and unexpected. This is not merely because of a general prejudice that one will learn more about our present and its past by studying the minor and everyday texts and practices, the places where thought is technical, practical, operation , than by attending to the procession of grand thinkers that have usually captivated historians of ideas of philosophers of history. It is also because, so often in our history, events, however major their ramifications, occur at the level of the molecular, the minor, the little and the mundane (Rose 1999:11).

9 Some of these unique tensions in the classroom are clearly depicted in cultural representations of schooling such as Dahl’s (1988) Matilda . Here, the harsh disciplinarian schoolmaster who wants to instil strict obedience is juxtaposed with the caring and nurturing role model who would allow for Matilda’s unique gifts to flourish.

11 The present study explores the mundane and everyday texts and practices, from political debates to community-based town halls; from Ontario legislation to TDSB policies; from commissioned inquiries to focus groups and training seminars. From these diverse sources of data we see visible traces and struggles of zero-tolerance, a topic discussed in Chapter 2, throughout the process of keeping schools safe. For example, later in this chapter I detail an exchange between a health and safety worker and a crime prevention expert, both of whom worked in different branches of the TDSB. It is those moments that exemplify how the “molecular level” is replete with data on how the concepts of safety and security play out in the school setting – data which may be invisible through formal interviews. I pull threads together that tell, only partially, a story of how safety moves through the TDSB (see Lindle 2008 and Brewer and Lindle 2014 on the multiple ways safety manifests in schools). I highlight some major components of safety concerns in schools, such as zero- tolerance and school shootings, and place these in the context of bureaucracies and policies of the TDSB. The exceptional (such as a school shooting) tends to dominate policies in a climate of the risk management of everything.

I use discourse analysis to understand how the risk management ethos of policies and documents of the TDSB frames safety. Discourse analysis does more than critique the substance of texts. The policies and procedures are institutionally produced texts which must also be understood as discourse in the Foucauldian sense: … practices that systematically form the objects of which they speak … Discourses are not about objects; they do not identify objects, they constitute them and in practice of doing so conceal their own invention (Foucault 2002: 49).

By looking at the training material and manuals about school safety through the lens of discourse, we are able to pay attention to power/knowledge couplings of security and safety. The creation, implementation, and changes in the Safe Schools Act [SSA ] and TDSB policies help constitute safety. While they may (or may not) actually make

12 things safer, they do produce what safety and security ought to look like. As Ball (1993) argues: We need to appreciate the way in which policy ensembles, collections of related policies, exercise power through a production of ‘truth’ and ‘knowledge’, as discourses … Discourses are about what can be said, and thought, but also about who can speak, when, where and with what authority. Discourses embody the meaning and use of propositions and words. Thus, certain possibilities for thought are constructed. Words are ordered and combined in particular ways and other combinations are displaced or excluded (14).

Discourse, put this way, ‘makes us up’ (Hacking 1990) and produces subject positions. It also creates the concept of safety. In studying zero-tolerance this way, I am not suggesting that discourse analyses should be prioritized over exploring the very real issues with zero-tolerance implementation, particularly around issues of inclusion and social justice. However, looking at zero-tolerance through the lens of discourse analysis allows us to attend to particular power/knowledge relationships and their implications.

Reading safe school policies and procedures as texts is not sufficient. As Ball (1993) reminds us: “the enactment of texts relies on things like commitment, understanding, capability, resources, practical constraint and agency” (Ball 1993: 14 emphasis in original). There are numerous readings of zero-tolerance as texts rather than discourse, and they are unable to account for how zero-tolerance dissipates as an idea in the TDSB. For instance, Wacquant (2009) discusses how zero-tolerance gains popularity and is transferred as a text across national boundaries. Another example is Giroux (2003a; 2003b, 2011), who argues that school regimes of zero- tolerance resemble the practices in prisons and that young people are disposable. His reading of zero-tolerance as inevitably about exclusion is anchored by his reading of policies as texts. Likewise, much of the literature that uses the prison-

13 school pipeline as a metaphor for contemporary social control has a narrow reading on school disciplinary policies (see for instance Kim et. al. 2010). These scholars also generally present the similarities between the school and the prison as shocking developments when in fact similar disciplinary techniques were intended for the different institutional populations at their inventions (see Dohrn 2002; Foucault 1977). These scholars do engage with the text critically, but write about how zero- tolerance policy is racialized or enacted unjustly. While undoubtedly it is important work to point out these issues with zero-tolerance, this scholarship does not engage with zero-tolerance as a discourse (in contrast see Wilson 2013).

While many school systems in the U.S. have adopted zero-tolerance policies, this has not been the case in Ontario. In Chapter 2, I use the genealogical method to explore zero-tolerance as discourse and attempt to trace its path in the TDSB. Revealing the discursive limits of zero-tolerance in Ontario schools will show how zero-tolerance was articulated at a particular moment in time, and how (to borrow phrasing from Foucauldian scholars) it became unsayable in the context of education in Ontario. An undertaking such as this is less concerned with who is excluded from the implementation of these policies (although minority populations, students with disabilities, and other already marginalized groups were undeniably targeted), but rather how truth for school safety is produced by the introduction and subsequent dissipation of zero-tolerance. Importantly, the scholars who are critical of zero- tolerance policies constitute the discourse of zero-tolerance, and their work often finds its way, directly or indirectly, into the TDSB and actors in the education system (see Giroux 2003a, 2003b; Bhattacharjee 2003; Wacquant 2009; Skiba and Peterson 1999, 2000; Community Advisory Panel 2008).

In talking about the genealogical method, Foucault (1998) argues that: Three domains of genealogy are possible. First, a historical ontology of ourselves in relation to truth through which we constitute ourselves as subjects of knowledge; second, a historical ontology of ourselves as subjects acting on others; third, a historical ontology in

14 relation to ethics through which we constitute ourselves as moral agents (262).

I am using Foucault ’s third example of genealogy. Alongside the explosion of technological means to secure schools through such things as metal detectors and CCTV (see Devine 1996; Casella 2003; Gallagher and Fusco 2006; Kelly 2003; Kupchik and Monahan 2006; Levinsky 2008), zero-tolerance emerged as a technique to govern safe schools. Tracing a genealogy of zero-tolerance in Toronto is useful for a number of reasons: First, it details the recent history of school safety in Ontario. Second, it shows how the American (mis)use of zero-tolerance strategies was integral to issues of safety and security in Toronto schools. Third, it counters trite notions that Toronto schools are simply preparing young people for prison (see Hirschfield 2008; Giroux 2003a, 2003b, 2011; Kim et al. 2012), or that school safety is about governing through crime (see Simon 2007). The technique of zero-tolerance does not pick up the same traction in the TDSB as it does elsewhere, a difference not easily explained by this literature. The story of zero-tolerance dissipating in Ontario, and more specifically the TDSB, is not a story of a political party or individuals overthrowing an oppressive system. Instead, it is a story of reputational risk management of school discipline policies.

Finally, Braithwaite (2003) observes that scholars who use the genealogical method favour ideas that become successful or persistent instead of tracing ideas that die out. Chapter 3’s analysis of zero-tolerance in Ontario will heed Braithwaite’s advice and trace the dying of zero-tolerance.

Data Sources

First, I searched Ontario Hansard debates between 1998-2000 for key words (zero- tolerance; school safety) and also examined all the debates when the SSA was being read. I downloaded these into a separate Microsoft Word file of 173 pages where I

15 coded them thematically and grouped the data for analysis using Microsoft Excel. I have selected a portion of these quotes to illustrate the themes that emerged. Second, the Safe Schools Procedures Manual [hereinafter referred to as the Manual] of the TDSB was used as a source. The Manual is a binder with protocols, policies, programs, and other resources to help school administrators. In the TDSB, this Manual has around 300 pages of information and is found in every principal’s office. Third, I drew from my experiences during the Safe and Compassionate Schools Task Force proceedings, as well as the final report. I observed the proceedings of the Task Force when their report was presented to the school trustees and participated in one of many focus groups. Fourth, general policies and protocols unique to the TDSB were analyzed. These are publicly available online at www.tdsb.on.ca . Fifth, The Road to Health Report, written in the wake of Jordan Manners’ death, and the proceedings of the panel who wrote the report were used. The data here are not just written documents: I was actively involved in the process as a researcher, a position that gave me access to major players in the Report and insight into the decision- making process. Sixth, both incarnations of the Safe Schools Act were used to explore shifts that occurred during a very small time period.

I also collected research by attending over 50 hours of training seminars and workshops (totalling 150 pages of Field Notes) and obtaining course material (about 250 pages of resources, some of which overlaps with the Manual) during the summer of 2008. The original research plan called for me to interview principals and senior safe schools administrators. Increasingly, private and public institutions have made it tougher to conduct external research as part of this shift to reputational risk management (see Power 2004, 2007; and Turnbull and Hannah- Moffat 2009; Watson 2014). In the context of the TDSB, this shift has meant the board’s External Research Review Board, with its original goal of ensuring that research was ethically conducted, is also concerned with what research may reveal, and whether it will disrupt the efficiency of their workers. Although the denial I received was more mundane than an explicit attempt to control image, it shows how

16 institutional lines are being drawn to police external research, impact how we collect data, and what we can discover from the perspective of front-line workers.

To do research during this period of hyper-policing of public institutions, I had to engage in a form of ‘institutional subterfuge’. 10 I attended training seminars on school safety specifically designed for school staff, which, although run by an independent organization, was led by senior TDSB safe schools’ administrators. The courses were for anyone interested in the subject in Ontario (those present were predominantly teachers, principals, and vice-principals), but the course instructors informed us that these same training seminars were requirements for all principals in the TDSB. 11 Although I could not interview principals and administrators, I was being trained in what were considered key topics for educators on school safety. Instead of semi-structured interviews, attending the courses allowed me to study safety in a more ethnographic way since I participated in lectures, discussions, and case studies.

The training seminars allowed me to study what the TDSB, through its senior administrators, believed should comprise organizational actors’ daily activities in regards to school safety. It is an entirely different question, and beyond the scope of this dissertation, to explore what information was actually absorbed by the constitutive members. Had I been permitted to conduct interviews with principals as I had initially planned, I may have found very few similarities between what was taught and what principals enacted on the ground. However, the strategy I used allows for greater insight into what the institution (through senior administrators) emphasizes as important. It also means that this message is unlikely to get diluted

10 I call it institutional subterfuge to highlight that the formal mechanisms of the institution were adverse to research and not that I did anything surreptitiously during the ethnography. The training sessions were public, and run by a third party not affiliated with any school board. All the educators involved in the training sessions I attended were well aware what I was doing and I always made sure to introduce my research interests and myself at the beginning of every new session. The workshop organizers would often point me out to the group as taking "feverish notes" and I had a couple of principals attempt to convince me to become a teacher at their school board. 11 In fact, there were a couple of participants present from the TDSB who had missed this required training during the school year.

17 through participant interviews. Smith’s (2005) discussion of institutional ethnography (IE) was particularly directive for this research, as she observes, “what will be brought under ethnographic scrutiny unfolds as the research is pursued” (34). 12 I wanted to interview teachers and principals, but instead relied on this snowballing method of exploring what texts were important in training and how they were enacted. From this perspective, the rejection letter I received from the TDSB external research department becomes an institutional text of importance and an opportunity, because it forms part of this shift to reputational risk management, rather than a barrier to research.

The data obtained by attending training seminars are important for three reasons: First, it fills a knowledge gap – people often examine either the law on the books or the law in action. My research picks up on the intermediary phase where the law is transformed, by the mediating institution, into actionable knowledge (in this case we can understand the law to be legislation as well as policies of the TDSB). Second, if institutions are going to become increasingly insular and resistant to external research, ethnographies of training seminars are a way of doing external research on the institution without having to disrupt the institutional flow. These training seminars are attempts to produce a good and conscientious worker in a given field. Thus, by passing such a course the researcher is placed in the institution, without actually being placed inside it. Third, active participation in a training seminar creates opportunities for dialogue with actors within the institution who may offer insight beyond that found in a formal interview setting. I had various instructors ranging from those in charge of the Safe Schools Office in the TDSB, to police working on guns and gangs (another institution that is increasingly tough to access as a formal researcher). 13

12 I should note that my research is not an example of IE. However, Smith (2005) offered useful insights into looking at the documents an institution produces. 13 I will use SSA1, SSA2 and SSA3 to refer to the three main instructors. I will also provide the day of the quote and my corresponding page from my field notes. For example a reference will look like this (SSA1; Day 1, 15). I have tried my best to reconstruct quotes as accurately as possible from my field notes.

18 This research covers the years from the formation of the original Safe Schools Act to the re-written act (from 1999-2007) and makes up the discourse on school safety during the years of zero-tolerance.

The School as a Site of Research

In the school, as in other institutions (see Hannah-Moffat 2001), there is a co- existence of disciplinary power, pastoral power, governmentality, and sovereign power, which map onto issues of safety (see Hannah-Moffat 2000 for a discussion of the overlaps in Foucault’s modalities of power in a prison setting). For the majority of my dissertation, I focus on a narrow aspect of that quadrangle of power: the tension between pastoral and disciplinary power (examined in the narrow area of school safety) and the governmental technique of risk management (see Valverde and Mopas 2004; Valverde 2017). For Foucault, disciplinary power usually takes the form of institutions involved in hierarchical observation, constant examination, and normalization. The school, like the prison, emerged around the same time period as disciplinary institutions, and Foucault highlights their commonalities 14 in the creation of the carceral society where disciplinary techniques of examination, normalization, and hierarchical observation extend to managing societies.

Despite the school being institutionally concerned with creating productive and docile bodies through disciplinary mechanisms (see Foucault 1977; Jones and Williamson 1979; Raby 2005), the close contact between teacher and pupil suggests pastoral power is also in play (Foucault 2001). One could cynically accuse the school of re-creating capitalistic goals of a cheap labour force (see Illich 1971), but it is the teacher's proximity to the student that suggests a more complex relationship than that of state/citizen – where the state is only concerned with ensuring ideological reproduction of the system.

14 More commonalities than school/prison pipeline critics (such as Giroux 2003a and Kim et. al 2010) would care to admit.

19 Pastoral power, a concept less discussed by Foucault and one some have argued is a precursor to governmentality (see Foucault 2004; Welch 2009), captures the duty of care element of most teacher/student relationships. The teacher may play a role in creating a docile student body or indoctrinating ideologues, but there is also an ethic of care where the teacher, as the shepherd, tends to a flock. There are images of the teacher as a harsh disciplinarian, but the contemporary yearning for the ‘good old days’ (see Casella 2001)– when discipline was easier to enforce through corporal punishment – highlights the supposed enlightened benevolence of current strategies. Throughout my research, the harsh schoolteacher was lauded for keeping the school safe, even though their methods are now considered outdated. The contemporary problem is how to exert such strong discipline while understanding that corporal punishment is no longer legal or appropriate. As one politician pointed out during debates on safe school legislation: “We know today that corporal discipline, the things perhaps that Father Brown was able to use – the whack across the backside if you went to the washroom when you weren't supposed to or you stepped out of line as you went from class to class – was an element that kind of went the way of the dodo bird. That's not to say that discipline disappeared ” (Spina, Progressive Conservative, Hansard, June 12, 2000. Emphasis added).

Likewise, the Safe Schools training course started with a story about Mother Assumpta (see Appendix A) who was strict and sometimes harsh – yet everyone, we were told, behaved. Mother Assumpta symbolized the goal of school safety even though her methods are no longer acceptable. Aside from the curious choice of Catholic teachers as examples in TDSB student discipline, both examples highlight the shifting nature of school discipline. They both assume that schools were made safer through corporal punishment and a harsh disciplinarian, and that the teacher still cared about the student.15 Current safe school strategies are continually measured against a “Golden Age” (see Casella 2001) with the (assumed) successes of

15 The image of school safety created through the physicality of punishment is now seen as undermining the ethic of care, since it is really not ‘safe ’ for the student being punished.

20 corporal punishment regimes; the current impediments to enforcing rules; and the purported rise of school violence. Nostalgia for the days of better discipline is entwined with newer pedagogical values of inclusivity, fairness, and social justice, which form a large part of teacher training. The new pedagogy is about active engagement (see Raby 2014) and scaffolding techniques, which recognize that every student will have different abilities and need different help. Of course, it will not always be the case that teachers will care for every member of their flock, but in theory, the nature of teaching demands a careful attention to the pupil. The teacher’s role takes on multiple intersecting forms of power relations with students – disciplinarian, shepherd, and sovereign displayer of might. These types of power overlap with new concerns about accountability and documentation.

In Chapter 2, I explore the genealogical roots of zero-tolerance and its links to school safety to argue that zero-tolerance is not the necessary corollary of a ‘culture of violence’ or a fear of violence. Zero-tolerance is often pitched as antithetical to promoting school safety and the notion of progressive discipline is seen as a pendulous reaction to its one-size fits all approach. “Progressive discipline” attempts to make discipline proportionate to the action committed and stems from the realization that for the majority of students, discipline does not need to be harsh to be effective since only a minority require repeated disciplinary action. The chapter will argue risk management underpins both of these movements, which occurred at the policy level in relation to school safety in Ontario. The defensive logic of a risk management of everything is evident in the demise of zero-tolerance and reveals the discursive complexities of zero-tolerance.

In Chapter 3, I argue the Safe Schools Office is a bureaucratic unit representing an institutional shift toward risk management and the institutionalization of safety. The Safe Schools Office in the TDSB has been used as a model for other school boards and districts, so they may become more commonplace. These offices negotiate risk management of students and educators with the broader issues of safety and reputation. The risk management engaged in by the Safe Schools Office is not just

21 exclusionary, but has inclusionary concerns, which I term compassionate risk management.

In Chapter 4, I argue that the emergence of the specific problem of school shooters has led to lockdowns and threat assessment tools, because they are manifestations of risk management strategies and are now considered emblematic strategies of school safety. I will argue that while these strategies may secure students, they more importantly protect the school's image as a safe place for students.

These chapters argue that safety and the school’s duty of care are re-configured under an institutional ethos of risk management and how competing governing rationalities co-exist. The risk management turn in the context of school safety also takes on a uniquely compassionate form owing to the school’s use of pastoral power. Risk management, while present, is not the sole concern of educators and institutional bureaucracies. It is important to understand how safety, and the educator’s duty of care to the student, is situated under these broader changes.

I want to conclude this chapter with four narratives from my research that capture the complexity of compassionate risk management and lay the groundwork for themes this dissertation will be exploring. First, the Safe Schools Office (SSO) was created to help principals with student discipline (see Chapter 3). In the post-zero- tolerance TDSB, however, it underwent a name change to the “Safe and Caring Schools Office”. The change is significant because it echoes the name of the Safe and Compassionate Schools Task Force, which was created by the TDSB to explore issues with disciplinary practices. The change in the SSO is a direct result of the many town halls and accusations of mistreatment of students by the SSO and through exclusionary practices levied at the TDSB. 16 School safety, and the office that represents it in the TDSB, is explicitly reinforced as having an ethic of care. The

16 At one such town hall I attended, one parent expressed reluctance to speak her mind about the SSA and school disciplinary practices because one of the heads of the SSO (who was involved in her son ’s suspension) had just walked in.

22 re-naming of the SSO in a particular way lessens the often difficult decisions that unit has to make in regards to individual students, and tries to present a façade of caring for all. As we will see in Chapter 2, the exclusion-based policy of zero- tolerance had little traction as a lasting method of safety in Ontario due to this tension.

The second narrative is an exchange between two TDSB employees. One person worked in the health and safety department, and the other was a consultant employed by the SSO, whose expertise was in situational crime prevention (SCP). Health and safety still formed a key part of school board bureaucracies, but the creation of the Safe Schools Office usurped some functions of the original department. According to the frustrated health and safety worker, her department received less monetary support from the TDSB, and it appeared to her that the SSO was now providing oversight on matters that were historically under the auspices of health and safety departments. The tension was clear from what the SSO's consultant said she focused on when visiting schools. The consultant showed slides to illustrate areas of concern from a school safety perspective, and conducted a mock audit for principals to ensure their school is a safe place. Some of what the SSO consultant discussed as troublesome – such as litter in a doorway, the height of outside shrubbery, graffiti, and the width of stairway rails – were all issues the health and safety worker said her department monitored in the past. Why was the better-funded Safe Schools Office dealing with them? The exchange demonstrates how safety gets reassembled under a shift to prevention and risk management, which will be explored more in Chapter 3 in the context of the SSO.

A third narrative, highlighting the emergence of risk management in the TDSB, is the inquiry into the shooting death of Jordan Manners. The title of the report is instructive: “The Road To Health: A Final Report on School Safety” (2008). The original mandate was to provide closure on the shooting and to develop strategies to make schools safe. However, the final report did not limit itself to just gun violence when interpreting what ‘school safety’ meant, and expanded the terms of

23 reference to study broader problems, such as sexual violence against female pupils, and a culture of silence amongst staff and students. The introduction of the report suggests that safety is linked to health and inclusivity which, unlike the second narrative, turns crime into a health issue: The approach the School Community Safety Advisory Panel (the “Panel”) has taken to this review is a broad one. The underlying premise to the Panel’s work is that “school safety” is synonymous with “school health”…If a healthy learning environment is achieved then schools will be safe. Conversely, where safety issues have become a serious concern, there are clear indications of ill health. It follows, therefore that issues of safety of the school community involve considerations of more than the narrow questions about security measures, building security and discipline (School Community Safety Advisory Panel 2008: 1, emphasis added).

These contradictory pulls and pushes suggest there is no easy way to unify or categorize these shifts in school safety, and highlight the utility of Rose’s (2000) distinction between circuits of inclusion and exclusion. Problems of school safety can be organized in different ways, leading to exclusionary or inclusionary solutions such as the call in the quote above to foster a holistic school community. The discourse of healthification additionally presents newer ways young people are governed within risk management logics that invoke a broader array of (self)regulatory strategies (see Fusco 2006). This narrative is also representative of how the school shooter is now a central concern, as demonstrated by a targeted shooting becoming the focus of a large scale-inquest (as opposed to the institutional forgetting that occurred following the 1975 shootings). It also shows that though the school shooting is an exceptionally rare event, it guides school safety responses such as the lockdown and threat assessment I will discuss in Chapter 4.

The final story stems from another school death that occurred as a result – not in spite – of security measures. Ryan Gibbons’ unfortunate death in rural Ontario

24 highlights how a risk management of everything is not always safe for students. Gibbons needed asthma medication, and his school required that all medication be kept in the principal’s office under lock and key. Gibbons frequently had his puffer confiscated, and his mother needed to be contacted to pick it up because the school would not let Gibbons take the medication home himself. Unfortunately, Gibbons died of an asthma attack, as teachers were unable to get to his medication in time. Locking up such medications is the result of the increasing bureaucratization of school safety (highlighted in more detail in Chapter 3). Interestingly, the mother has not sued the school board, but has instead been advocating that some medications should be kept on the student’s person for their personal safety (see Canadian Press 2013). 17 The final story demonstrates the stakes of understanding these shifts and the emergence of a risk management of everything. Schools are still safe spaces for young people, but what new uncertainties emerge from the very risk management systems attempting to achieve school safety? School safety increasingly means more than keeping educators and students safe from violence (in all of its manifestations, from bullying to gossiping to shootings). School safety is reshaped to ensure the school board and educators are protected from challenges to authority or being blamed for school violence. This dissertation will argue that shifts in governing safe school subjects, and how challenges are understood by the school administration, reconstitute the space of the school to be one of compassionate risk management, which is important in moving beyond just seeing the exclusionary aspects of school safety.

17 This legislation has since passed in the Ontario Provincial Parliament; see Bill 20, Ryan’s Law ( Ensuring Asthma Friendly Schools ) (2015).

25 Chapter 2: A Genealogy of Zero-Tolerance in Ontario Student Discipline

“Zero-tolerance is not referenced in the Safe Schools Act … [but the Act] does set out mandatory consequences for specific infractions” – Safe Schools Administrator 1; Day 1: 3

Introduction

In 2001, a senior Toronto District School Board (TDSB) administrator involved in safe schools referred to his board’s safe schools’ policy as zero-tolerance. Five years later, that same individual told a group of educators and principals during their training that, contrary to popular characterizations, the Safe Schools Act (SSA ) and TDSB policy was never about zero-tolerance. How can we explain this dissonance and contradiction? The TDSB procedures manual was explicit in its description of a zero-tolerance approach to student discipline, as was the aforementioned administrator. So how was zero-tolerance in school discipline and safety retroactively erased? This chapter traces the development of the SSA, and how the idea of zero-tolerance informed that process in the TDSB. Using the genealogical method, I examine the advent of zero-tolerance and how it played out (or did not) in the provincial Safe Schools Act and other school board policies. 18 I argue that zero- tolerance is ill defined and often functions as a rhetorical strategy to emphasize the value placed on safety. However, strategies typically associated with a law and order style zero-tolerance regime, such as blanket automatic exclusions for misbehaviour, were not in the legislation. I argue that zero-tolerance did not work as a method of school governance in the TDSB, because of an emergent reputation risk management ethos, which prevailed over a strictly punitive mentality. The shift to risk management, and particularly a compassionate form of risk management, gave way to a new SSA that emphasized proportionality (or progressive discipline).

18 Please see Appendix B for a timeline of events covered in this chapter.

26 Some scholars have suggested that zero-tolerance missed Canada as an idea (see Pratt 2000; Meyer & O’Malley 2005) while others argued it emerged in the context of policing (see Dekeseredy 2009; Comack & Silver 2008 for non-empirical takes on the subject). I will analyze how zero-tolerance was or was not deployed in the context of school discipline and safety. As Roger Matthews (2005:195) notes “most of the examples of punitiveness that have been presented in the literature represent more extreme and exceptional developments and … most are limited spatially or temporally” (as cited by Comack & Silver 2008: 840). As the following chapter will show, the idea of zero-tolerance existed within the TDSB and the SSA but it was an uneasy, incomplete, and messy discourse. I argue that zero-tolerance ceased to exist in the TDSB for two key reasons: First, there was a growing concern about the Americanization of schools and U.S. examples of safe school policies were used as a foil to highlight a distinctly Canadian way of achieving safety. Second, legislation cautiously avoided an explicit use of zero-tolerance as part of the shift to a risk management ethos. Although political parties recited ideological talking points, the SSA itself is not so easily reduced to demagoguery. In the first SSA , zero-tolerance was not explicitly named, but was inferred and implied. Subsequently, all political parties were quick to point out that zero-tolerance was never written in the SSA, either as an explicit practice of one-strike and you are out, or as an idea for achieving school safety. In the TDSB, there was movement against being characterized as a rigid zero-tolerance regime akin to American schools, and any such representation needed managing.

In this chapter, I first discuss the history of the concept of zero-tolerance. Next, I outline the context of education in Ontario from 1990 to 2000, a period of rapid reforms. I then trace how zero-tolerance emerged in the SSA, and the contestations in school discipline that occurred in its wake. Finally, I argue that the emergence of progressive discipline in schools, and the subsequent dying out of zero-tolerance, suggests risk management overtook a law and order mentality in the TDSB.

27 Zero-Tolerance: The History of an Idea

Zero-tolerance burst onto the crime prevention scene in the early 1980s. The phrase “zero-tolerance” was first used in 1983 to describe the reassignment of 40 U.S. Navy crewmembers for suspected drug use (see Skiba and Peterson 1999). The term was next used to describe a 1986 program in San Diego that impounded sea craft carrying illicit substances. Zero-tolerance then made the jump from drugs found at sea, to those at the borders, when U.S. Attorney General Edwin Meese “ordered customs agents to seize vehicles used in transporting drugs across U.S. borders and to charge such persons in federal court” (Verdugo 2002:52).

When zero-tolerance emerges in policing circles, it is uneasily combined with Broken Windows Theory (see Hebert 2001) to suggest that major crimes can be averted by aggressively policing minor nuisances. 19 Kelling and Coles (1996), expand the crime problem beyond serious criminal acts, to incorporate less severe forms of disorderly behaviour, such as vandalism and other incivilities (15), and really exemplify a moral authoritarianism style of governance (see Hughes 1998). 20 Infused with zero-tolerance in the context of school safety, a Broken Windows understanding of disorder would suggest that lower forms of disorder, such as vandalism or improper attire, are inextricably linked to higher, more serious forms of violence. Furthermore, if a school has higher levels of violence, lower forms of disorder are usually implicated as symptomatic of, or the reasons for, the higher order disorder (see for instance the report from the School Community Advisory Panel 2008). 21

19 Broken Windows continually co-emerges with zero-tolerance in school safety discourses, as we will see in Chapter 3's SSO ‘safety audit’. 20 As we will see, this is related to the original SSA and the attempt to prevent vagrancies such as alcohol use, vandalism, swearing, and even improper attire. 21 The shooting of Jordan Manners is linked to cultural issues in the school – such as the culture of silence. These feelings of distrust, improper administration, and safety are linked to the shooting because they created such an atmosphere in what can be described as a reverse Broken Windows proof. However, the report was more multifaceted than I am allowing for.

28 Zero-tolerance, and the idea of not allowing second chances, is often a catch-all for many programs that are not necessarily true examples of the policy. For example, in the realm of policing, Johnston (2000) notes “ZTP is also a discursive device for describing a wide range of actuarially-driven police practices orientated toward the management of risk and the resolution of more serious crime” (67). Zero-tolerance is often a politically expedient way to refer to a program, such as the call for zero- tolerance of harassment in the workplace. The term itself hides a lot of specificities. Does zero-tolerance mean exclusion in the case of workplace harassment, or does it mean that harassment will garner some response from one’s bosses? Zero-tolerance alone does not imply a punishment, though it is generally linked to exclusionary and harsh policies. In the context of the TDSB, the original SSA was defined as a zero- tolerance policy since it only laid out the conditions in which to suspend and expel students. This, in turn, justified characterizing the act as one of zero-tolerance.

Zero-tolerance slogans are also risk strategies, with the underlying hope that “by removing low-achieving disruptive students from the schools, these policies may increase the likelihood that average levels of student achievement will rise in order to meet state or district standards” (Gagnon and Leone 2002:103). Every youth is increasingly seen as a potential risk (Kelly 2000), thus rejecting previous characterizations of children drifting in and out of deviancy (Matza 1964). Youths are still seen as drifting, but safety and security become overriding concerns as the category of deviancy has been supplanted by the category of “at-risk” (Bessant 2001; Kelly 2003). Uncertainty is ever-present in schools, as youths involved in serious matters are unknowns and potential risks: “If he did it today, why wouldn’t he do it tomorrow?” (as quoted in Levinsky 2016). This reinforces the notion that the past predicts the future. The difference between this notion and the idea of dangerousness as explored by Castel (1991) is that risk is not just embodied by a particular population of youth, but in all people.

A review of school-centred studies on zero-tolerance policies yields mostly negative results. The studies generally point out the ineffectiveness of these disciplinary

29 mechanisms and the disproportionate way they are often applied (see Levinsky 2008 for a review of studies on school discipline). A consistent finding in the literature is that zero-tolerance policies result in punishing students who already exist at the margins, such as those with learning disabilities or below average grades (Morrison & D’Incau 1997); those with developmental disabilities such as autism (Orwen 2003); African-American students (Skiba et. al. 2002; Verdugo 2002; Dunbar & Villarruel 2004; Noguera 1995; Nolan 2011; Wolf 2013); poor students (Skiba and Peterson 1999; Verdugo 2002); Tamil and African-Canadian students in Ontario (Bhattacharjee 2003); and Latino students in the US (Noguera 1995). Because of its strictness, zero-tolerance also can cast too wide a net.

Studies also suggest zero-tolerance is a blanket term used to describe the shift to hyper-security in schools (see Verdugo 2002) and can be counterproductive by inhibiting learning and creating an environment of mistrust and resistance (Noguera 1995; Giroux 2003; Nolan 2011; Lyons and Drew 2006; Raby 2012). Most student infractions resulting in mandatory suspensions do not threaten school safety (Skiba and Peterson 1999; Skiba et. al. 2002), which suggests these policies may indeed be doing something other than curbing school violence.

Zero-tolerance policies governing student conduct are designed to minimize discretion and disparity. Therefore, these types of policies are also used to crack down on, and regulate, staff decisions. 22 However, it is reported that there are still wide variations in disciplinary decisions found in zero-tolerance regimes (Dunbar & Villarruel 2004). These policies still leave decision-makers with high levels of discretion, even though zero-tolerance leaves the impression that they eliminate ‘grey areas’ (see also Levinsky 2016).

Zero-tolerance policies are often equated with the production and exacerbation of inequalities. For example, Giroux (2003a) argues that zero-tolerance is a ‘war on

22 Even in a progressive disciplinary regime, the regulation of discretion is important and the SSO becomes the main way staff disciplinary decisions are monitored.

30 youth’ and symbolizes that young people are ‘disposable,’ while Hyman and Perone (1998) posit that this disciplinary practice represents a new type of victimization of students. Akin to this critique is that the school under a zero-tolerance regime is a way for young people – particularly racialized young people – to ‘prepare for prison’ (Hirschfield 2008), and strengthens the link between the justice system and the school (Kupchik and Monahan 2006; Kupchik 2010; Nolan 2011). These characterizations of youths being repeatedly victimized by zero-tolerance policies, or repressed into behaving appropriately, are problematic because the specific way the safe school subject is produced is overlooked. Elsewhere, I have argued that TDSB students (subjects of a zero-tolerance policy) are shaped and positioned in particular ways, and to suggest students are disposable denies the specific ways these policies seek to produce the good student and frame the bad student (Levinsky 2016; see also Raby 2014 in the context of children’s participatory initiatives). These analyses also tend to downplay how zero-tolerance strategies seek to regulate staff decisions and discretion.

The Educational Context in Ontario: From Mike Harris to the First SSA

It is beyond the scope of this chapter to provide a complete historical account of changes in schooling, but it is important to show how shifts in education in Ontario map onto the broader shifts in governance. Changes in Western education are summarized by Levin (1997) as having three common themes: “1. Decentralization of authority to schools and the creation of school or parent councils to share that authority; 2. Various forms of choice or other market-like mechanisms; 3. Increased achievement testing with publication of results and its corollary, more centralized curriculum” (p. 6). These shifts reflect neo-liberal trends in governance (see O’Malley 1999; Rose 1996, 2000; Garland 1996; 2001) and contextualize safe schools discourses. Rinne (2000) locates the education system at the centre of the new “evaluative state,” where pupils compete with one another to become more effective in the global environment. Increasingly, this means the application of practical knowledge at the expense of a liberal education (Corson, 2000).

31 Furthermore, a standardized testing regime effectively excludes segments of children as non-standard students are left out (Corson 2000). Teachers not only are caught up in teaching to the tests, but also in teaching to the rules (Kupchik 2010), as all these pieces become measures of institutional efficacy (see Power 2004).

Standardized testing is not solely for the purpose of the child, as every school profile reveals measures of achievement (see www.tdsb.on.ca) designed to hold schools and their boards accountable. It is believed that the only way to create an accountable education system is through standardized testing and a common curriculum. 23 In Ontario, the former is managed through the more recently created Education Quality and Accountability Office, while the latter is handed down from the Ministry of Education and Training. Parents become consumers in a market-like atmosphere, choosing a school that fits both their needs and that of their child. Schools have report cards which facilitate parental choice and are often found in real estate materials (Ontario 2001). 24 These report cards contain, among other things, information about how well students did on standardized tests compared to the provincial average, how much it costs per pupil to run the school, parents’ and children’s attitudes toward the school, and the number of suspension days per 50 students (Ontario 2001).

Overlaid with the move to an advanced liberal governmentality (see Rose 1996), some education systems underwent changes in student discipline with the emergence of zero-tolerance policies. Within the move to efficiency there are indications of a more moralistic, neo-conservative approach meshing complexly with neo-liberalism. Hence, these various trends in education, like O’Malley (1999) notes in terms of punishment, are seen as often being contradictory (Apple 2001b; Levin 1997; Rose 2000). The conceptualization of choice and accountability

23 During this rapid shift in Ontario, there was a call for teachers to be subject to ongoing tests to prove their competency. The testing never materialized. 24 Toronto schools do have catchment areas, and while parents can apply to get their child into another school, these spots are limited. These publicly available school report cards likely impact decisions on where to live, although this is not well researched.

32 reproduces the existing class and race differences, rather than freeing them from these bonds (Apple 2001a; Dehli 1996; Taylor 2001).

To counteract the slovenly welfare state, increased surveillance and performance appraisals (such as the school report cards) are used so the state makes everyone “a ‘continual enterprise of ourselves’ … in what seems to be a process of ‘governing without governing’” (Olssen 1996: 340). Or, put another way, governing at a distance (Rose 1999). The Ontario government was another government that was seemingly stepping back and governing at a distance with all the changes it underwent starting in the mid-1990s. In Ontario, the Conservative Party won a majority government on June 8, 1995, and immediately made broad changes to education policy and practice. The pattern and rapidity of change in education (see Dehli 1996; Majhonovich 2002; Kerr 2006) was consistent with other governance transitions in Australia and New Zealand (see Dale 1994); in Europe and Finland (see Rinne 2000); the UK (see Hill 2005); in the US (see Apple 1995; 2001a; 2001b); and in other Canadian provinces such as Alberta (Taylor 2001). Two important legislative changes were made in the Fewer School Boards Act and the Education Quality Improvement Act (see also Gidney 1999).

The purpose of Bill 104 ( The Fewer School Boards Act), and Bill 160, ( The Education Quality Improvement Act), passed in 1997, was to change the way education was administered in Ontario. As The School Community Safety Panel (citing MacLellan 2007) states, the four main changes in the wake of Bill 104 were: 1. The number of school board was reduced from 124 to 72; 2. The number of school trustees was lowered from 1,900 to 700 3. The new education funding formula was introduced and eliminated the previous ability of school boards to raise revenue from their local property tax bases; and 4. Trustee remuneration was capped at $5,000 per year. Prior to the amendments, the salaries of trustees in the TDSB was approximately $48,000, one third of which was not taxable (14-

33 15).

These cost-saving measures had implications for how surveillance or safety was assured, particularly in the wake of larger class sizes and student populations. 25 Bill 160 and the revised teacher contracts (such as a change in the sick day process, and conceiving principals as management and apart from the teachers' union) resulted in province-wide job action. In the late 1990s, education in Ontario was a volatile environment, and teachers were often depicted as lazy, self-serving, and in need of rigid forms of surveillance. In neo-liberal times, governments formulate the rules and then step back and let the contest play itself out (Pratt, 2000:144).

Paradoxically, the Ontario government also conferred enormous power upon itself in the sphere of education. As Campbell J. noted for the Ontario General Court, the Fewer School Boards Act contained: Very few objective standards or guidelines for the exercise of the commission’s virtually unbridled powers. It lacks any coherent statement of regulatory purpose and it lacks the kind of principled guidelines, to structure and contain the power of government officials, that one might expect in a statute of this nature (as quoted in Dickinson, 1998: 432). 26

This quotation illustrates how the government of Ontario stepped back from the day-to-day governance of education, while simultaneously expanding the control it could wield over education policy. The Ontario government fully controlled education financing (see also MacLellan 2007) at the same time that the governmental bureaucracy of trustees had their power curtailed.

25 The literature tends to suggest smaller schools and smaller class sizes are linked to safer schools, more so than other environmental or situational factors (see Levinsky 2008). 26 In the end, however, the courts have upheld the Ontario restructuring regimes in education as constitutionally valid (Dickinson 2002). Furthermore, the funding model adopted in Alberta (similar to the Ontario model) was upheld earlier by the Supreme Court of Canada. This seems to reflect the nature of the Charter being applicable when an individual ’s rights are infringed upon rather than any notion of social justice or social harm.

34

The Safe Schools Act (SSA) is often ignored in the discussions of the socio-political climate of the education reforms in Ontario. For example, Kerr (2006) does not mention the SSA as part of that reform in her discussion of education reform in Ontario. Kerr (2006) focuses on the shifting role of the teacher in official documents, and argues that the Harris/Eves regime had a devastating impact on teacher morale and public education. Other discussions of the SSA position it as one of the myriad “tough-on-crime” policies, and a product of the law and order agenda (see Hermer and Mosher 2002 for a discussion of the Safe Streets Act ). The problem with placing the SSA among tough-on-crime policies is that it is disconnected from the sweeping education reforms that obfuscate the Act ’s nuances. It appears that the SSA is without an academic home – it is either considered separate from education reform, or seen as simply one example of the shift to getting tough. As I argue, the SSA signifies the tension of imagining the bad apple who needs to be removed to make the school a safer place while recognizing that ‘kids are kids’ and deserve compassion and second chances.

Origins of the SSA : Implicit Zero-Tolerance and Risk Management

The following section examines the origins of the Safe Schools Act in the Toronto District School Board (TDSB), and how it is connected to zero-tolerance. Although the scope of the zero-tolerance concept has rapidly expanded from laws on drinking and driving to welfare fraud to regulations posted in social venues and for recreational games, 27 in the context of Ontario and the TDSB, zero-tolerance is no longer considered part of the legislative history of the SSA, nor the TDSB policies of school discipline. 28

27 ‘There is zero-tolerance for fighting and swearing in our leagues’ reads the email from the Toronto Sport and Social Club. 28 I should note, not all Ontario Members of Provincial Parliament were from Toronto. However, these provincial debates and discussions still frame the educational context of the TDSB.

35 The SSA began as a private members bill and was sent to a standing committee on June 11, 1998 (as Bill 21) prior to its third reading. When the new SSA was introduced, its third reading carried on June 14, 2000, and it was given Royal Assent on June 23, 2000. Although opposition parties commonly framed the SSA as a zero- tolerance policy, that was never the official party line of the Conservative Party. The Act was designed to address a perceived upward trend in school violence.

Newman, the MPP 29 who introduced one of the earliest Safe Schools Bills as a private member, made the following claim: Over the past decade, school yard violence has changed throughout North America, and Ontario has certainly not been immune to that change. While many may argue whether violence in schools has or has not increased over the years, one thing is indeed certain: The acts have become more violent in recent years. More weapons are finding their way into our schools, and students are becoming more accepting of retaliation and violence as the norm in our society … Although Ontario schools cannot be compared to US schools, with metal detectors and armed guards roaming school corridors, we must not shy away from the issue just because it has not yet exploded here. My Safe Schools Act will ensure that Ontario's schools are the safest places in the world to study and to work. (Newman, Progressive Conservative June 11, 1998)

Newman thus talked about a policy that could be understood as zero-tolerance but did not name it so. In the original introduction of the Act, Newman never explicitly uttered the phrase zero-tolerance, but referred to his act as a policy that would “mandate automatic exclusion and possible expulsion for students who commit assault or who possess a prohibited or restricted weapon. It will provide principals with a framework for responding to other student violence as well” (Newman,

29 Progressive Conservative MPP from 1995-2003.

36 Progressive Conservative June 11, 1998). The latter caveat suggests that it was being envisioned as zero-tolerance for these particular offences, and that there would be a less stringent framework for responding to other student violence. Newman’s positioning of US schools in opposition to the situation in Ontario is a discourse that will continually occur throughout the debates on the SSA.

The early discussions of the SSA align closely with Casella’s (2001) argument that discipline in today's schools is continually juxtaposed with the yearning for the “golden years” of school discipline (for example, in the narratives of Mother Assumpta and Father Brown – the latter used by proponents of SSA s, and the former used to begin the Safe Schools training seminar). Both invocations of the Catholic school corporal disciplinarian were held up as examples of how school discipline worked well in the past, and the challenges facing discipline in an era of non- corporal punishment.

Interwoven in the TDSB with the well-discussed narrative of nostalgia in school discipline was a juxtaposition of the American and Canadian school experience. In Newman’s comparison with American school violence, Ontario needed the initiative of his SSA to prevent American level violence. In doing so, Newman acknowledged nothing would get that bad in Ontario. Another assumption was American schools reacted to issues of school safety in an over-securitized way, but Ontario still needed to take preventative steps. In this regard, the idea of zero-tolerance was readable into the SSA because it was viewed as one of the successful American methods, without having to resort to more totalizing forms of security, such as metal detectors and armed guards.

Newman’s speech, consistent with the narratives of many other actors discussing school violence during this time (see Levinsky 2003), presented safety as something lacking in schools, and something the government could fix. The way to counter the

37 purported rise in violence in Ontario schools, 30 or to at least prevent the American- like potential for a rise in school violence, is through a law that will exclude students. There was a Conservative government push in the education system to, as the then Education Minister John Snobelen 31 said in 1995, create a crisis (see Globe and Mail 2001). However, rather than the creation of a crisis in school safety, it was the borrowing of a crisis that suggested the Ontario education system needed to get tough. As is often the case, crisis and fear were used as rhetorical devices to support exclusionary strategies.

Initial opposition to the private member’s bill came not in questioning the purpose of the SSA , but in how the act would be implemented. As Liberal MPP Lyn McLeod 32 commented: I don't think anybody in the House would argue with the stated purpose of this bill…In the absence of resources, in the absence of real support, this bill leaves us only with another form of exclusion, a moderated form of expulsion. (McLeod June 11, 1998)

Despite lingering political unhappiness with Harris’ policies and funding cuts, school safety remained the one issue the parties could rally behind. 33 As none of the political parties wanted to contest the idea of safe schools, they instead took issue with the practice of exclusion without any inclusionary supports. In fact, the only other problems McLeod identified with Newman’s proposal was that it left the door open for corporal punishment in schools, and that Newman had drafted it without public consultation.

30 This link was a tenuous one at best (see for instance Doob, Marinos & Varma 1995; Zimring 1998). 31 Progressive Conservative MPP from 1995-1999. Minister of Education and Training from June 26, 1995 – October 9, 1997. 32 Liberal MPP from 1987-2003. 33 This characterization may be overly broad. As we will see, there were some reservations with the SSA .

38 The discourse of zero-tolerance became more explicit when the debate moved to backbenchers and their anecdotal evidence. For instance, after mentioning that there had recently been a stabbing near a school in his riding, Progressive Conservative MPP John Hastings 34 argued: There is no doubt this particular bill deals with some of the specific problems that not only bother teachers and parents, but kids in the schools. Let me quote. The students of Lakeshore Catholic High School, in their own submission to the Crime Control Commission, said, "There should also be zero-tolerance in all schools to deal with youth crimes in the area of drugs, weapons and acts of violence. (June 11, 1998; emphasis added)

In this instance, zero-tolerance was positioned as "get tough" rhetoric from constituents (students) and not the speaker (Hastings) himself. Hastings legitimates the notion of zero-tolerance as necessary for school safety, but he identifies himself as simply the messenger rather than driving policy. As we will see, zero-tolerance continued to exist in this ephemeral way – rarely being anchored to any platform in particular.

Further into the debate, the SSA is characterized as being able to separate bad students from those who are morally good and compliant or, as one principal framed it in my previous research, “those who are serious about school” (Levinsky 2016). Zero-tolerance of violence was conceived of more than a repressive policy, but one that could identify bad students and provide guidance for educators: Zero violence policies and…safe schools policies are not new. Clarification is what students, parents, teachers and school community councils have wanted…to clarify their role, duty and what they're authorized to do. But let's face it, today our politically correct, litigious society makes all our jobs much more difficult…I

34 MPP from 1995-2003.

39 think Mr. Newman's bill attempts to segregate those groups of individuals that want to spoil it for the rest. (O'Toole, Progressive Conservative, June 11, 1998).

The exclusionary aspects of the SSA were de-emphasized, and its ability to help make things clearer for students and staff, while protecting staff from litigious mentality of society, were highlighted. As I have previously argued (2016), the SSA was used as a way to help guide decision-making and the duties of principals while making their decisions defensible. A recurring justification for the SSA was the need to provide school boards and educators with a way to manage risks posed not only by bad students, but also by a litigious society, and to fulfill a duty of care to the good students.

With an election looming on June 3 rd 1999, Newman's work in the SSA was rewritten and repackaged as coming from the entire Conservative government. The re- formulation of the SSA was not a drastic turnaround, but it became one piece of the “Blueprint for Change” platform used by the Conservative government. As Janet Ecker, 35 then Education Minister, (re)explained: Respect and responsibility are certainly important parts of ensuring that our schools in our publicly funded education system are safe…If passed, this bill will ensure that there are clear, province-wide standards, especially for the most serious infractions (June 6, 2000).

Ecker emphasized that safety could be achieved through clear penalties and mandatory punishments, such as an automatic expulsion hearing for students who sold drugs/alcohol; committed physical and sexual assault; brought a weapon to the school, or who used a weapon to threaten somebody. Suspension was pitched as the “minimum penalty” for possessing illicit drugs/alcohol; threatening or swearing at

35 Progressive Conservative MPP from 1995-2003; Minister of Education 1999-2002.

40 teachers; making threats of harm; and vandalism. The SSA was ostensibly about holding everyone in the school system accountable. Zero-tolerance for specific behaviours in schools was written explicitly into the Conservative Party’s re- election platform, Blueprint for Ontario , where they vowed to get tough on school violence. Yet in the SSA, and its subsequent public talking points , Ecker avoided the phrase zero-tolerance, and only went so far as to suggest that a suspension would be the minimum penalty for some conduct. In the public discourse, Ecker often deployed a broken windows sensibility that was in vogue at the time (see Kelling and Coles 1996) by linking minor infractions, like swearing at teachers, to serious violent infractions. However, unlike the common fusing of broken windows to zero- tolerance, it was only serious forms of disorder that merited mandatory suspensions. Also clear from these talking points was that a potentially wide range of behaviour could be caught under the ambit of the act. For example, physical assault, which triggered an expulsion hearing, could be the result of a deliberately vicious attack, or simply a snowball fight. Similarly, vandalism triggered a mandatory suspension, but could be an orchestrated graffiti campaign, or the destruction of any school property, like a pencil sharpener. The ambiguity worked to target the ‘bad kid’, the mythical other, who had the worrying potential to develop into a more serious delinquent or school shooter.

Although absent from Ecker’s discussion, zero-tolerance for some student conduct appeared in multiple places in the Conservative repertoire prior to the SSA . For instance, the Commission for Crime Control in Ontario, a Commission struck by Harris in 1997 comprised of three Conservative backbenchers, supported using zero-tolerance to regulate numerous activities related to young people. These three politicians (Jim Brown, Gerry Martiniuk, and Bob Wood) drew on a growing fear of young people at the time, and each one openly discussed the frightening experiences they had at the hands of youth (see Martin 2002). In terms of school safety, they advised the creation of legislation that: …would include a standardized policy of zero-tolerance for violent or disorderly behaviour for all Ontario schools; short-term

41 placement centres for disorderly students; school response teams to recognize, manage and resolve conflict; tough and escalating sanctions for violence, sexual assault, weapons offences and verbal abuse-from detention to placement centres to expulsion. (Martiniuk, Progressive Conservative June 7, 2000).

Zero-tolerance was at the forefront of the Conservative platform in dealing with school safety since it dovetailed with the rhetoric of ‘getting tough’ and the misperception that toughness worked (see McMurtry and Doob 2011). The Crime Commission’s explicit use of zero-tolerance was not echoed in formal introductions of the SSA , although the spectre of zero-tolerance remained in media talking points and in the constant references the Conservative Party made to its own Crime Commission. However, Ecker never formally introduced the SSA as a piece of zero- tolerance legislation in House debates, nor was there any mention of zero-tolerance in the legislation itself. The absence is significant because it suggests that while the Conservative Party considered the idea of zero-tolerance a salient political tactic to garner votes, it complicates viewing the SSA as part of the shift toward zero- tolerance solutions. The hesitation may be because the targets of the legislation were not hardened criminals, but young students who could be redeemed. The government rhetoric highlighted the law and order aspects of the legislation, but the primary goal of the act was to make discipline consistent and clearer throughout Ontario to rectify provincial disparities in school discipline. The genealogical tracing of zero-tolerance could end here, as perhaps uttered in Conservative Party cabinet meetings, and as deployed as a populist tool – still being sayable, yet officially unsaid.

Zero-Tolerance at the Provincial Level: (Not) Becoming the United States

When the repackaged SSA made its legislative rounds after the Conservatives' re- election, it was mainly critics and backbenchers who brought up zero-tolerance. Zero-tolerance in school discipline became an incantation – a loosely defined and

42 fluid concept used for ceremonial purposes. Safety was becoming a primary concern for schools on the heels of Columbine and Taber, and due to a general belief that young people were becoming more violent. Around this time, there was also an explosion of safe school literature, packaged in textbooks and how-to manuals (see Duke 2002; Hill & Hill 1994). The ‘crisis’ in school safety was emerging at the same time zero-tolerance (coupled with Broken Windows) was becoming a hot commodity, and hailed for its mythical ability to improve conditions (see the hagiographies of Kelling & Coles 1996; Wilson & Kelling 1982; Bratton & Kelling 2006. For a more critical take see Wacquant 2009). However, zero-tolerance discourse was uneasily situated in the context of Toronto schools, destabilizing these mythical properties and leading to the questioning of its strategic value. Criticisms of the SSA were not levied against the theory of zero-tolerance and, as I will show, zero-tolerance was something parties of other political stripes admitted to liking or instituting.

Political critics of the SSA deemed the bill unnecessary, and just another frivolous attempt to play politics, because it created a problem in school safety, then ostensibly solved it. 36 To others, there was nothing new in the SSA and it was a simplistic caricature of the problems that befell schools. Other critics argued that safety could not be a priority if there was no funding to back it up. In all these criticisms, the idea of zero-tolerance as a useful strategy for school safety is tacitly supported or at least, not actively discounted. The act itself triggered many lasting structural changes to the TDSB; for example, it shored up the need for the Safe Schools Office (to be discussed in the next Chapter), which meant its consequences were hardly frivolous.

There was a commonly held belief that zero-tolerance was already in place as a school safety strategy. Zero-tolerance was referred to as an existing measure in

36 In fact, McGuinty would say about the policies in total: “I went through the throne speech in some detail…There are three references to mandatory or zero-tolerance policies. There are three references to crackdowns. There are nine references to discipline programs. ”

43 well-managed schools; for instance, Scarborough, a city just East of Toronto,37 kept emerging as the litmus test for the usefulness of zero-tolerance in student discipline that deserved to be standardized across the province. In this respect, zero-tolerance entered the debate as something that school boards should strive toward, as part of the turn to limit staff discretion and manage institutional risk and blame. 38 Occasionally, the limitations of zero-tolerance as a school safety strategy were presented, but for the most part it remained the elephant in the room because it had more cache as a rhetorical device than as an actual strategy to ensure school safety.

Even opposition parties constantly dismissed the SSA , along with the zero-tolerance implied within, as nothing new:

[The SSA ] pretends to give school boards a code of conduct. The reality is that every school board in this province already has a zero-tolerance policy and a code of conduct in place. (Agostino, Liberal, June 12, 2000).

I was a member of the NDP government from 1990 to 1995, and [we] put in place a number of policies that dealt with the issue of codes of conduct within schools and zero-tolerance policies when it came to violence … (Bisson, New Democrat, June 12, 2000).

Curiously, zero-tolerance becomes a term that is shunned at times, yet the tenets of zero-tolerance policies are continually – and implicitly – understood as being beneficial for schools. Bisson's claim (June 12, 2000) – that the NDP government was already developing a SSA with zero-tolerance elements – was similar to Kerr’s argument (2006) that the unpopular and neo-liberal policies of the Harris government had roots in the previous NDP government of Bob Rae. Harris and the

37 Scarborough joined Toronto through amalgamation as part of the sweeping changes alluded to in Chapter 1 necessitating the harmonization of school policies. 38 This theme of institutional risk management will be developed further in the next chapter on the SSO.

44 Conservatives have been demonized for most of the policies of the 1990s, but other parties were quick to point out that zero-tolerance was an obvious way to promote student discipline and increase school safety. While the New Democratic Party (generally a left of centre party) was keen on a zero-tolerance policy towards violence in schools, it is less clear that it would have sought such a policy for students showing disrespect to teachers. 39

On the other side of the political spectrum, Conservative Party members suggested that the practice of zero-tolerance was already in existence, particularly in pre- amalgamation Scarborough. As Conservative backbencher Mushinski attested to anecdotally, the Scarborough model of zero-tolerance toward school violence resulted in a decline in violence and an increase in students feeling safe (June 7, 2000). Zero-tolerance peppered the debates on the SSA, without ever being introduced as part of the act. While it was presented as an incantation for safety, the knowledge that zero-tolerance was American in origin continually destabilized its own discursive power, because the fear was that Ontario’s response could become too American and too harsh.

The United States was brought up in discussion either as a foil to what Canada could become, or as a way to frame school safety: We hear a lot about violence in our schools, particularly in the US. Some people read about what's going on in the US or wherever and say, "Just give it a few years and it will be here in Canada, here in Ontario." (Galt, Progressive Conservative June 12, 2000).

I appreciate that in the movies and on TV we see what's going on in the American school system and so we're going to model it in philosophy here, because the government thinks if we can create

39 Tony Silipo was the Minister of Education for the NDP government from 1991 – 1993 and this point stems mainly from my knowledge of him, his politics, and what he has said, found in Hansard.

45 the perception that there's a problem, then we can solve a problem that doesn't exist and get credit for it. Interestingly, the solution is to take the American solution to their problem, which has been proven not to work there either (Parsons, Liberal, June 12, 2000).

Although parallels were drawn to the United States, the American solution was not necessarily the path to choose. 40 The excesses of securitization were clear when school administrators visiting American schools frowned at the overuse of metal detectors and bars, because they made beautiful old schools look worse (SSA1; Day 1: 5). The danger of becoming the US was a theme, particularly when zero-tolerance discourse was activated (emphasis is my own): …the students and the teachers and a particularly heroic vice- principal [were] talking about the great danger of zero-tolerance. The politicians love zero-tolerance. It sounds so very good. My concern [and] I don't even mean to be partisan here because I hear the Democratic President of the United States and I hear the Conservative Premier of Ontario and I hear some of the same phrases. They are phrases crafted by and for Madison Avenue (Conway, Liberal, June 6, 2000).

[The Progressive Conservative government has] chosen the path of the right wing in the United States : Whip up a little fear, don't deal with it substantively and try to reap political reward as a result (Duncan, Liberal, June 7, 2000).

This is the same neo-conservative, Republican government that has cut funding from social workers and psychologists and support services for kids in school, and they dare talk about safe schools (Agostino, Liberal, June 13, 2000).

40 We see the American solution used again as a foil in the chapter on lockdowns.

46 Zero-tolerance was framed as a populist ploy – an American way of doing things. Echoing the sentiments of Newman, 41 these critics of the SSA suggested there is a Canadian way to achieve safety in schools, and advocated for the policing of the border of school policy, in order to prevent a turn to hyper-securitization. The Canadian approach to school safety had been compromised. The Conservative government was negotiating what constituted school safety – borrowing from the American example, but in a uniquely Canadian context. While critics openly espoused the evils of a zero-tolerance policy, Ecker refrained from invoking zero- tolerance despite its popularity with her government prior to the election.

In fact, there was a subtle shift at both ends of the political spectrum to refer to the policy as “zero violence” (see for example the earlier O’Toole quote). This was another device meant to distance the Ontario context from that of the US, since in Ontario we presumably allow for some measure of tolerance. Even throughout the initial debates on the SSA, the need for safety in schools remained an uncontested idea. This desire for school safety was continually met with the example of the United States, which became a perpetual straw man in how not to do things. Thus, the Ontario legislators navigated the uneasy terrain of doing something about safety, while stopping short of calling it zero-tolerance or falling into the trap of using tactics such as metal detectors, which could be criticized as “too American” a response.

There were aspects of the SSA that aligned well with zero-tolerance policy. Wacquant (2009) described the travels of Bratton 42 and how his zero-tolerance- cum-Broken Windows entourage was warmly received by then Mayor of Toronto Mel Lastman. Clearly, these ideas were migrating, but the political capital of zero- tolerance did not have the same cache as other phrases, like ‘efficient government,’

41 Recall, Progressive Conservative Newman (June 11, 1998) introduced his SSA as follows: “Although Ontario schools cannot be compared to US schools, with metal detectors and armed guards roaming school corridors, we must not shy away from the issue just because it has not yet exploded here. ” 42 Bratton was the Police Commissioner of New York City from 1994-1996.

47 ‘accountability,’ or even ‘safe schools.’ The lack of traction for the idea of zero- tolerance does not imply that Canadians are somehow a more tolerant people. However, it was the mythology of a more tolerant society (and the avoiding of the term zero-tolerance itself) that helped keep the moral authoritarian voice of neo- conservatism severed from the tenets of neo-liberalism as it pertained to school safety. The call for Ontario to avoid becoming the US was a particularly salient way of countering zero-tolerance discourse. The critical narratives of zero-tolerance did not necessarily win out. Rather, there were aspects of zero-tolerance that were neither as salient nor as easily sayable in the context of Ontario. 43

Zero-Tolerance in the TDSB: Grappling with Circuits of Inclusion and Exclusion

The legislative absence of the term zero-tolerance is significant, but it pops up in policies of the TDSB, and there was some confusion at the local level over how to interpret the SSA . For instance, TDSB trustees – albeit in greatly reduced numbers and power post-1990s – enacted a Safe Schools Policy on May 3, 2000. 44 The main policy component was explicitly zero-tolerance: “The Toronto District School Board does not tolerate any anti-social or violent behaviour, which impacts on [sic] learning environments. The Toronto District School Board’s commitment to zero- tolerance is central to the Safe Schools Policy ” (emphasis added, TDSB Minutes). Thus, zero-tolerance became a particular governmentality – a way to ‘conduct conduct’ (see Foucault 1991), and a safety incantation not necessarily mandated from above. In fact, while talk of zero-tolerance was remarkably absent from the SSA and the Ontario Code of Conduct, the TDSB was able to reaffirm its zero-tolerance approach when the new law came into effect. In a news release about an assault on a student, the TDSB reassured people that it “…has a Safe Schools Protocol that involves working with police services, community agencies and local government to

43 The concern over collecting race-based statistics (see Wortley 1999), and its eventual collection in school boards (see Yau et. al. 2014), also relates to the nationalistic pull to separate Canada from what are seen as American issues. 44 Recall that the SSA was formally assented to a month later in June.

48 develop preventative programs and initiatives. Part of the Safe Schools initiative is a Zero-tolerance policy that supports appropriate consequences for inappropriate behaviour” (March 19, 2002). Local pronouncements about the SSA were explicitly about zero-tolerance so that could signal the end to this genealogical quest. But, as I will argue in this section, zero-tolerance could be deployed fluidly within the TDSB.

Although there was a time when zero-tolerance was explicitly referenced in TDSB policies, it was erased ex post facto . During a training session on the changes made to the SSA by the newly elected Liberal government, senior TDSB officials indicated that zero-tolerance never actually existed in TDSB policies. These were some of the same TDSB officials who had proudly described it as a cornerstone of student discipline. Of course, the complete denial of the written and visible is particularly interesting from the standpoint of a genealogical inquiry. To frame the discussion of zero-tolerance in the TDSB, I will turn to the proceedings of The Safe and Compassionate Schools Task Force [hereinafter Compassionate Task Force].

The Compassionate Task Force marked an important moment in the contestation of zero-tolerance in the TDSB, and was central in the advancement of broader dialogue on school safety. Established on December 17, 2003, the Compassionate Task Force objectives were “To assess the effectiveness of the current Board’s Safe Schools Policy and its implementation: To identify the necessary steps to ensure that every Board school is a safe, compassionate, peaceful and inclusive learning environment in which to study and work” (SCSTF 2004). It also sought to determine the extent of the role played by race, gender, sexual orientation, class, or other diversity dimensions in the enforcement of the Safe Schools Policy. 45 As the name implies, compassion was seen as central to school safety, and it was suggested that rigid law

45 The SCSTF was spearheaded by two trustees in the TDSB, Zanana Akwande and Chris Bolton. Along with the two trustees was Bhattacharjee, who in 2003 had filed a report with the Ontario Human Rights Commission on exclusion policies in the TDSB. The OHRC has similar origins as the SCSTF and the latter emphasized many points in the former. The OHRC ’s stated goal was to “help move along the provincial review of the Safe Schools Act ” (Bhattacharjee 2003).

49 and order policies were uncaring and detrimental to the same. Discipline was of course important, but needed to be handled with compassion.

The Compassionate Task Force invited many experts, stakeholders, community groups, and parents to provide feedback on the SSA and policies of the TDSB. There were some heated consultations about the SSA 's effect on the TDSB. The bulk of the anger was directed at how racial minorities and students with disabilities were targeted in the SSA , creating an uncaring and rigid school environment. As one parent commented, “The zero-tolerance policy dehumanizes perpetrators of wrong by seeming to just cut them off” (SCSTF 2004: 18). Another parent said that “zero- tolerance in our schools is fundamentally flawed because it leaves no room for forgiveness. No room to exercise forgiveness. No room to learn forgiveness” (SCSTF 2004: 19). In these focus groups, public forums, and the final report, the SSA was consistently typified as a zero-tolerance policy. In particular, the US emerged again as a foil during these deliberations, where: One race relations expert stated that ‘zero-tolerance policy has been in effect for 10 years in the U.S. and there is now acceptance of the adverse effects of the policy…even though the TDSB has no Ontario statistical data on zero-tolerance it would be incredible if the impact [here] was any different (SCSTF 2004: 3).

Here, the common assumption is described more clearly: Ontario was in the midst of an American-style zero-tolerance policy for student discipline and had statistics which were unavailable to the TDSB. However, the TDSB policies, openly described as zero-tolerance, were mediated by the co-emergence of the SSA, which was silent on zero-tolerance . To many of those in attendance at the public forums, the SSA became the surrogate for a zero-tolerance policy. Throughout the deliberations, the difference between the TDSB Safe Schools Policy and the Safe Schools Act remained nebulous. The zero-tolerance portion of the TDSB’s Safe Schools Policy emerged during the transition to the SSA, but due to a lack of cohesion among administrators, and the way discretion was wielded in suspension/expulsion decisions, zero-

50 tolerance became a heuristically useful way for everyone to characterize the TDSB policies and the SSA .

The Compassionate Task Force’s name and objectives were designed to counter the perceived strong language of the SSA . Compassion, and to a lesser extent the term caring, were understood to stand in opposition to zero-tolerance. However, the Compassionate Task Force did not dig a trench to fight against zero-tolerance; rather, they strategically relied on the absence of zero-tolerance in the SSA. Upon examining the legislation even more closely, the Task Force had the following epiphany: Zero-tolerance is not part of the provincial legislation language and the task force believes strongly that safe schools policies ought to be thought of as being fundamentally different than zero-tolerance. It appears that two messages are being given to the administrators of safe schools policies. The presence of mitigating factors in provincial legislation and the TDSB safe schools policies inhibits the description of the Safe Schools Policy as being strictly zero- tolerance (SCSTF 2004: 8).

Part of the reason for the mixed messages received by administrators was that while zero-tolerance language appeared in some TDSB policy documents (specifically, the Safe Schools Procedural Manual , of which each principal had a copy), there were mitigating circumstances that implied the SSA was not a strict zero-tolerance policy. The mitigating factors, discussed in Provincial Policy Memorandums [PPMs] (106/01 for mandatory suspensions and 37/01 for mandatory expulsions) stated that the suspension/expulsion is not mandatory if: 1. the pupil does not have the ability to control his or her behaviour 2. the pupil does not have the ability to understand the foreseeable consequences of his or her behaviour; or 3. the pupil’s continuing presence in the school does not create an unacceptable risk to the safety of any person.

51 Administrative confusion was evident in discretionary decisions made by school principals whereby some infractions – those meant to result in a suspension/expulsion – were mitigated, because the principal believed the student was a good student who simply made a mistake or, as one principal asked “what child can really foresee the consequences of their actions” (Levinsky 2003)? The mitigating circumstances gave educators a discretionary space that undermined a zero-tolerance approach. However, principals were also able to use the SSA as a crutch to say they had no choice but to suspend or expel a child if parents were getting inquisitive about the disciplinary process (Levinsky 2016). The seemingly zero-tolerance approach provided principals and other administrators legitimacy in discretionary decisions. The anger the SCSTF heard expressed by parents was directed at the SSA itself rather than the TDSB specifically, precisely because of the belief among parents of a suspended/expelled child that the SSA had tied the hands of the administration.

In effect, the Compassionate Task Force adopted the same stance on mitigating factors as Bhattacharjee (2003) of the Ontario Human Rights Commission, making it tough to characterize any Safe Schools policy as zero-tolerance, and the contradictory messages caused confusion: In assessing whether zero-tolerance is being practiced in the school system in Ontario, it is important to keep in mind that principals and teachers are receiving two contradictory messages, one advocating “zero-tolerance” and prescribing “mandatory” action and the other directing them to apply mitigating factors (iii-iv).

The argument was that the lack of clarity in the SSA justified the TDSB's continued use of zero-tolerance in student discipline. Zero-tolerance was still practiced in the TDSB due to contradictory messaging. Although zero-tolerance was implied in the SSA , the dissonance was evident in interviews with principals who suggested that the act did not do anything new except give them more clout (see Levinsky 2016). While providing a document to defend principals’ exclusionary decisions, the

52 legislation contributed to a fluid understanding of school safety. The SSA gives the impression of a “get tough” agenda, but it was premised on mitigation – the antithesis of zero-tolerance. The SSA contained two simultaneous and contradictory messages whose fluidity enabled it to support a variety of rationales.

The Compassionate Task Force recommended that all instances of the phrase zero- tolerance be removed from current and future TDSB documents. The removal is both symbolic, and a reaffirmation of identity. When the safe school policies were first enacted, they were distanced from American penal common sense (Wacquant 2009) by suggesting that the practice predated these policies. Zero-tolerance was not something uniquely American, because it was already being practiced by Ontario school boards. 46 Later, the way to distance the TDSB safe schools policy from the American example was to remove any mention of the term zero-tolerance.

Zero-tolerance as strategy is what Garland (2001) terms a part of a ‘criminology of the other’ – where people who are not like us are targeted. In the TDSB, it was no surprise that an exclusionary tactic like zero-tolerance might be associated with racism, since the American data were readily available and quite damning. However, in keeping with the mythology of Canada being the more tolerant country, school governance personnel largely ignored the connection between race and school discipline. 47 In fact, one SCSTF recommendation not formally approved by the TDSB trustees was recommendation 8.1: “Based on anecdotal and empirical data as well as minimal quantitative data, it is apparent that the TDSB’s Safe School Policy impacts disproportionately on students from racialized and marginalized communities. Without statistics on race it is impossible to know this with any certainty, allowing an unfair discrediting of these communities’ concerns” (10). The SCSTF agreed with the OHRC (Bhattarcharjee 2003) that collecting statistics on race

46 Recall that the new SSA was typified as not really being a different approach to safety and that many of its tenets were not that new at all. 47 The apprehension of collecting and publicly reporting race-based statistics has shifted since this time period. Now, the TDSB publishes a census that looks at different marginalities (such as race or sexuality) and tracks things like achievement and discipline for instance (see Yau et. al. 2014).

53 was necessary, but as Wortley (1999) argued, this collection appears to be a northern taboo and why trustees rejected it. The idea of Canada as a tolerant and multicultural nation is enhanced when the American experience is distanced. The non-collection of race statistics, like the non-use of the term zero-tolerance, helps maintain boundaries between the two countries when it comes to race and intolerance. The connection between racism and zero-tolerance cannot be understated. It is well documented that zero-tolerance policies have devastating effects on racial minorities (Verdugo 2002). The silencing of zero-tolerance and the refusal to collect race-based statistics are two sides of the same coin, representing Canadian identity and the mythology of tolerance.

The trustees of the TDSB did not recognize many of the Compassionate Task Force’s recommendations, but the report forced the creation of subsequent committees and meetings and influenced the agenda for future discussions on the SSA . Interestingly, one of the major critiques of the Task Force is that it relied too much on anecdotal evidence, which it freely admitted, and then used this gap to support the need for collecting statistical data. Thus, the report was delegitimized as an authoritative text on the issues with zero-tolerance, and not granted access to data that would give it more authority. In the new era of the total information society, where information is collected every step of the way to set targets and monitor progress, race remained an elusive data set because of its potential to destabilize the mythical Canadian identity (see Jiwani 1999 and Backhouse 1999 on silences of race and racism; see Loo 1992 and Williams 1991 on the silencing of evidence of racism as anecdotal).

In other recommendations, the organizational pull toward the risk management of everything was clear (see Power 2004; Ericson and Haggerty 1997), from linking up with research institutions (such as OISE and York University), to making statistics on disciplinary decisions more available. As the Compassionate Task Force (2004) noted, “in the words of one parent: ‘if we are sending our kids to your school, we have the right to get those statistics” (4). Suspension and expulsion statistics have the dual capability of exposing issues of marginalization, where students may be

54 suspended based on race or disabilities, and also represent a way to acquire safety knowledge about a particular school.

Re-Tooling the SSA : Erasing Zero-Tolerance

When the Liberal government was elected in the fall of 2003, the SSA was reviewed by a new committee: The Safe Schools Action Team. The mandate of this team was to do a province-wide review of the impact of the SSA, akin to what the Compassionate Task Force had done in the TDSB. The Safe Schools Action Team (2006) identified eight themes for priority action:

- Prevention

- Progressive Discipline

- Community and Parental Involvement

- Application of the Safe Schools Act

- Programs for Suspended/Expelled Students

- Education and Training

- Communication

- The Provincial Safe Schools Framework (p. 5)

The general points for action fit within broad liberal trends documented elsewhere (see Rose 1996; Garland 2001; O’Malley, 1999), particularly in activating parent and community involvement, as well as partnerships and the shift to a preventative framework. Under the prevention theme, the action team used the buzzwords of citizen development, restorative practice and empowerment programs (see Cruickshank 1996 and Hannah-Moffat 2000). The most highly touted change was the use of progressive discipline. The government explained what the changes in the SSA meant for parents:

55 Ontario has shifted away from an approach that is solely punitive toward progressive discipline, a new approach that corrects inappropriate behaviour and offers multiple supports ( SSA: Fact Sheet 2006).

The phrases ‘solely punitive’ and ‘one-size-fits-all’ were the only evidence in Liberal talking points bearing any similarity to zero-tolerance, but they were strategically invoked to present progressive discipline in opposition. Progressive discipline was not an entirely new idea, given that Newman's 48 original SSA (1998), despite assessing mandatory penalties for given infractions, also contained the following clause: Code to be flexible: 302 (4) The school code of conduct shall give the principal flexibility in the imposition of penalties and provide for progressive discipline, including possible suspension or exclusion.

Embedded within the initial act was the idea of progressive discipline. Consequently, zero-tolerance in Ontario was always uneasily aligned with the ideas of proportionality that would be the linchpin of the subsequent Liberal SSA . The co- existence of the terms ‘zero-tolerance’ and ‘progressive discipline’ signalled how school safety legislation resembled what Ericson (2007) refers to as ‘governing through vague terms.’ Certain words become politically expedient to use, but are still malleable and vague.

The new government informed parents that progressive discipline meant: 1. Principals will consider the most appropriate way to respond to each situation.

48 I identify the incarnations of the SSA as Newman ’s or Ecker ’s or the Liberal Government only for the sake of clarity. I am not suggesting that these incarnations come down to the musings of one or two people.

56 2. Students will have more opportunities to learn from the choices they make. 3. Parents will be made aware sooner and will have more opportunities to be involved. 4. More social workers, counsellors and psychologists will be working with school boards to offer support and counselling to students (Ontario 2009:1).

The first point mirrors the emphasis on proportionality that was the main focus of the federal Youth Criminal Justice Act of 2003. The second point’s emphasis on choice was a way for the school to deal with troublemakers, and for the board to be absolved of any blame for student suspensions and expulsions (see my argument in Levinsky 2016). The responsibility of the school was to ensure that bad choices by students became teachable moments. Choice emerged as a way for principals to deal with the tension in the wake of a zero-tolerance-like push to exclude students through mandatory minimum punishments, and the tenets of inclusion in a liberal democratic education. Choice was now explicitly emphasized in the legislative direction echoing the presence of choice evident at the TDSB level (Levinsky 2016).

The fourth point (expanding the use of social workers, counsellors, and psychologists) can be read as an attempt to know students better. With the funding cuts introduced by Harris, problems some consistently flagged problems were around the lack of supports for students. Such supports, of course, also provide more eyes and voices in making decisions about individual students, which is why they were pitched as a part of a progressive discipline strategy. The move away from the one-size-fits-all approach to discipline dovetailed with moving away from using aggregates (as suggested by Feely & Simon 1992) to tailor punishments since it required collecting more information from a range of experts. Interestingly, and related to how power contradictorily exists in schools, these people supplying extra supports for students can also extend the disciplinary reach of the school.

57 Whither zero-tolerance in this era of progressive discipline? Echoing the Compassionate Task Force and the OHRC, the Safe Schools Action Team argued that zero-tolerance never existed in the SSA because of the presence of mitigating factors. The Action Team also suggested that ‘zero-tolerance’ itself is open to interpretation, but that it was “loosely perceived as automatic [discipline]…regardless of factors or conditions surrounding the incident (2006:26). Mitigating factors, in play since the original SSA, are once again used as evidence that mandatory consequences were not necessarily the same as zero-tolerance. The Safe Schools Action Team continued, suggesting that the perception of zero-tolerance in the SSA is the antithesis of a safe school environment: …there is a perception that the Safe Schools Act focuses on zero- tolerance rather than promoting appropriate behaviours. Ending the use of the term and the perception of ‘zero-tolerance’ requires a clearer understanding of the Act which can be achieved through training … and communication (2006: 18).

The new SSA , relying on the recommendations of the Safe Schools Action Team, highlighted that the most significant issue with the previous Act was that it lacked clarity and consistency – essentially the same reasons for the introduction of the original SSA . Although there was a move away from a strict law and order piece of legislation, there was a clear and continual shift to ensure consistency in student discipline. Hidden in the Liberal government shift from a ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach, was the same desire to strengthen the clout and defensibility of decisions provided by the original SSA .

It is peculiar that the Liberals did not use the re-examination of the SSA as an opportunity to admonish the Conservative government for using zero-tolerance. In fact, the Action Team could have denounced not only zero-tolerance, but also the racial disparity provoked by such tough-on-crime campaigns. Instead, the Action Team stated the following:

58 Concern has been expressed that that some groups are more likely to be suspended or expelled than others. Ontarians want the Safe Schools Act to be consistently applied by schools and school boards. The incorrect perception that the Act supports the concept of “zero- tolerance” must be dispelled. (2006: 12)

Racism is silenced in this statement, as the concern is blanketed as ‘some groups’ without the well-documented specifics. Race continued to be an uncomfortable topic of discussion, as it was in the context of the TDSB, and was intertwined with the sensibility of zero-tolerance in school discipline. The fact that this racial disparity may result from school safety practices is ignored, and pointing out that zero- tolerance was never said destabilizes the claim of racism in these practices. Zero- tolerance in the US was well known for being racialized, and this contributed to the haphazard way it was invoked in the Ontario and TDSB contexts. There were still proponents of zero-tolerance who went through the motions of reiterating the transposed American discourse of discipline and order. However, the irregular way zero-tolerance came up in post-Progressive Discipline discourse in the TDSB and Ontario suggested there was contestation over invoking zero-tolerance as a metaphor for school safety while maintaining a distinctly Canadian identity.

The language in the new SSA and the Provincial Code of Conduct shows the subtle shift in school governance and student discipline. For example, the original Provincial Code of Conduct (created with Ecker’s SSA ) emphasized the following principles: 1. To ensure that all members of the school community, especially people in positions of authority, are treated with respect and dignity. 2. To promote responsible citizenship by encouraging appropriate participation in the civic life of the school community. 3. To maintain an environment where conflict and difference can be addressed in a manner characterized by respect and civility.

59 4. To encourage the use of non–violent means to resolve conflict. 5. To promote the safety of people in the schools. 6. To discourage the use of alcohol and illegal drugs.

The advanced liberal sensibilities of responsible citizenship are interspersed with the moral conservatism of not using alcohol or drugs, and the more restorative approach to conflict resolution. However, the above principles still evoke the image that boundaries need to be created through the proper deference to law and order. The newer “Fundamental Beliefs” reads:

• Everyone has a responsibility to promote a safe environment.

• Everyone should be aware of their rights, as active and engaged citizens. More importantly, everyone should also accept responsibility for protecting their rights and the rights of others. Responsible citizenship involves taking part in the civic life of the school.

• All members of the school community are to be treated with respect and dignity, especially those in positions of authority.

• Everyone has a responsibility to resolve conflicts in a way that is civil and respectful. Insults, hurtful acts and a lack of respect for others disrupt learning and teaching in a school community.

• Everyone is expected to resolve conflicts without using violence. Physical aggression is not a responsible way to deal with other people. No one should use an object to injure another person, or even threaten to use an object to injure another person. This is unacceptable and puts everyone's safety at risk.

The language in the Provincial Code of Conduct put in place by the Liberal government strengthened notions of responsibility and self-actualization. In fact, non-violent conflict resolution becomes a character trait of responsible people,

60 highlighting that the Liberal document appears to be an example of pure- governmentality: where there is an emphasis on self-actualization and the freedom of the self (see O’Malley, Rose, Valverde 2009). The emphasis on the freedom of the self shifts some of the responsibility calculus in school discipline away from the institution. For those scoring at home, traces of this shift can be found in the previous legislation and some of the newer principles used the original language almost verbatim, for instance: “members of the school community are to be treated with respect and dignity, especially those in positions of authority.” The new Provincial Code refined the suggestion that those within the school community should ‘know their rights.’ The directive to know one’s rights (and by definition the rules) allegedly helps reduce behavioural issues (see Levinsky 2016). The aspects of the SSA that transcended political ideologies are threads where governing through freedom and choice are revealed.

Zero-tolerance did not disappear ignominiously; it was not written out of the SSA because it was never there to begin with. The new SSA was not the same as the old one. It did reverse a law and order mentality but did so somewhat unassumingly. However, what it did strengthen was the idea that provincial legislation could make student discipline a clear and consistent enterprise and thereby of increase school safety. The new act also gave educators the resources to defend their daily decisions.

Theorizing Zero-Tolerance Dissipation

Zero-tolerance did not dissipate because of critics arguing it was an unjust and ineffective way to govern school safety. Curiously, the then incoming Liberal government could have used the moment to play politics and bemoan the earlier government for inciting a (racialized) zero-tolerance piece of legislation. Instead, the original SSA is referenced as a one-size-fits-all policy, and zero-tolerance – while implied – remains in the background, unstated. Members of the Liberal Party were the first to apply the derisive moniker of zero-tolerance to the legislation during parliamentary debate, and yet they were the same party to point out that zero-

61 tolerance was never a part of the original legislation. Zero-tolerance emerged more clearly in the counter-discourse of the SSA as a way to characterize the Americanization of school safety.

Wacquant (2009) details how zero-tolerance started in New York City and then became globalized. In his analysis, he puts an emphasis on European nations taking up the term and practice. What is problematic, and similar to my critique of Giroux’s (2003a for instance, but also Lyons and Drew 2006) work is that he presents zero- tolerance as being monolithically accepted (Levinsky 2016). Any analysis of zero- tolerance must include how specific nations or cultural histories intersect with what he terms the American penal common sense. While his analysis shows how zero- tolerance emerged in a cascade across multiple sites, it remains, to him, a fairly immovable concept that drifts from country to country. Though there is a small passage about Bratton coming to Toronto, Wacquant does not focus on Canada in his analysis of the American penal common sense. Because of the close proximity of the two nations, it is possible he assumes that the spectre of zero-tolerance would have to go through Canada to get to Europe. The relationship between Canada and the United States is particularly unique and fragmented, as evident from historical studies of early nation building (see Loo 1992 and Backhouse 1999). The portrayal of the zero-tolerance language that emerged in Ontario in the 90s as just another example of how discourse was borrowed from New York ignores how the SSA was negotiated in Ontario and the TDSB. It is superficial to simply note how zero- tolerance existed within the Conservative Party’s platform. The discourse of zero- tolerance certainly lingered in Ontario, but it gained an entirely different sensibility that approached, but fell short of, what Wacquant (2009) calls ‘American penal common sense.’

One thing neglected in discourse/policy transfer studies is how voices on the ground may impact policy discussions (Wacquant 2009; also see Newburn 2002). Ideas do not necessarily flow as goods to be handed out in different political and national contexts. This viewpoint concocts discourses – such as zero-tolerance – as an

62 overbearing force that imposes itself on a new state; the population either acquiesces to the policy or resists it. In this instance, resistance to the Americanization of safety policy took the form of calling the SSA zero-tolerance. Those protesting the SSA referred to it as a zero-tolerance act, and in doing so were able to access a particular counter-discourse already established in the United States. I am neither suggesting that the SSA should or should not be considered a zero-tolerance policy, nor that the current regime of progressive discipline is somehow devoid of zero-tolerance undertones. The main point is that the discourse of zero-tolerance has disappeared, as has its counter-discourse.

Alternatively, it could be argued that the relationship between counter-discourse and discourse is symbiotic: in order for it to emerge as a contrarian position, it has to be preceded by discourse. However, as I have demonstrated, it was the counter- discourse that was more crystallized and active in deploying zero-tolerance in the TDSB and Ontario government policies. I argue the counter-discourse reaffirmed the desire to uphold a uniquely Canadian identity in the face of American encroachments. The arguments for zero-tolerance did not win out, nor did they lose per se . The discourse and counter-discourse became erased as though non-existent.

The national differences invoked in the discussions of zero-tolerance mirror the dichotomies presented in the early nation-building and identity formation of Canada. Canadian identity often emerges from something in opposition to American identity. In talking about sedition trials of Loyalists in 1780s Nova Scotia, Bell (1995) documents the use of language to target those who were un-Canadian. Opposition leaders were deemed to be of a “Republican craft,” and the rhetoric made one commenter “shudder” as it was reminiscent of the propaganda responsible for the “late American usurpation” (170). These rhetorical devices of inventing Canadians and creating an enemy out of Americans were evident in the discussions surrounding the SSA and TDSB policy. Obviously, during the 1780s, the threat of the emergent American state encroaching onto surrounding territory was very real, and this fear helped create a particular understanding of the Canadian

63 nation-state as 'not American'. It should therefore come as no surprise that this sort of language remains, when there is a symbolic fear of American discourse encroaching upon Canada (see also Loo 1994).

The dissipation of zero-tolerance in Ontario concretizes the Canadian identity as opposed to the American other. Rooted in the trend to zero-tolerance in other Western states, is the manifest push for the Canadian experience to be distanced from being too American. This self-reflexivity does not mean Canadians were somehow more tolerant but does helps to explain why critics of the SSA were quick to argue that zero-tolerance was emblematic of the American experience. Once elected, the Conservative party avoided connecting zero-tolerance with school safety. Zero-tolerance and race were both elephants in the House of Commons, and largely present only in critiques and counter-discourses of the SSA . These criticisms culminated in the Safe Schools Action Team finding that zero-tolerance was not in the original SSA, and racial disparities from school discipline were a result of this confusion. The Safe Schools Action Team linked racial disparity with zero-tolerance regimes and, while not addressing the concerns of parents and community members directly, implied that ending the belief that Ontario took an American approach to school safety would be sufficient enough to negate the claims of racial disparity in school discipline.

Throughout the invocation of school safety discourse in Ontario, the drive to hyper- securitization sits uneasily with the mythology of the Canadian identity and the tenets of education in a liberal democratic society (see Dewey 1966 [1916]). One of the clearer manifestations of this resistance was the School Community Safety Advisory Panel Report (known as the Falconer Report), which recommended the use of sniffer dogs instead of metal detectors for gun detection, 49 despite Falconer’s original preference to push for metal detectors (personal communiqué). The fundamental tension between security technologies and Canadian tolerance shows

49 In consultation with OISE Professor Kathleen Gallagher (see also Gallagher 2007).

64 that safety is in a constant state of negotiation and flux. Despite being about mandatory consequences, the SSA was a fluid piece of legislation, which allowed it to be diversely typified, and provide a space for securitization to emerge. Zero- tolerance and the perception of an increase in school violence are both examples of incantations – ideas that lose their substance through repetition. This was evident in the creation of a crisis to create a need for a solution, such as the SSA itself, but also in the changes made by the Liberal government. Legislation offers little in the way of substance while simultaneously being fluid and capable of covering multiple bases. Zero-tolerance as an approach to school safety represented such a superstition, or ‘safety incantation,’ as I have called it. Despite being more of a gesture, the manner in which this form of school discipline played out in Ontario has important implications for the production of Canadian beliefs in education, race and discipline. While some may argue that zero-tolerance is still alive in Ontario schools, it is quite significant that it is no longer sayable in student suspension/expulsion decisions. Even the hiding or renaming of the ritual is important in defining the Canadian approach to school discipline and school safety.

Although there is an absence of the term ‘zero-tolerance’ in the TDSB, some of its premises still exist: the TDSB says it does not tolerate violence of any kind, and the government policy still mentions mandatory punishments for certain infractions. These subtly different phrases strategically turn people away from focusing on the unhealthy aspects of zero-tolerance. In Ontario, we can be re-affirmed as being more tolerant (since we are not zero tolerant), while allowing ourselves to cling to similar mechanisms in school safety. In power/knowledge discourse analysis, researchers too often focus on what is said or ‘sayable’. As Foucault (2002) argues, “Discourse may seem of little account but the prohibitions to which it is subject reveal soon enough its links with desire and power” (11-12). Thus, there is an emphasis on the reverberations of said things and how they produce truths. However, the silencing of ‘zero-tolerance’ has many implications for regimes of truth and power/knowledge games. Discourse can thus be explored as an absence, or a silence. Feminist scholars already point to the importance of exploring these

65 silences, of what is un said or un seen and how it relates to games of power/knowledge (see for instance Martin’s (1988) take on the removal of the woman’s complete body from medical texts, although I am inferring a Foucauldian power/knowledge leap). Often in the debate around school safety and security, the attention of scholars is on what is said by texts and who will be affected by these policies. The removal of zero-tolerance language is a strategic attempt to change the terrain upon which actors in Toronto talk about safe schools. Rather than look at who is potentially marginalized by the new SSA , which is the focus of most work on zero-tolerance, I argued that the silencing of zero-tolerance is its own particular truth regime. The silence of zero-tolerance does not delegitimize a law and order discourse, but it does destabilize it. Perhaps zero-tolerance becomes authorized in other ways by calling instead for mandatory punishments or progressive discipline. We will also see in the next chapter that while there is no zero-tolerance for broken windows or graffiti, there are other mechanisms such as the Safe Schools Audit that activate a zero-tolerance sensibility.

Interestingly, zero-tolerance is still present in defining what the current practice is not doing. It exists as a foil, a supposed opposite to what is happening now. Zero- tolerance thus becomes objectified and only a shadow of its former self in order to produce and procure new ways of describing governance. Taking this into the current context, the enemy of school safety became zero-tolerance and the American way. It was something that one had to discuss or bring up when talking about the SSA or safety in Ontario schools.

At politically convenient times, particularly during law and order discussions, zero- tolerance was uttered. During these times, the self-other dialectic that was emphasized was between the other-as-criminal and the other-as-bad-student. Of interest in this dialectic is the continual, explicit denunciation of the SSA having ever been zero-tolerance. This denial is linked to understandings of the mythology of Canadian tolerance, and is opposed to the American penal common sense. These dialectics are important for policy transfer discussions, since “if those resistant to

66 change can convince others that a new idea threatens national traditions, it may be possible to reject the former outright as, for instance ‘un-American’ (in the case of American response to communist or socialist ideas) or ‘un-French’ (in the case of French response to ‘American’ ideas) … the perceived origin of ideas often has great symbolic importance” (Saguy 2002: 263). So while zero-tolerance was essentially never mentioned in official policies (appearing in a single sentence in the Safe Schools Procedure Manual), it still needed to be denounced in official discourse to help distance the Ontario SSA and legitimize its value as legislation post- Conservative party.

Conclusion

In conclusion, I want to re-visit Simon’s (2007) argument: Despite some resistance to the excesses of zero-tolerance, one should not expect widespread resentment toward the criminalization of schools, because it links the governance of schools to the problem of parental insecurity about their children at school (230).

In Ontario, not only was parental insecurity at play, but school boards were insecure about being seen as rigid, zero-tolerance regimes. Simon’s remark assumes an uncritical gaze at how zero-tolerance policies exclude and target certain populations, whereas the TDSB was quite conscious of how some parents were seeing the negativity of such policies. Principals grappled with the push to exclude in the original SSA , while stating that it was antithetical to the goals of education (see Levinsky 2016). Somehow, at these minute areas (the individual principal, the complaining parent, the founding principles of the school board), there was a reversal of policy. Those who typecast the SSA and the TDSB as committed to a zero- tolerance policy tell a more convenient story than is borne out by data. Exclusionary concerns often do trump inclusionary concerns in schools. Schools are increasingly using crime prevention strategies that inscribe security on student bodies (ID cards;

67 uniforms), make students more visible (clear knapsacks; random locker checks; metal detectors; CCTV) and restrict the flow of students (unlocking only one door; see the chapter on lockdowns). However, something about zero-tolerance itself was unpalatable.

What I have shown through tracing the recent history of the SSA and school discipline in the TDSB is that the language of zero-tolerance was conspicuous by its absence. Where zero-tolerance strategies existed, they were often downplayed as something enforced prior to the SSA , silenced and removed explicitly from places, or their previous existence denied completely. Zero-tolerance in school discipline in the TDSB destabilized the promises of what education should be, and the nature of Canadian identity. While there was a need to do something about the purported crisis of violence in schools, there was a distancing of zero-tolerance from the SSA and TDSB policies. How the concept of zero-tolerance played out in Ontario represents a rupture in the conduct of conduct – a moment when an idea (at least ostensibly) dies out. This adds to our understanding of zero-tolerance policies within a Canadian context and the politics of educational discourse, but also represents a way to do a genealogy of an idea that loses favour or traction. In the context of school discipline, legislation began as a more ‘law and order’ approach before giving way to progressive discipline – however both have a risk management mindset concerned with defending decisions and fortifying against negative reputational perceptions. The ability of the SSA to be fluid, and to be both about and not about zero-tolerance, represents how competing ideologies can use the same legislation to do different things. This fuzziness has implications for those engaged in student discipline in the TDSB. The main message gleaned from the legislation was not that zero-tolerance could make schools safer, but that student disciplinary decisions could be defended. Newman and Ecker’s SSA achieved this through mandatory consequences, a provincial code of conduct, and the use of mitigating factors. As my research showed, principals under the original SSA were not referencing zero-tolerance, but were talking about the authority, legitimacy, and support they received for clarifying and legislating the disciplinary process. In fact,

68 most principals felt as though the original SSA was not doing anything different than they were doing already (see also Levinsky 2003).

Finally, there was no concerted effort to undo zero-tolerance in school discipline because the idea of zero-tolerance was nebulous, and its existence and disappearance related to the management of student and institutional risk. Referring to the changes in the SSA as a product of zero-tolerance does a disservice to the nuances where the push to exclude is held at bay by the pull to include – often through the technique of compassion. It is still necessary to be critical of how marginalized populations (racialized groups and those with developmental or behavioural issues) are disproportionately targeted for suspensions and expulsions, but to tie it strictly to zero-tolerance is more expedient and less useful. In the following chapter, we see how school discipline and school safety becomes centralized within the Safe Schools Office. Not only does this office balance concerns of inclusion and exclusion on the ground but also it shows a particular institutional [compassionate] response to the risk management of everything.

69 Chapter 3: The Safe Schools Office: Compassion as Risk Management

“Yes we do look at what is best for the kid, but we do what is right and what is legal” - Safe Schools Administrator 1; Day 1: 6

Introduction

Early in my training session, a senior Safe Schools Office (SSO) administrator observed “our job is no longer about correction, it is about prevention” (SSA1; Day 1: 6). In this chapter, I explore this shift to prevention in the creation and use of the Safe Schools Office. This chapter will argue that the SSO is an example of the preventative turn (see Ashworth and Zedner 2014), which, in the case of school safety, aligns caring and compassion with risk management logics. Complete shifts to entirely new governance rationales tend to be overstated (see Ashworth and Zedner 2014; Garland 2001) but in the context of school safety this newer emphasis results in strange couplings and competing claims in this move away from ‘correction to prevention’ and allows for a compassionate risk management.

The SSO provides a new bureaucratic and centralized site in school boards to administer and produce safety through the documentation process. Through the document, the SSO provides actionable knowledge for the school and school board to reach certain benchmarks in safety and allows a governance of educators at a distance.

In the new documentation process older documents, like the Individual Education Plan (IEP) designed to address the needs of the student in the classroom, become part of this new preventative framework. Through the IEP, educators need to demonstrate that they have taken student supports into account, or shown their duty to care. The IEP also enables school boards to know potential unknown students. Therefore, the type of prevention engaged in by the SSO does not just

70 prevent student misbehaviour and create safe spaces, although this is a core feature, but also ensures educators are actively demonstrating a duty of care owed to students – particularly through Progressive Discipline (as introduced in the previous chapter). The SSO ensures teachers and principals have followed proper protocols and processes when dealing with disorderly student conduct – partly because the SSO is focused on limiting the risk of litigation and human rights challenges that school boards and educators could face.

In the example of the SSO, the logic of prevention is thus more muddled with the advent of progressive discipline because the office is negotiating a balance between exclusionary and inclusionary circuits (see Chapter 1). The TDSB owes a duty to create safe spaces for those serious about school,50 while also demonstrating that the problem pupil has supports available and the benefit of the Progressive Discipline policy (as opposed to being removed entirely under a zero-tolerance regime). The concern for all students is part of the duty of care expected in a liberal- democratic education system (see Dewey 1966). This theory of education aligns with the Foucauldian concept of pastoral power in which all members of the flock are cared for individually as part of a larger group. No sheep is overlooked and sometimes the care provided to one rogue sheep may jeopardize the entire flock. The compassionate turn (or perhaps re-turn, see Williamson and Jones 1979) assembles with the newer preventative logic of risk management in institutions. Discretion becomes streamlined and everything is documented – including taking steps to demonstrate you have cared. In this way, the emergence of progressive discipline produces a new way to frame data collection, and using compassion becomes a new way of constituting safety. Caring and compassion are not new in education, but what is new is it is a direct reaction against zero-tolerance which is absorbed by the over-arching shift to preventative justice (see Ashworth and Zedner 2014). As Ashworth and Zedner (2014) inform us, the contours of the preventative state relates to the “the imperative to prevent, or at least to diminish the prospect of,

50 I borrow this phrase from a principal I interviewed for a different research project.

71 wrongful harms conflicts with these [justice in a liberal society] requirements since it may require intervention before reasonable suspicion can be established, on the basis of less conclusive evidence or even in respect of innocent persons.” [252]. The authors also point out that this tension is almost always resolved in favour of prevention, however in the context of school safety, I will argue this preventative (risk management) approach melds with the pastoral power of the school to address, somewhat, these concerns about justice.

First, this chapter discusses the history of the SSO to situate the argument that even though legislation shifted from zero-tolerance to progressive discipline, the preventative focus of the SSO remained its central function. Next, I will outline the documentation process of the SSO to show it reconfigured how safety was produced. I argue that it is through the document that the risk management goals of the SSO are achievable, and that it also governs at a distance by making educators document being compassionate while also limiting discretion (despite a policy that, as demonstrated in Chapter 2, is not one-size-fits-all). Finally, I will address how this prevention logic combined with compassion and inclusionary logics in newer ways. I argue, in contrast to the exclusionary regime of zero-tolerance, compassion coupled with risk management led to specific techniques of governance using inclusionary circuits, which are often unexplored in discussions of school safety (see also Raby 2012; Raby 2014; Gallagher 2007). Although schools may not necessarily be more inclusive, the compassionate and inclusionary focus of the current SSA means that prevention looks different than it had under an exclusionary policy.

A History of the Safe Schools Office

The original SSA exposed the government and school board to human rights challenges (see Bhatarchjee 2003) because it relied heavily on non-discretionary decisions (see Levinsky 2016). As I argued in Chapter 2, progressive discipline became a way to address the perceived Americanization of education and school safety. The idea of caring became central in school safety (as evidenced by the

72 Compassionate Task Force) as a way to soften student disciplinary practices. Central to addressing the challenges facing the SSA in the TDSB was the very first Safe Schools Office (SSO), created in 1999.

The SSO was created just before the Safe Schools Act came into force and was designed as a way to provide a centralized expertise to the diverse schools in the TDSB. As its origin story states: The TDSB created the SSO of the School Services Department in 1999 to ensure that our schools are safe and caring communities. It is a comprehensive, multi-disciplinary team of staff who provide direction and support to school administrators, senior staff, parents, students and the community (Presentation slides from SSO).

In the TDSB, the SSO consists of a: System superintendent, central co-ordinating principal; 3 system administrators, 5 cluster administrators, 2 advisors per cluster, designated child and youth workers/counsellors, social work and psychologist, over 40 safe and caring school programs (Presentation slides from SSO).

The SSO has a range of duties – helping principals with disciplinary decisions; improving the safety features of a building; conducting training exercises; dealing with parents; and administering suspension/expulsion programs. The SSO was envisioned as being independent from provincial legislation, although it helps enforce and implement provincial policies. The SSO is central to discipline in the TDSB, and was a model exported to other school boards.

The SSO first emerged alongside the common sense (and mistaken view) that schools were not safe, and would be safer through clear disciplinary procedures and

73 consequences for inappropriate behaviour (see Chapter 2; Levinsky 2003). 51 The TDSB created the Safe Schools Office in a climate where safety was a key educational concern, and part of the shift to establish and measure benchmarks for achieving safety (see also Kupchik 2010). Despite the fact SSO administrators now point out that school violence is down across the board and school safety concerns may have been overblown (SSA1; Day 1: 6), the SSO continues to be legitimated as necessary to school safety.

The SSO had several name changes in its brief history, highlighting the desire to be seen as compassionate. Under the Parents tab on the TDSB website, the list reads, among other things: “Safe and caring [sic] Schools.” 52 The SSO underwent this name change after the Task Force on Safe and Compassionate Schools (discussed in Chapter 2). The non-capitalization of ‘caring’ reflects its later inclusion into the ‘Safe Schools’ arena and serves to highlight how compassion/caring gets melded with risk management techniques. The department was subsequently re-named the “Caring and Safe Schools Department” to underscore its integral link to caring.

Safety – particularly in ‘Safe Schools’ – developed a negative connotation to parents and other educators in the wake of the original SSA (see Safe and Compassionate Schools Task Force 2004), which led to a subtle re-branding. In the original SSA, safety was seen as achievable through suspensions, expulsions, and tough love, making it the focus of human rights complaints. When the SSO became the “Caring and Safe Schools Department,” the oscillation between fear of and fear for children is evident (see Grossberg 2002). The ‘caring’ aspect of the department distances it from being all about the fear of children, and instead makes the observation that all students, even problematic ones, need to be protected and cared for. Caring matters, at least ostensibly, in the context of the Safe Schools Office, because ‘safety’ is intended to cover all students – even potentially problematic ones. This caring is still

51 This may also have something to do with the large number of ex-police officers originally hired to work in the SSO. 52 The capitalization has since been corrected but the oversight existed for several months on the TDSB website.

74 wedded to a risk management logic and the rhetoric of prevention. There is a melding of techniques accentuated by the turn to progressive discipline,53 which emphasizes caring but still sits with the existing logic of the SSO – prevention. With the turn away from zero-tolerance to a more caring environment (at least in presentation), prevention and risk management remain, as does the SSO. I first discuss how risk management is achieved through the documentation process.

Risk Management: “Document, Document, Document”

The key technique of prevention taught by the SSO to educators was the often- repeated phrase “document, document, document” (SSA1; Day 1: 16; SSA2; Day 2: 32). Educators were instructed to keep a record of interactions with students and parents, and to make notes of any thought processes behind disciplinary decisions. The refrain suggests that proper documentation would offer protection. We can break down the phrase into its three constitutive parts to suggest there are three ways the document is important to the risk management functions of the SSO. First, the document represents the production of knowledge and the benchmarking of safety in the TDSB. Second, the document signifies a dissemination of information, best practices, and forms assembled and compiled from a centralized location. Third, the document represents the prevention logic embedded in education systems and it is this aspect of the document to which I will now turn.

Part of the training by the SSO includes a step-by-step guide to discipline, from the initial investigation to the appeal process. The addition of progressive discipline in the SSA represents more than the pendulum swinging from harsh to more lenient punishment. The revised SSA reifies the collection of information in a database (created in 2001) to track the disciplinary records of students, which has

53 There has also been a proliferation of similar policies in the move from zero-tolerance to progressive discipline such as: the Accepting Schools Act (2012); the Equity and Inclusive Education Strategy (Ontario Ministry of Education 2009). These changes themselves are borne of reactions to the original SSA from the TDSB settlement with the Ontario Human Rights Commission; the final report into the shooting death of Jordan Manners (School Community Safety Advisory Panel 2008); and the Roots of Youth Violence Report (McMurtry and Curling 2008).

75 contributed to an increase in paperwork. As I have argued elsewhere (Levinsky 2016; Chapter 2), the process for suspension and expulsion in the TDSB was less about ‘getting tough’ – in spite of the rhetoric of zero-tolerance – and far more about ensuring that problem students were not unknowns, and that proper procedures were followed. In the original SSA and its non-discretionary language, SSO administrators and principals honed in on establishing a student paper trail so they would “know where the student came from” (see Levinsky 2003), and also ensure the defensibility of their disciplinary decisions. The theory of progressive discipline may be a new way to frame the gathering of information but it serves the similar purposes of facilitating knowing the unknown. Disciplining students and correcting their behaviour is less important; recall the administrator who argued, “our job is no longer about correction, it is about prevention.” The SSO is concerned with preventing student misbehaviour and uses documentation to also prevent future litigation against the school board and educators.

The document is part of a paper trail that can be used to flag problem students when they move to different schools (such as high school) and protects against the threat of future lawsuits. The mantra of “document, document, document” thus encapsulates the drive of institutions towards total information awareness (see Whitaker 2006) and is understood as a proactive way to manage future risks: “When the lawsuit and the media comes they want to know two things: First, when did you know and second, what did you do about it?” (SSA2; Day 1: 4). The concern is not just about losing a civil suit, which the school board administrators are quick to point out rarely happens, but also about the potential publicity. The document, reconfigured from welfarist purposes to provide support for students, also becomes a risk management technology. 54

54 We must also not forget the key role played by the documentation process in producing knowledge for the social sciences (see Foucault 1977).

76 Educators are routinely reminded that the SSO plays a preventative role by limiting future risks. On explaining why notes should be kept indefinitely, the SSO maintained: Our job is to protect your butts. This [bullying] is a big area to be sued for by the board and years later people are coming back. Before it was based on a threshold of how would a reasonable person run the home (SSA1; Day 3: 40).

The document imagines students as potential future threats and highlights how the shift to securitization in schools is not solely about technological devices. 55 How a reasonable person would run the home is not enough to show an educator’s duty of care because the educator has to show they listened, and took seriously, every allegation of bullying made by a student. Within the SSO, preventative compassion is intertwined with the formalization and legalization of school safety.

Bullying is itself a new area of concern for educators as risk management proliferates in school boards. 56 Bullying prevention is not just about the welfare of the children involved, but also that of the educator. The need to be compassionately preventative is conveyed as a new reality of teaching even though the TDSB rarely loses in court: “We get sued for failure to do something about bullying. [Our lawyers] seldom lose in court but they have to go a lot” (SSA 1; Day 5: 66). There is a feeling of inevitability that former students will come back to haunt educators: “Do your school boards have in-house legal departments? The lawsuits are coming and you never know when a huge shadow will be cast over you” (SSA2; Day 1: 4). The drive to legalization of school safety is not just about potential litigation but is fostered by the same preventative logic represented by extreme documentation. While it is easy to blame an external cause for the problem, the centralization of

55 Although, I should note that paper is itself a form of technology, I am talking about the fixation on mechanical devices in literature and crime prevention. 56 Interestingly, gossip, psychological and online bullying have also developed more recently as a particular problem, as the focus shifts from physical aggression and male students, to emotional aggression and female pupils.

77 school safety in a bureaucratic department also creates the visage of warding off outsiders who are presented as an inevitable onslaught. The emergence of risk management and the call to “document, document, document” highlights the shift away from the days where the teacher was held to the legal standard of the “reasonable person running the home” and instead demands educators to show their duty of care and compassion.

The documentation process is now totalizing since, as one administrator said, “people didn’t sue us back then … the time is gone that you can hope it goes away” (SSA1; Day 1: 4). During the investigation process of an incident, principals are instructed to record everything, and the spaces between everything (see Appendix C1 for a look at the investigation document). Principals protect themselves by recording everything and expecting to be recorded by parents. Documentation is supposed to be so thorough that principals are also instructed to document silences by recording the times an attempt was made to call the parents unsuccessfully.

The call to “document, document, document,” while buffering from certain risks, has the potential to reflexively create more. For example, principals are instructed by the SSO to: Say less rather than more in suspension letters. Communication and transparency are important but make sure it is tailored. There is a disadvantage of having too much information and you could get hung later on. The more you put in, the more the advocate can pull out. Be factual, short and to the point. Avoid certain words. Assault is one of the worst words you can use (SSA2; Day 1: 14).

Beck (1992) argued that in the risk society, science and technology are the emancipation from, and the source of, danger. However, the document also has to be understood as a specific technology that also carries with it a similar paradox. In the disciplinary process, principals are instructed to hold things back as evidenced in

78 the above quote. Principals are to be transparent in their documentation but to conceal things within that transparency, as the SSO is aware of the reflexivity of risk.

These policies and the training suggest it is smart to document everything in case of issues years down the road – it is premised on the inevitability that problems will arise and that co-workers, administrators, students, and parents will not be your allies, but albatrosses. Indeed, the TDSB lawyers may be on your side initially, until it comes to a question of who is more to blame – the individual educators or the school board. Speaking to a room of principals, one SSO administrator commented that the board lawyers would be there to help, but “if they found that there was negligence on the part of the staff, they would become your adversaries in a hurry and you would be all alone” (SSA1; Day 2: 35). The underlying narrative of inevitability is clear in the Murphy’s Law logic drilled home during training: “if there was one case you did not document properly, that will be the case that comes back to bite you” (SSA1; Day 2: 29).

There are instances where the heightened allure of defensive decisions undermines trust relationships in the school (see Community Safety Advisory Panel 2008). Teachers in the TDSB are supposed to use a Safe Schools Incident Reporting Form to document when a student gets sent to the office (see PPM145), and get a receipt. Relationships and communications amongst the staff need to be proven. The documentation process potentially institutionalizes mistrust (Casella (2003) discusses this effect in the context of security technologies). A culture of silence brought on by distrust of the principal and teachers was considered a contributing factor in the death of Jordan Manners (Community Safety Advisory Panel 2008). Despite having an orientation to compassion, these governing at a distance strategies can be sources of distrust by streamlining discretion, as I discuss below.

79 Governing at a Distance: Constraining Discretion with Compassion

The SSO consolidates information on school safety by turning material practices into representations that are easy for institutional communication (see Latour 1986). All these data collected through the document allows for governance at a distance by establishing benchmarks and best practices for school safety. 57 In this section, I argue the preventative logic underlying the documentation of everything also impacts how school safety success is measured, and the discretion of educators despite the shift from the ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach of the original SSA . In this section, I focus on how the SSO governs at a distance through particular compassionate risk management techniques. First, I discuss how existing documents are reconfigured to suit the new focus on compassionate risk management. Second, I examine how principal discretion is constrained by decision trees. Third, I discuss how the audit demonstrates the expansion of the SSO to be about more than just student misbehaviour. Fourth, I turn to the use of case studies to train educators on how to use the SSA . Finally, I discuss the use of benchmarks.

Reconfiguring Paperwork

Schools have always created knowledge through a disciplining and normalizing process (see Foucault 1977). All this new paperwork from the SSO combines in different ways with existing formats such as the Ontario Student’s Report (OSR); Individual Education Plan (IEP); and the Internal Placement Review Committee (IPRC). The latter two forms are used primarily for students with special education needs. As one principal who works heavily with this student population remarked, “save a spec-ed kid, kill a tree” (Principal; Day 3: 37), highlighting an over-visibility through the document. These documents are not new, but in the shift from correction to prevention they take on different purposes such as demonstrating that you have taken student needs into consideration rather than solely focused on

57 For instance, the Safe Schools Procedures Manual (SSPM) is in every principal’s office and is intended as a compendium of legislation, policies, and procedures in the TDSB

80 needs. While the shift seems minor, there are implications for the work done as the same principal also pointed out that the paperwork takes up so much time that some principals call the External Research Review Board directly to ask that they refrain from accepting any more researchers at their school. The implication of this strategy provides a less insidious reason for why institutions such as the school are reluctant to approve external research. While the SSO is producing knowledge, it also stymies knowledge production of other kinds. Recalling Strathern’s (2000) poignant question – what does all this knowledge collection and visibility conceal? Denying outside research is not always about institutional protectionism and may be related to the constraints on actors in these new prevention regimes.

The knowledge produced by the SSO becomes a focal point for activating changes and governing educators at a distance, similar to what has been documented by the rise of the audit society (see Power 1997). Administrators are quick to observe that this type of training “was never done before” (SSA1; Day 1: 5), but they understand it is not just because schools are perceived to be more violent. The explosion in school safety training is part of governing educators at a distance to protect themselves individually and, by inference, the school board. Training done by the SSO also reaffirms who is involved in constituting and orienting safety, as it limits discretion and ensures compliance.

Suspension/Expulsion Decision Trees

Through this continual feedback loop in the disciplinary process, discretion becomes less an ideal of the new SSA, and more a product of a principal answering a series of either/or questions. Even though progressive discipline in the SSA is lauded as a more discretionary approach, the decision tree for a principal’s investigation into an incident is highly structured (see Appendix C2). Templates on the TDSB intranet ensure that principals have followed proper procedures – for instance, contacting parents and documenting conversations with students. Via the intranet, principals are prompted to fill out a series of forms and given guidelines for

81 conducting an investigation and carrying out a disciplinary decision. All the discretionary aspects of the job are streamlined and standardized. For example, in the TDSB there is a particular process in place for an expulsion. The student is given a suspension pending possible expulsion. Despite the longest suspension being 20 days, a suspension pending possible expulsion does not need to be 20 days. The limiting of discretion and the promulgation of more paper becomes as a way to demonstrate proper (inclusionary focused) procedure: Click off suspension which may lead to an expulsion. This generates suspension possible expulsions form. Principal’s investigation is accessible. Principal fills in the investigation report. Determines the decision. Depending on what the principal’s decision is the proper letter is produced. The principal is directed to complete the Summary of Principal’s Findings if there is a referral for a hearing (Safe Schools Procedure Manual 2001).

After an investigation, the principal can decide to confirm the suspension but shorten its duration (from an expulsion to a suspension of 20 days or less); withdraw the suspension; or recommend an expulsion to the school board. There is a document tree to complete for each decision (see Appendix C3). For instance, if the principal recommends expulsion, the Discipline Committee, which consists of three trustees, holds a hearing and the principal is prompted to check off boxes to show that mitigating and other factors have been considered. In this way, this limiting of discretion is understood as responding to caring and compassionate concerns. How compassion is wedded to the limiting of discretion will become clearer when I discuss processes in a future section. The turn to risk management has meant a limiting in the discretion of front-line workers (see for instance Turnbull and Hannah-Moffat 2009 and Maurutto and Hannah-Moffat 2005), which importantly allows for at least the illusion of more defensible decisions.

82 Safe Schools Audit: Absorbing Health and Safety Concerns

The governance at a distance achieved by the SSO is also evident in the use of the audit to determine the safeness of a school, and the jockeying of positions by health and safety officers. At one conference, I witnessed an exchange between a disgruntled health and safety officer and the safe schools office consultant (I outlined this story in Chapter 1). The consultant was trained in crime prevention through environmental design (CPTED), and was showing slides of examples of TDSB schools that she had audited and deemed unsafe (see Appendix D for the audit that the TDSB uses). Similar to what Parnaby (2006) discovered when talking to CPTED experts, the CPTED consultant made the connection that a school with visible waste, graffiti, and/or high hedges was inevitably going to have assault issues. The high hedge and graffiti became substitutes for safety – they were unsafe in and of themselves. While there is nothing inherently unsafe about waste on the floor, it becomes not only a signifier of being potentially unsafe, it was unsafe because of these aesthetic concerns. Health and Safety may be the more appropriate portfolio where refuse is concerned, but the Health and Safety worker lamented that her department is never given the same resources granted to the SSO to solve these problems, nor the clout to make schools act on their recommendations. The encroachment of the SSO as a new department is where we see how safety (and workplace safety) increasingly falls under the auspices of the SSO. The SSO mantra of “being all about prevention” allows for it to encroach on other terrains.

The Safe Schools Officer was presenting a slide show on SCP and CPTED – yet in a couple of instances, things that were clearly not about crime/criminals or school discipline were highlighted. The officer talked about stairwells with gaps in the railings big enough to be dangerous to a small child. This stretches the concept of security from SCP/CPTED to domains that used to be the purview of other departments. This expansion means safety discourse becomes dominated by how the SSO conceives of safety, which is more in line with exclusionary logics. Unhealthy and unkempt areas are no longer problematic because they are

83 potentially sickness-inducing or not as aesthetically pleasing – they become sites where an assault or a robbery is more likely to happen.

Training Resources: Case Studies and The Safe School Procedural Manual

The use of the case study in training of educators and administrators on how to make disciplinary decisions under the SSA is another technique for governing at a distance. Training included three fact patterns detailing student misbehaviour designed to facilitate discussion about what would be the appropriate punishment. Each case study prompted a range of audience disciplinary decisions and reasons and the lead trainer observed, “none are wrong” (SSA2; Day 1: 18). The multiplicity of subjective decisions is used to legitimize the SSA approach to progressive discipline. As Ericson et. al. (2003) observe, subjective decisions are built into risk management systems, and have an aura of objectivity to close off the given system (see also Rose 1994). When the progressive disciplinary regime is pitched as working on a case-by-case basis and in opposition to the static, non-discretionary regime of zero-tolerance, subjective decisions get built into the risk management system and the focus becomes on the articulation of reasons for a given decision.

Interestingly, subjective decisions made by principals and administrators in training through case studies are used as evidence that progressive discipline objectively works. In one particular complex case study, the room was asked what type of discipline they would enforce for all the parties involved (see Appendix E). The trainer said that it was good they all arrived at different answers because “if they all had the same answer that would be zero-tolerance” (SSA2; Day 2: 32). Ostensibly, this means there are no longer any right answers in discipline. Discipline depends more on how you can defend that decision at the same time that discipline is relationally produced. It signifies that discipline is more about getting the process of discipline right, while recognizing that discipline could be a moving target based on

84 the context of the educator-student-principal triad.58 Compassion becomes ambiguously infused in the risk management shift and discipline becomes a doing rather than a done. The training on how to implement progressive discipline by the SSO shows how discretionary decisions can become an objective enterprise. Training exercises such as this one permit institutional narratives to be passed down, and augment institutional texts. Case studies become important ways to communicate that knowledge and govern at a distance.

The process of turning subjective discretionary decisions into a seemingly objective enterprise is also evident in the Special Education Discretionary Checklist and Tracking Sheet. Similar to the disciplinary templates, although the decisions do invite some level of discretion, the structured template ensures modified discretion. A principal has to answer questions in certain ways and provide a written record (SSPM 162). The tracking document is able to govern at a distance, and progressive discipline appears to be the best of both worlds. It creates a discretionary atmosphere that is still containable in a working document to assist principals in their disciplinary decisions.

One of the key training resources for administrators is the Safe Schools Procedure Manual (SSPM), which is referred to as the “primary tool used by administrators in the implementation of the Safe Schools Policy” (SCSTF 8). This binder espouses best practices and updates policy memoranda, and highlights a newer focus in school safety: The collection, planning and reporting of information is essential to building safe and caring school communities. Smoker (1996, p. 38) states, ‘you cannot fight what you cannot see … data makes the invisible, visible, revealing strengths and weaknesses that are easily concealed.’ Gathering statistical information related to suspensions and expulsions helps a school system monitor and assess how well

58 A triad suggested in a discussion with Kathleen Gallagher

85 it is doing and determine areas for improvement. Such information is critical in helping school systems work towards goals and targets that are established in school and system planning processes. (SSPM, 2010: I.1)

The new focus on internal data collection and efficiency monitoring provides support for principals but is also a part of the defensive logic of school boards. It also allows for a perpetual monitoring and self-monitoring of principals. The SSPM is integral to how the SSO governs safety at a distance. The centralization of the SSO makes it easier to disseminate information and produce knowledge that guides training on ‘best practices,’ and helps serve as a template for decision-making.

Collecting Statistics, Benchmarking and Trying to Show Compassion

Since 2001, the SSO has collected suspension and expulsion statistics using computer software and tracked all the available information on disciplinary decisions. It is well documented that institutions that create this type of knowledge work for themselves to help justify their existence and maintain a hold on information (see Foucault 1977; Ericson and Haggerty 1997). Disciplining a student generates paperwork (as does just thinking about disciplining a student), and multiple forms have to be filled out. These documents, as discussed above, are prevention focused to justify the type of discipline used. These, in turn, are used to produce safety benchmarks and justify a focus on safety with regards to suspensions and expulsions in the TDSB. For instance, even with the shift away from zero- tolerance, suspensions are understood to be preventative because as one official noted (displaying flawed logic): “86% of all those suspended are only [suspended] once, so suspension must work as a tool for preventing future issues” (SSA1; Day 5: 65). Within a broader TDSB plan for improvement, the Safe and Caring Schools had 4 SMART goals: 1. Reduce the number of violent incidents in schools by 10% 2. Reduce the number of Non-Discretionary Transfer by 15 %

86 3. Reduce the number of suspensions in TDSB by 20%, and increase the number of suspended students participating in supportive programming by 20%. 4. Reduce the number of “all schools” expulsions by 10% and the number of “school-only” expulsions by 20%.

These goals show an attempt to prevent issues by reducing violence and show compassion, by not using exclusion as the sole means of violence reduction.

Strategies to “improve the engagement and academic achievement of marginalized students, ensure safe, caring learning environments, and promote a sense of belonging” (Caring and Safe Schools Office 2008) were based on the 4 SMART goals. The measurement of improvements is based on disciplinary data such as violent incidents, transfers, and the number of suspensions and expulsions, all of which are readily available to the SSO. There are very few data on how inclusive and accepted everyone feels at a school. Instead, caring is shown in a reduction of the use of exclusionary measures, such as expulsions and suspensions. Thus, the same data collected in a zero-tolerance regime to prove school safety via exclusionary tactics, are reconfigured to promote an inclusionary logic. According to the SSO, the SMART goals will be evaluated by analyzing qualitative and quantitative data. However, all the goals are stipulated as quantitative goals. This tension in the form of measurements could potentially undermine the attempt to be more inclusive and caring because it will not be clear how students are feeling. These statistics, while they matter, do not necessarily show compassion, and this represents the continuing struggle, as risk management of the SSO swings from exclusionary to inclusionary logics. 59

59 I should point out that the TDSB now has censuses that are attempts to measure feelings of acceptance by different student identities but these began after the time period studied. I will allude to these censuses again in the final chapter.

87 The visibility of suspension and expulsion statistics was a concern for parents, because initially the SSO did not publicly disseminate the information. As one parent said: “if we are sending our kids to your school, we have the right to get those statistics” (Safe and Compassionate Schools Task Force, 2004) because these numbers are implicitly linked to reputation and how safe a school is. What do a high number of suspensions signify? One administrator posed the rhetorical question: “There are two schools with suspension rates of 200 versus 20. Which is safer” (SSA2; Day 2: 32)? While the implication is that schools with fewer suspensions probably have more issues, it still reflects the belief that these types of data are useful and tied to reputation. These statistics however, do not tell us so much about compassion but legitimize the SSO as a useful body to collect and interpret knowledge. Statistics on suspensions and expulsions do not convey the actual safety of a given school and are also not a useful knowledge format to show compassion.

The Compassionate Task Force tried to use its data collection ability to gauge the impact on racialized and marginalized students, premising this on the belief that statistics add to the knowledge about a particular school. As the Caring and Safe Schools Office states: “This statistical information is made available because we want to ensure that principals, teachers, parents and the community have the information they need to work together in a meaningful way in order to benefit our students. Together, we can ensure a higher level of success for all students” (www.tdsb.on.ca ). School safety is presented as achievable through visibility and partnership. While it is unclear how suspension and expulsion rates can aid parents and the community other than by affecting their school choice, there is a universal belief that safety is something that can be acted upon, and is linked to how successful students can be. 60

60 It seems like the increase in the number of parents choosing to send their child to French immersion programs is related to perceived success, creating a system where parental choice is the driving force behind streaming.

88 Transparency of information collected by the SSO was seen as one way for the TDSB to be inclusionary – or at least to counter the claims it was being exclusionary. Parents at the town hall meetings suggested that this transparency would be useful to show compassion. As one administrator stated: “give them [the public; human rights complainants] the data, show that we have lower rates than other boards…now you never see stories that we are kicking people out” (SSA1; Day 1: 9). In terms of the risk management of everything, displaying what it is you are doing, or not doing, is a way to turn the organization inside out (Power 2007). However, despite this push towards total information awareness for parents the interpretation of disciplinary data is fluid and capable of demonstrating that something is being taking seriously as well as showing restraint.

Having discussed how prevention is important in school safety – and different layers of prevention through specific technologies (not just preventing student misbehaviour) – I next analyze how risk management combines with compassion and caring in processes and procedures in the TDSB.

Compassion as Risk Management

Although there was a clear shift to a risk management philosophy and a defensive logic in the TDSB, there were tensions evident as this ethos sat uneasily with pastoral power and compassion as evidenced by the quote: “Yes, we do look at what is best for the kid but…do what is right and what is legal” (SSA1; Day 1: 16). The framing of school policies as obviously still looking out for the best interests of the child, while at the same time keeping an eye out for these newer concerns of legality, echoes Hutter and Power’s (2005) observation that “risk management routines may have more to do with a certain kind of organisational legitimacy and responsibility framing than with having the organisational capacity to encounter risk inventively and intelligently” (18). The shift to a risk management of everything in the TDSB bears some specific institutional features in its routines, such as pastoral power.

89 Sometimes, the SSO displayed a self-reflexivity about the disjuncture between risk management and an ethos of caring for students, realizing that the needs of the student should prevail over internal demands. On other occasions, compassion was reconfigured as a risk management strategy itself. In particular, the ways educators were instructed to demonstrate a pattern of using progressive discipline. In this section, I contextualize the complications that arose by the mingling of pastoral and risk management strategies and how educators and the SSO sought to resolve these conflicts. It is tough to generalize what the SSO does since it is not all about handing out passionless discipline or objective risk management, nor is it able to disassociate itself from zero-tolerance. The drive to cover all the bases in school safety, and use a compassionate risk management lens, embeds contradictions. The following discusses specific practices and policies of the SSO to argue that compassion and pastoral power fuse with risk management techniques, often uneasily, in the context of school safety.

Compassion in Instituting Risk Management Strategies

All the documentation and processes embodied in the SSO, much like other risk management regimes, demonstrate a drive to centralize safety and provide authority and legitimacy to the disciplinary decisions of principals. However, in the TDSB there is an understanding about the potential negative effects discipline has on students and families. According to administrators, parents generally do not argue so much about what their son or daughter may have done, but parents have a pervasive worry that their child is missing out on something and are likelier to complain if no homework is provided. Parents feel that since the incident is now in the OSR, the education system has “damned them for life and you [the SSO] need to remove it” (Participant; Day 5: 66). The institutional power of the document is experienced as a pinning down of a student. Removing an incident from the OSR is never encouraged because it removes information that could be valuable to the TDSB. This echoes the weight given to legal documents in Ewick and Silbey’s (1998) seminal work on legal consciousness. Through the formalization of the SSO and

90 discipline, the OSR has mystical properties for some parents, and is thought to be all-knowing and distributed freely internally and externally by the SSO. Neither of which are true. In fact, the SSO suggests that principals communicate with parents about the limitations of the OSR to assuage some of their fears. But the mystification of the OSR also legitimizes the work of the SSO, by making everything appear more formal and centralized.

Administrators are trained that “if you suspend a student and the parent is not happy, the worst thing you can do is offer to remove it from the OSR once the suspension is done” (SSA2; Day 3: 38). School safety in public education is increasingly organized along risk management lines to protect against future litigation, and to ensure information is stored for institutional retrieval. Kupchik (2010) argues that the school is increasingly teaching to the rules – and this itself is a part of the defensive organizational logic. If the school is teaching to the rules, it has fulfilled its obligation – or at least, it cannot be blamed if future litigations emerge.

Although the SSO facilitates the paper trail, there are some limits to total information awareness. In other security settings, the power of paper means it is infinitely accessible (see Whitaker 2006). The school board wipes the institutional memory of the student after graduation. Some information stays within the purview of the institution to protect itself from future risk, but this happens in personal databases to protect the principal from harm – not in official institutional documents. The SSO maintains it will not share any information pertaining to the discipline record of students with post-secondary institutions. Although the record remains “somewhere” to defend against litigation, the SSO recognizes that educators should be clear that these records are not passed along as a matter of course to other institutions or organizations.

The aversion to sharing documents, to protect the student, even happens within the school board. While the disciplinary paperwork from one school is visible to the

91 SSO, it is not necessarily visible to every other principal in the system. Part of this is because of the SSO’s fear that principals would see an incoming student and, as one SSO administrator put it, “[say] they have no room for a pupil or we can’t program for this student” (SSA1; Day 1: 11). Safe Schools Transfers such as these are a source of anxiety for some educators because they know the student is being transferred to their school through the SSO but remain in the dark about the reasons behind the transfer. One of the prevailing feelings of educators at C.W. Jefferys was that their school was unsafe because of the sheer number of these types of transfers into their school (School Community Safety Advisory Panel 2008). It is the lack of complete information, knowledge guarded by the SSO, which perpetuates these beliefs that there is an outsider in the school making it less safe.

The Student Action Plan (SAP) represents a document geared towards inclusivity within a disciplinary strategy. The SAP outlines the student's needs, and the measures the school has taken to address them: “A plan to support the student’s academic and/or non-academic needs. The plan is formulated by the principal of the home school once a parent has committed to attending a program for students on long-term suspension” (PR 586). In contrast to the risk averse direction to under- document in suspension letters, in the SAP the principal is instructed to write everything down: “don’t back away – put on paper what the kid needs” (SSA1; Day 2: 27). The disciplinary process, while it can be defensive in posture, leads to the production of a document – the SAP – that is about inclusion and the student’s needs.

The concerns of litigation can inhibit inclusionary and educational opportunities as evidenced by the SSO advice that teachers should get rid of contracts with their students. Despite the student-teacher contract having potential value to the educational process, and their particular neo-liberal technique of governance, contracts are also more paperwork that the student can use in an appeal. Information is an economy, and when it comes to helping a student, or saving a student, to draw from Foucault’s (1991) discussion of pastoral power, educators

92 should have documentation to show that they are trying everything. However, when suspensions and expulsions are initiated, a dominant concern is the security of the rest of the school (by removal of the student) and security against litigation (by the tailoring of the message). In the economy of documents the educators, teachers, and administrators must be mindful not to give away too much information that could be used against them. However, they must still try to have as much information as possible about the student for pedagogical supports and also to protect against imagined future litigation because they suspended a student unjustly or ignored students who felt unsafe.

A moment where compassion came through risk management practices was when the SSO self-reflexively was aware about the limitations of the children under their care. The SSO was quite open about the absurdity of some of the demands placed on students by the newer defensive ethos. Commenting on the practice of sending school codes of behaviour home and getting children to sign a paper to show they had read it, one SSO administrator said it might be “dumb” for a child of 5 or 6 years of age to take something like a list of rights home to discuss with their parent but that “bureaucrats are drafting [such policies]” (SSA1; Day 1: 10). Although risk management has infused itself into the pastoral aspects of schooling, it has not supplanted a concern for care as evidenced by understanding the obvious limitations of having young children sign what amounted to a waiver.

Finally, a word should be reserved for exclusions from school. Exclusions are based on the principal’s right to limit access to school premises, so it rests on the Trespass to Property Act. This disciplinary action was used by principals on their own students and was “not liked by advocates” (SSA2; Day 2: 33). The exclusion criterion was clarified in the new SSA under s. 265.1(m). It triggers an automatic and extensive review and has not been used at the TDSB to date. All 22 trustees have to be present for a hearing, and the SSO views exclusion as a “career-ending move” that should be avoided at all costs (SSA2; Day 2: 33). Exclusion is a tool in the repertoire of the principal and school board but it exists only on paper. In action, there is a

93 mixing of compassionate and legitimacy concerns, which means exclusions are not a practical option in school safety.

Progressive Discipline in Practice: Risk Management Through Compassion

Progressive Discipline, as discussed in Chapter 2, was touted as a more compassionate approach to discipline and in line with the push for the TDSB to be more caring. However, progressive discipline provides a means for the SSO in the TDSB to engage in a wide range of risk management techniques. The turn to progressive discipline enhances the production of documents by requiring proof that due process has occurred. The progressive discipline approach also helps partition blame and facilitates a governing through choice, as the TDSB iterates: A progressive Discipline Approach includes:

o Prevention Strategies

o Early and ongoing intervention strategies

o Addressing inappropriate behaviour

o Opportunities for the student to learn from the choices made a. Parental awareness and involvement (emphasis added)

This situates how progressive discipline provides defensibility over decisions and is amenable to the “document, document, document” regimen of the SSO despite being less strictly rule-bound than under zero-tolerance.61 Under progressive discipline, the document is still an institutionally protective tool to help justify decisions, but it also becomes an exercise in demonstrating compassion.

Progressive discipline as instituted in the TDSB is an example of how due process and human rights are reconfigured as risks to be managed at the local school board and school level. The option to use progressive discipline assumes a degree of caring

61 Under zero-tolerance in the TDSB educators would often tell parents that their hands were tied: “I had to [suspend], this is what the act says” (see Levinsky 2016).

94 about student rights beyond a blanket application of the law. Progressive discipline allows for this defensibility of decisions, much like the mandatory and absolutist nature of zero-tolerance, because it leads to the production of multiple documents and allows for retrospectively pointing out what educators should have known about a given student. Whereas zero-tolerance led to defensibility of actions because it was mandated by legislation, it was not as defensible of the educator’s desire to keep students in school. Progressive discipline fits in with the importance of governing through choice (choice is something I expand on in Levinsky 2016), because it shows students are given the opportunity to recognize and correct their inappropriate behaviour, which is more than what occurs in a zero-tolerance regime. Although repeated misbehaviour does not mean that students progress linearly through discipline, it allows “opportunities for the student to learn from the choices made” (see above quote).

The educators trained by the SSO are taught to separate the doer from the deed and understand it is behaviour that is wrong or bad and not the student. For example, the SSO asks educators to “be human in disciplining students – it is all about caring,” (SSA1; Day 3: 41) and suggests educators put themselves in their students’ shoes. By making safety about caring in training (and even in receiving safe schools certification from these seminars), educators can defend themself against critique or blame as can the school board.

Progressive discipline ensures documentation is potentially endless since even informal sanctions are caught in its purview. As one trainer stated: “Progressive discipline doesn’t mean once you start with formal measures you keep going with formal measures. You can do informal things later. You can go back on the continuum” (SSA2; Day 1: 16). The key is that informal measures still need to be documented and recorded. Progressive discipline is not meant to be a rigid scale since it is supposed to respond proportionately to a student’s actions. It is a simplification to view the old incarnation of the SSA and progressive discipline as opposites, as their common threads are overlooked. As one official stated: “they did

95 as good a job pre-amalgamation 62 using progressive discipline but they didn’t document it ” (SSA2; Day 1: 12, emphasis my own). The ‘it’ being everything from how parents were told; the letter sent home with the student; what interventions/strategies were put in place, and whether mitigating factors were considered. Interestingly, it is very similar to the statement that zero-tolerance existed before being formalized within the original SSA .

Because of the progressive discipline process, students who act out more severely should already be more visible to the SSO. The SSO informs principals that the first thing you will be asked during an appeal is “what progressive discipline strategies did you put in place?” As one official noted, this is “not the time to walk in without any documentation” (SSA2; Day 1: 12). The principal at the review hearing in front of trustees will have to demonstrate that progressive disciplinary steps were taken in the past, and mitigating factors were considered (the appeal process will be discussed later in the chapter). Thus, progressive discipline has the twofold consequence of achieving safety through suspension/expulsion similarly to the zero-tolerance regime (with suspension and expulsion being re-branded as prevention not exclusion), and expanding and refining the process to facilitate information collection. The information machinery at work is often overlooked in discussions on school safety, but the processes behind punishment decisions is important because of its potential (over)reach.

The principles of progressive discipline and a defensive line of thinking are to be passed along to teachers in the classroom. Principals should already be aware of every student the teacher sends to the office and the reason why, since educators are told “classroom management is not rocket science” (SSA2; Day 3: 39). Chewing gum in class should not land a student in the office. The defensive mindset permeates the entire school, inhibiting teachers from passing a problem student

62 This is in reference to the Fewer School Boards Act that came out in the early 90s during Mike Harris ’ tenure as premier of Ontario. For a look at the shifts in Ontario ’s education policy during this time, please see Gidney 1999.

96 along for minor issues. Of course, this handing off of students is still a problem the SSO has to contend with (SSA2; Day 3: 39) and the direction given to teachers is that they should try to resolve these minor issues in-class, because of the broader impact it could have on the TDSB. The shaming that principals may feel during an appeal for a minor offence is being passed down to the front-line workers.

Risk management through compassion has also reconfigured older disciplinary offences. One offence listed by the TDSB was “conduct injurious to the moral tone of the school,” which functioned as a catch-all (see Levinsky 2003). There were two issues with this offence. First, it was never clearly defined, so students were being suspended with this as the listed offence, when they had clearly done something different. Very rarely did the student engage in ‘conduct injurious to the moral tone of the school’ that could not have been defined, and disciplined, elsewhere (such as vandalism or swearing). Second, it operated as a catch-all for principals, with the implication that it could be used to remove a student at will. Under the new SSA , ‘conduct injurious to the moral tone’ has been re-coded with the more neutral language: “an act considered by the principal to be a breach of the Board’s or school’s code of conduct” (Caring and Safe Schools 2011). However, the more formal – and defensible – language omitting morality has had similar problems. As discussed by a Caring and Safe Schools research paper about this new disciplinary offence: There were several specified reasons that should or could have been issued as a [different] suspension … and should not have been recorded as a breach of school’s code of conduct … We will continue to institute professional learning opportunities to define the use of ‘an act considered by the Principal to be a breach of the Board’s or schools code of conduct’ as a suspension reason. It is recommended that Principals consult with their quadrant Caring and Safe Schools staff and/or their Superintendent of Education prior to using this suspension reason (Caring and Safe Schools, 2011: 13).

97 The SSO was able to determine that 25% of all suspensions were a result of this still ambiguous and vague category. A more detailed breakdown on the characteristics of the suspensions (length; grade of student; gender; IPRC status) showed no difference when compared to suspensions as a whole. The new statistical knowledge, enabled through the TDSB’s newer emphasis on board-wide record keeping, empowered the school board to be reflexive, set new targets, and refine categories of discipline. The statistical output created a new set of actions and trainable moments. The vagueness of the category is a continual source of concern for the SSO because principals are still employing it similarly to the “conduct injurious to the moral tone” offence. Although the newer offence presents a more sterilized and risk-averse moniker, it has seemingly replaced a more welfarist term almost perfectly.

In the next section, I want to outline how this defensive logic working with and through compassion is evident in three specific areas in the TDSB, and how it constitutes safety: the suspension appeal process; interactions between educators and the police; and safe and caring rooms. All three demonstrate that there is more going on than exclusionary tactics for the sake of exclusion and demonstrate pastoral risk management.

Appeals of Disciplinary Decisions: Student Rights and Compassion

In the appeals process, one can see how pastoral concerns are emergent in the risk management of appealing disciplinary decisions. The interplay of the themes of prevention and compassion is evident where multiple aims are achieved: Protecting the school from problem children, creating safe spaces for ‘good students’, and ensuring educators follow procedures while showing compassion to the problem student.

98 A corollary of the rapid formalization of the disciplinary process is that there has also been an increase in appeals, as school boards “rarely had [to deal with] suspension or expulsion appeals in the past” (SSA1, Day 1: 19). This rapid formalization has induced the TDSB to use due process jargon not so much as a legal/substantive right, but as a risk management tactic (for turning rights into risks to manage see Whitty 2011). For instance, parents have 15 school days to launch an appeal of the suspension/expulsion. Using due process as a reputational risk tactic has led to the imposition of arbitrary deadlines. Timelines like this give both the illusion of due process and an air of legitimacy, when in fact all it means is that the principal “really has no chance to meet with the parents anymore” (SSA2; Day 3: 38) in the wake of an appeal, because of the pressure put on the administration to set up a hearing. Process often trumps substance.

The Discipline Committee, who oversees appeals, is comprised of at least three trustees (see PR595). These are elected officials who make considerably less money than they did pre-amalgamation (because of the Harris government’s Fewer School Boards Act ). Trustees do get compensation for sitting on this committee. The appeals process includes a reporter, the school principal, and TDSB lawyers. As pointed out earlier in the chapter, principals will “need to show progressive discipline to the trustees – as a principal you will get asked what strategies you put in place and it is not the time to walk in without any documentation” (SSA2; Day 1: 12). Progressive discipline is the accountability test for principals to show compassion and caring given rigid timelines and institutional obligations formed through the logic of risk management.

Progressive discipline remains ambiguously taught. Progressive discipline is related to proportionality while emphasizing mitigating factors (see Chapter 3) and does not mean that one gives the student progressively harsher penalties. However, it’s not clear what specifically shows the appeals committee that progressive discipline occurred, other than the principal having more documentation on various strategies. The key seems to be in showing what strategies were implemented, but the majority

99 of the training session focused less on substance, because it was presumed the principal should be flexible and creative, and that the SSO would be on hand to help. The focus of the teaching by the SSO is often about process concerns over substance. I am not suggesting the SSO and the TDSB do not care about the content of programs – just that increasingly, there is an attention to process that reframes substance and compassion (see Levinsky 2016 and Whitty 2011 for how prisons recode substantive and legal concerns like human rights as risks to be managed).

Trustees often “get into their roles” (SSA2; Day 1: 22) as adjudicators and have grilled principals and participants when trying to rehash an event. They do not necessarily favour the principals but based on the amount of documentation the principal is able to bring to the table, it is not a balanced affair. It is problematic if a principal fails to demonstrate progressive discipline and/or does not have enough documentation. For instance, before a suspension, principals are instructed to consider an appeal: “Think: can I defend my suspension? If it is five days because the student wasn’t wearing a uniform, good luck” (SSA2; Day 3: 39). The implication is that the appeal relies heavily on documenting being compassionate (and proportionate), and less on any defence raised by the student. The document brings a level of control to the matter – to show procedure and to show caring. If school discipline were purely about punishing students for punishment’s sake (or zero- tolerance), then educators would not be instructed to internalize compassionate risk management when considering factors to suspend/expel. Furthermore, there are constraints in the disciplinary process since principals are trained to prepare for an appeal of every suspension.

Similar to being instructed to over-document and to not under-react to incidents (see Chapter 5), educators are instructed to do the following in their process of arriving at suspension decisions: Err on the side of caution. Consult and talk to other people. One principal gave a 10-day suspension because it was the fourth day the student didn’t have a uniform. The SSO did not get consulted

100 and it was appealable – but the parents luckily didn’t appeal (SSA2; Day 2: 24).

At first these two instructions seem contradictory. Principals are to overreact to incidents in their school, and err on the side of caution, but that 10-day suspension for lack of a uniform would appear to be an improper overreaction. Similarly, one instructor cited a real-life example where a student suspended for five days on the second to last day of school (carrying over 4 days into the next term) was “inviting an appeal” (SSA2; Day 2: 32). These two sentiments, under-reacting to incidents and over-suspending, share concerns for litigation. Under-reacting or over-suspending threaten to undermine the legitimacy of the TDSB – by body count (as we will see in Chapter 5) or by appeal. Principals should not under-react to a potential threat, but when they have a moment to reflect, they need to exercise caution. The SSO trains educators in the following logic: if I do (or do not do) X, will I be exposed to risk? The SSO is concerned about the individual educator’s exposure to risk insofar as they followed the training and protocols. Incidents that may require a suspension or expulsion trigger a voluminous amount of forms to complete, strategically allowing more time for the principal to err on the side of caution, and to seek SSO support in the process.

During training, the principal who suspended a student for 10 days for failing to wear a uniform was framed as a teachable moment for other educators. The SSO administrator lamented this would not have happened had they been consulted, and that they were “sitting on the edge of [their] seats waiting to see if an appeal would come through” (SSA2; Day 1: 18). Despite the air of due process and concern for the student’s welfare embodied by the appeal process, an over-riding concern of the SSO is defensive of the TDSB rather than protective of the student. The due process evident in the appeal process is less about the substantive rights of children and more about smooth institutional flows. In fact, the very existence of an appeal process, and the legalization of discipline, means the concern about the rights of the student is transferred from the TDSB to external lawyers and trustees. The appeal

101 process, and the presence of a neutral body to oversee the decisions of the principal (with the aid of the SSO), still strives to do what is best for the student, but leans toward being more defensive, to reference the earlier quote: “do we still do what is best for the kid? Of course! But we do what is right and what is legal” (SSA1; Day 1: 16). Although it is laudable that there is a way for students to appeal disciplinary decisions, the process sets up an adversarial system where ‘what is legal’ becomes a proxy for ‘what is best for the kid.’

Appeals never had a defined rubric under the initial SSA . Their formalization in the new SSA represents an obvious impediment to institutional efficiency, as the TDSB witnessed a sharp increase in appeals with its implementation. Upon issuing a suspension, the principal has to provide information to the parent on how they can appeal the decision. In the TDSB, where they deal with 11,552 suspensions in a given year, “if only 1-2% appeal, that is a lot of hearings and a lot of money” (SSA1; Day 5: 68). Principals are no longer able to negotiate with the parent, as that task falls to the superintendents, who are encouraged to try to resolve appeals informally. While the SSO administrator admitted this was working around the legislation, it was a worthwhile manoeuvre to ensure the TDSB could handle its caseload. The SSO expressed disdain with the formalization of the appeal process and suggested it was political. The SSO acted as gatekeepers to the appeal process, and tried to prevent "unreasonable" appeals from going forward. Educators were instructed to “smarten up – if we are not going to win at appeal then get rid of it” (SSA1; Day 1: 19). The SSO suggested limiting the number of formal appeals was advantageous, but maintained they are “not suggesting this for violence or a history of aggression, as that could haunt you legally and if other schools don’t know the history” (SSA1; Day 1: 19). This quote again highlights that much of the concern is around legal ramifications rather than programmatic and student welfare issues.

One strategy deployed to mitigate the number of appeals is to give a relatively short suspension. Ninety percent of suspensions are fewer than five days, and there is a clear directive to give students homework for the time they are suspended. These

102 two policies (one implicit) make it less likely that a parent will appeal a decision – one of the biggest critiques parents have when their child is suspended is that s/he was sent home without any homework and could fall behind. The pressure is geared to the boundaries of the disciplinary process and there are ambiguities and tensions in the message. With no clear one-size-fits-all approach to defend the principal’s decision to suspend or expel a student as provided for in the first SSA , the new instructions appear to be about what the administrator can get away with. This possibly means that suspensions or expulsions are used less often either because of an aversion to the number of appeals, or because it will push the SSO to think about what they can get away with (such as a short suspension). In both cases, it is at the expense of what is best for the student.

Expulsions do not happen immediately. In the TDSB, a student is given a suspension first and, after investigating the reason behind the decision to expel, the student is designated as having a “suspension pending expulsion hearing”. All potential expulsions trigger an automatic hearing. For the suspension pending an expulsion, the threshold for the expulsion hearing is “a balance of probabilities,” and here more documents tip the balance in favour of the educator. While I was unable to view how the process unfolds, the document is critical to the process: 4.40 Documents to be Relied Upon During the Hearing a) In a hearing, all parties are entitled to receive every document a party intends to rely on b) Such documents shall be provided to all parties prior to the commencement of the proceeding c) Each party shall provide sufficient copies to the Discipline Committee at the hearing (PR 595).

There are also strict guidelines given about when documents are received by the parties such as: “a document received by a party of the Board after 4:00pm shall be deemed to have been received on the next day that is not a holiday” (PR595: 4). It is unlikely the student has many documents about the incident – they are not the ones

103 conducting the investigation, interviewing witnesses, filling out forms and logs, or responding to the SSO. The following section further reinforces the power of the document in establishing the truth of an incident: 4.39 Time Limitations: The Discipline Committee may impose reasonable time limits, so long as each of the parties is given an adequate opportunity to present its case. If the Discipline Committee fixes a time limit, that time limit will be announced to the parties at the onset of the Hearing. Should the Proceeding not conclude within the fixed time limit, if any, the Discipline Committee will have regard to prescribed timelines in the Education Act and, if possible, the schedules of the parties and their witnesses in fixing the adjourned date and time (PR 595).

These time restrictions, while superficially neutral, are really matters of due process to ensure the hearing is held within a reasonable time frame. While all parties are subject to this time restriction, it appears to be a layer of pastoral power to ensure the student does not miss more school than necessary. The document still transcends these strict time restrictions, since there is no page limit to what parties can submit. While this, ostensibly, always tilts the balance of probabilities in favour of the principal (the principal who documented everything with a defensive mindset), I am unable to comment on what actually happens during a hearing except to note that the TDSB rarely loses appeals, which circularly reinforces the behaviour of those in the TDSB. As one administrator noted from a recent case they were handling, 700 pages of documents and emails were subpoenaed (SSA2; Day 2: 32). A strict time limit, coupled with the fact the TDSB rarely loses an appeal, means these rules operationally help the TDSB, but afford a degree of protection to the pupil missing school. While the due process rights of the student are a main consideration, it seems like the system is also set up to facilitate a quick integration back into school.

104 The above section has suggested a more nuanced analysis of discipline in schools through the appeal process. While the echoes and concerns of zero-tolerance and the prison-school-pipeline remain, the TDSB and the SSO have shaped discipline less around needs of students or the strict punishment of students, and more around institutional protectionism – but this protectionism still takes a particularly compassionate and pastoral form. In the next section, I argue that risk management routines of the school take on particularly a unique compassionate character by discussing the uneasy relationship between the principal and the police officer.

Using the Police and Protecting Students from the Police

The dual role of the principal as protector of both the student’s interests and that of the institution is evident in interactions between the police and the pupil. Police investigating incidents on school grounds potentially restrict the SSO’s role in information collection and conducting investigations. The SSO makes it clear that disciplinary actions, while often warranting police intervention, should not be a way for the principal to pass a problem student onto the justice system. As one SSO administrator said, the principal must distance herself as much as possible from the police and cannot be “seen to be in bed with the police. It is unfair, corrupt and biased” (SSA2; Day 1: 17). So although there are possibilities for linkages between the education system and the police, principals are instructed to mind the investigative gap. Although this is done to protect the needs of the student, and the principal is acting as a parental figure in this scenario, it also draws on case law where principals were seen as agents of the police in unlawful search and seizures (see Berger and Graham 1998).

When the police are called in to deal with a student, principals are instructed to be the advocate for the child and ensure the police honour the student’s rights. Here we see that safety of a school is in flux – safety concerns may have prompted the principal to call the police but once they arrive, the principal is instructed to act as the advocate for that child. The symbolism of the principal caring for a member of

105 the flock is evident. Safety concerns (see Chapter 1) are not just for the school against the problem student, but also for the problem student against the police. The principal is acting on a higher level than in loco parentis, since principals are better trained in the rights of children than many parents (part of the SSO training comes from law firms that specialize in education law). This substitution should not be understated. It signifies, at least on a policy/training level, that the principal is to be concerned for the student facing possibly serious trouble, even with serious school intervention looming as well.

The advent of zero-tolerance and the emergence of a precautionary logic (see Ericson 2006; Ashworth and Zedner 2014) have meant more contact between the school and the police. Issues that used to be in the school's purview, such as schoolyard fights, are increasingly being brought to the attention of the police, precisely because of this turn to the formalization of the disciplinary process and reputational risk management. Not calling the police leaves the principal exposed to risk if the student is dangerous, if someone is seriously hurt, or if there is a history of run-ins with the law. However, police contact with students and police officers in schools (termed ‘Support Resource Officers’) have generally been used as evidence by scholars about the emergence of zero-tolerance, the militarization of schools, or as part of the school-prison pipeline (see Giroux 2003a; Kim 2010). Within the progressive disciplinary regime of the SSA and policy training from the SSO, there is a gesture – albeit quite possibly a token one – to advocate for students during police involvement. The involvement of the police has less to do with the ‘get tough’ movement and more about reputational risk. There is not a complete abdication of responsibility for the student/offender to the police. Educators are supposed to exercise caution when going to the police in the context of student discipline (we will see similar sentiments in Chapter 5 when discussing lockdowns). The school- prison pipeline thesis suggests a less complex relationship between the school and the justice system than that which actually exists. The questions principals appear to grapple with are: How can I make this school safe? When should I call the police? How can I make sure I continue to protect the needs of the student in question? All

106 these questions could centre on a defensive mentality, but one infused with caring. You call the police when you think they need to be called. It is better to overreact in this situation. Principals advocate for the student because they have to defend the student, but also the reputation and independence of the school, by looking out for his/her own students. Risk reconfigures the duty of care principals are meant to show. They may need to call the police to intervene with a student, but the principal is elevated to the role of advocate for that student.

Formalizing the Informal: Informal Suspensions and Safe and Caring Rooms

One of the main reasons for suspensions and expulsions under the first SSA was not necessarily about punishing and excluding students but about formalizing punishment so there was an existing record (see Levinsky 2016). In fact, in-school suspensions were frowned upon not because they could not hold the pupil accountable for his/her actions, but because the informal suspension generated no paper trail. The belief was that in-school suspensions did not always trigger the documentation process, and thus future schools may not have the complete history of a given student. The creation of ‘Safe and Caring Rooms’ in the TDSB accomplishes the formalization of informal suspensions: Safe and Caring Rooms : The SCS department will provide system support and leadership in order to allow schools the opportunity to allocate specific staff and space to support students in-school rather than through suspension. Our new Gender Based Violence Prevention Department will be a critical support for prevention, intervention and a consistent response (Safe and Caring Schools, 4 SMART goals).

These ‘Safe and Caring Rooms’ need to be distinguished from Simon’s (2007) analysis on the emergence of punishing rooms in the United States. As disciplinary codes identify more misbehavior as requiring recognition and official response but not warranting suspension or

107 expulsion – which are largely counterproductive because they all allow the student to escape oversight – in-house detention is becoming a sanction of choice for various offences (Simon 2007:224).

Simon’s assumption is that these rooms have emerged in the context of governing through crime and expanding the zero-tolerance disciplinary process to reach newer targets. However, in the TDSB, these rooms are specific reactions against a strict policy of zero-tolerance, because sending students home actually hinders their education. Rather than assume these in-school rooms are part of the spectrum of punishing students under zero-tolerance and crime-prevention, in the TDSB these rooms suggest that there is an underlying shift that could account for both the emergence of a punishment room (as per Simon 2007) and the divergent TDSB Safe and Caring room. These in-house suspension rooms have the same goal of removing the potential problem student from the day-to-day operations of the school, but are also justified as a way to continue the school's disciplinary (pastoral) involvement and surveillance over the student. Simon’s analysis implies that punishment and zero-tolerance is necessarily connected to governing through crime, but the TDSB example emphasizes intervention and prevention, particularly with regards to gender-based violence.

Further, the concern with documenting student discipline shapes the punishment process in the TDSB by formalizing previously informal spaces. Safety is achieved by correcting problematic behaviour and compassionate discipline is ensured through a paper trail. If the TDSB were following Simon’s (2007) example, then out-of-school suspensions would suffice since they provide documentation on a student and remove them – Simon assumes there is no oversight in the case of out-of-school suspension, ignoring the potential of documentation. In the TDSB, at least on paper, it is not about expanding the purview of governing through crime, but rather about how safety is best achieved for the individual student, for other students, and, of course, for the school board which now has a written record that is easily

108 transmitted to principals. The governing through crime thesis for school discipline ignores how (compassionate) risk management systems can underpin school decisions and lead to different interventions.

One on hand, to use Simon’s phrase, these Caring Rooms do “take the anxiety out of the exercise of power by facilitating the removal of problem students” (2007). On the other hand, they reinforce the belief that these decisions cannot be made arbitrarily or without proper due process – and punishment certainly is not the overriding concern. If a principal were to exercise power in a haphazard manner, with only the goal of removing problem students with little regard for due process, it would not alleviate anxiety for the SSO and the principal but create more (recall the administrator waiting to see if an appeal would be launched). It is quite clear to the SSO that improper procedure is a new source of anxiety, because the principal is left vulnerable to litigation, or having the suspension/expulsion overturned on appeal. Governing through crime is still crucial since it would be folly to suggest that some students are not treated in this manner. However, it fails to account for the emergence of a more formalized system of documenting problems and reasons for teaching to the rules (Kupchik 2010); namely, the safety of the institutional name.

An approach that would more in line with the governing through crime thesis would be for principals to determine if the student committed an infraction, and then decide on the more efficient place to put the student – in a punishing room or on suspension. The approach in the TDSB, with its discretionary wording, enables more space to document, record, and produce knowledge about the individual student, and show that the institution cares about said student. Similar to the issues with scholars who talk about the school-to-prison pipeline, clearly student banishment is one solution, but there are myriad trajectories that emerge along inclusionary and exclusionary circuits in school discipline. Zero-tolerance, in the case of the TDSB, had the first crack at initiating a formalized disciplinary process. However, being more formalized does not mean harsher as evidenced by these Safe and Caring rooms. The caring room is rooted in the body of research that suggests that

109 suspensions and expulsions can do more harm than good by creating an achievement gap where disciplined students lag behind their peers. It appears that it is this knowledge that puts the ‘caring’ in Safe and Caring Rooms while simultaneously providing more preventative surveillance over the student. 63 One can debate whether the room is about institutional efficacy, but it emerges as a specific tactic to quell reputational concerns through compassion and straddles the inclusionary/exclusionary line. Prevention here means multiple things that do not sit easily with each other: preventing bad kids from being left to their own devices; preventing an achievement gap that could lead to future issues; and preventing external criticisms that the TDSB does not care about its own students.

Conclusion

There is more to the SSO than dealing out punishment. While punishment is an organizing principle, it is not easily understood as an example of the ‘get tough’ rhetoric overtaking schools. The SSO does have an institutional risk management focus but it is within a public education system where pastoral-disciplinary power is simultaneously emphasized. The SSO is not only actively involved in disciplinary decisions and processes; they are also involved in re-constituting safety and compassion as a risk management strategy. Compassion becomes something around which risk management is organized. Compassion is present in exclusionary decisions and enables the educator and school board to bring levity to the situation. Levity is important because although there is a broad shift to risk management, it has institutionally specific reverberations. In the context of the SSO, these reverberations centre on the disciplinary/pastoral roots and promises of mandatory education.

However, compassion is also used as a means to mitigate the risk of future litigation by maintaining an optic of caring and instituting a process that allows for second

63 This relies on a specific type of criminological theory known as Routine Activities Theory, which suggests unsupervised young people potentially cause more problems.

110 chances, change, and progressive discipline. Compassion here is less a substantive goal to achieve but the means to an end; namely, institutional protectionism. Finally, compassion in the TDSB and through the SSO is a way to implement a risk management of everything (Power 2004). Risk management is not always about exclusions or callous decision-making. From the preceding chapter, compassion is another way to organize risk management principles.

To revisit the introduction, Ashworth and Zedner (2014) inform us that “the imperative to prevent, or at least to diminish the prospect of, wrongful harms conflicts with [justice in a liberal society] since it may require intervention before reasonable suspicion can be established, on the basis of less conclusive evidence or even in respect of innocent persons.” [252]. This tension, they lament, was almost always resolved in favour of prevention, at the expense of a liberal justice order. However, this pull towards prevention may be stronger where there is no pastoral caring for all its constitutive members rooted in the education system. In the context of criminal justice ‘the other’ in need of harsh measures is a compelling narrative. In the context of school safety, where extreme exclusion seems to have lost out, educators seem to understand that these are ‘just kids’ who may be in need of protection. 64 In school safety, the imperative to prevent harm is related to the imperative to provide a caring environment for all students – even if it does not always work out this way in practice. 65 The context of school safety may provide an answer to Ashworth and Zedner’s (2014) question of how to ensure that the rule of law is followed in the preventative framework: make compassion a preventative aspect of the system. The TDSB is held to account for preventing harms and for preventing the harms of prevention 66 – such accountability is undermined in the context of penal systems because the criminal is often depicted as an outsider compared to the insider/student of the TDSB.

64 It is of course more nuanced than this as educators are not a cohesive whole and they often face pressure from parental groups to crack down on problem students. 65 In particular, there are plenty of representations of particular segments of the youth population as ‘problems’ – particularly along the lines of race. 66 This is neither a novel nor a revolutionary idea – see Blomley 2007.

111 Chapter 4: Lockdowns and the Active Shooter

“Confronting [the school shooter] could end your life … or save it.” – Safe Schools Administrator 3; Day 3: 47

Introduction

Since the tragedy at Columbine, the school shooter has taken on mythical 67 elements and has become a source of constant concern for schools. Kupchik and Bracy (2009) found there was a “ubiquity of school violence by suggesting that Columbine has affected schools across the country in concrete and measurable ways” (149) and scholars have termed this “the Columbine Effect” (see Muschert et. al. 2014). I avoid the term “Columbine Effect” because it places too much significance on Columbine as a watershed moment. I argue that Columbine did not “change the game” (SSA2; Day 3: 42) because the shooter was a new threat, as one administrator intimated. Recall Chapter 1 where I outline two school shootings in Ontario had within months of each other in 1975. What changed were reactions after Columbine related to the emergent institutional concern of reputational risk management blending with pastoral power.

In this chapter I continue the line of analysis laid out in the previous chapter and discuss how pastoral power fuses with risk management. As quoted in Chapter 3: “risk management routines may have more to do with a certain kind of organizational legitimacy and responsibility framing than with having the organizational capacity to encounter risk inventively and intelligently” (Hutter and Power 2005:15). In this chapter, I explore two such risk management routines implemented by the TDSB to deal with the school shooter: Lockdowns and Threat Assessments. The school shooter is positioned as an outside threat but is potentially

67 I call the ‘school shooter’ mythic in that it evokes a particular image at the extreme end of school violence.

112 a member of the student flock. Although the school shooter 68 is a rare and “worst case scenario,” it remains central to concerns about school safety and to school board policies.

I further argue that lockdown procedures reconstitute school safety. Lockdowns are physical manifestations of the intersection between security and strategies of reputation risk management (Power 2007) and re-define safety in schools. Lockdowns are ways for institutions to respond to safety concerns and are gauges to measure how well prepared a school is in the face of a myriad of possible incidents.69 Although the school shooting is a rare occurrence, there are real consequences if a school board is seen as not doing enough to care for the flock. Finally, I argue Threat Assessments, while admitting they cannot accurately predict who will be the next school shooter, nonetheless attempt assert control over the shooter. As responses to the school shooter, both the Lockdown and the Threat Assessment emerge from a risk management orientation, and not because they objectively make schools safer.

Although other authors and most media reports expand the definition of a school shooting to include University campuses, which feeds into the broader myth of the school shooter, I focus on policies in grade schools (kindergarten to grade 12), because children are required to attend school until they are 16. The requirements of a compulsory education and the age of students contextualize parental anxieties about school safety, and frame the school board’s pastoral/risk management response. For the following chapter, I use data collected from workshops run by two high level TDSB Safe Schools Administrators, which featured other presenters. I also analyzed TDSB policies, procedures, and media reports concerning lockdowns and school shooters. Finally, the Limestone District School board epitomizes the new approach to threat assessments that the TDSB is working to build. I therefore used

68 Often termed the ‘active shooter’ in Ontario Police training protocols 69 Universities increasingly have emergency and lockdown systems in place for active shooters.

113 Limestone’s policies and the work of the leading expert, Kevin Cameron, to analyze threat assessments.

The Lockdown Procedure: The Limits of Safety

According to TDSB policy (Operational Procedure PR.695 SCH), lockdowns are “an emergency situation, which prevents the safe evacuation of a school building and requires steps to isolate students and staff from danger by requiring everyone to remain inside the building.” There are three levels of lockdown, originally called: full lockdown – internal (FLD-I); full lockdown – external (FLD-E); and a partial lockdown (PLD). The latter two lockdowns were renamed as Shelter-in-Place and Hold-and-Secure to symbolically distance them from other institutional lockdowns such as those that occur in jails. A Lockdown is issued when danger is present in the school, and “is a response to an emergency situation wherein the evacuation of a school building is neither safe nor advisable and steps are required to isolate students and staff members from danger by having everyone remain inside the building … [the lockdown] minimizes access and visibility and shelters students, teachers, staff and visitors in secure locations” (PR695). The Lockdown is designed for the active shooter since it is to be “invoked in situations that constitute life- threatening events, and where facility evacuation could be fatal” (SSA3; Day 3: 44). A Shelter-In-Place is used when the emergency exists outside the school – students are kept in classrooms, and a procedure similar to the Lockdown is followed to limit visibility and access from the outside. Hold-and-Secure is called when a serious incident occurs in the community. “This event poses no immediate danger to students or staff unless they were to leave the building. In a [ Hold-and-Secure ] situation, the school doors would be closed, lights are shut off in the classroom and curtains are closed to prevent visibility from outside. Students and staff would continue their school day in a normal fashion.” A Hold-and-Secure is initiated when the police contact the school about an incident in the community, such as a robbery, or if a nearby school is placed in a lockdown.

114 When a shooter is suspected in the school, the office is to be immediately informed, and should initiate a lockdown. “Seconds count and you should not wait to verify the existence of a gun” (SSA3; Day 3: 44). The office makes the following announcement as per TDSB guidelines: “Attention All Teachers and Staff! THIS IS A (Name of School) EMERGENCY. THE SCHOOL IS NOW IN LOCKDOWN MODE’ (indicate type of lockdown). I repeat … (repeat previous sentences)” (emphasis in original). The lockdown announcement is designed to be clear and unambiguous and should not have any secret codes (PR695). This is an important shift from the pre-lockdown era, when principals had a code word for a bomb threat, for instance, and all the teachers immediately left their classroom to look for any open lockers. Students, as well as staff, are now fully aware of what is happening, which is all routinized and practiced as a safety measure.

Once a lockdown is communicated to all parts of the school, a call is made to 911, then the TDSB call centre. A mandatory crisis report is promptly sent to communications, and all classroom doors and exterior doors are to be locked (except in the case of a Lockdown where one door is to remain unlocked for emergency personnel). The office must advise the emergency response team of which door to enter and have someone “ready to give the floor plan of the school if safe” (SSA3; Day 3: 44). Floor plans should have ‘red areas’, which are areas that cannot be locked down and communicate as much information as possible while acknowledging that uncertainty is embedded in the school’s own geography. There are three command posts, two inside the school (one being the office), and one outside if there is a hostage situation. The school is also expected to have all interior doors labeled to make it easier to pass along specific information to the police.

During a lockdown, teachers have numerous responsibilities under section 4.4 (PR 695): 1. Teachers take attendance in each room and note any additional students who have entered your room

115 2. Teachers should remain calm and reassure students that the emergency is under control; 3. Staff is to direct students in hallways to seek shelter in the nearest classroom; 4. Staff is to direct students in outdoor areas to immediately take cover. Return to the gym if it is safe to do so. If the threat is outdoors on campus grounds. All outdoor activities should be cancelled and students should remove themselves as far from the event as possible; 5. Keep everyone facing away from the glass and doors where possible. Stay away from open or exposed situations; 6. Pull shades or drapes and turn off classroom lights; 7. Don’t release anyone, except by the direction of the principal or designate or the police; 8. Do not allow students or staff to use restrooms or lockers; 9. Turn off all electronic devices, including radios, televisions and cell phones. However, if you have vital information or need to report a medical emergency, call 9-1-1; 10. Everyone should lie on the floor if gunshots are heard; 11. Do not call the office for general information – you will be advised; 12. Prepare students for staying in a ‘lockdown’ mode for an extensive period of time; 13. Only open the doors when an ‘all clear’ or ‘release code’ is given; 14. Lunchroom supervisors and School Based Safety Monitors should follow these procedures in the cafeteria or lunch room space if the lockdown occurs during the lunch hour; 15. Support staff (including Head Caretaker or designate, support staff at all levels) will report to a previously designated location (e.g. Main Office, Library); 16. Main Office Staff will contact transportation to advise staff of the situation; 17. Main Office Staff will have a consistent message for parents who are calling the school during a lockdown;

116 18. Adult students, visitors and all others in the building are required to obey lockdown procedure instructions while on Board property; and 19. When asked by the Main Office Staff, all teachers are to identify students who are NOT in the building during the lockdown procedure [Since removed]

Student responsibilities are the following:

- Follow the directions of school staff and emergency personnel;

- Remain calm and quiet;

- Proceed immediately to the nearest classroom;

- Turn off all electronic devices including ringers on cell phones;

- Relay any pertinent information to school staff.

These responsibilities are intertwined with the ‘right’ to have a safe school and the ability to attribute blame if protocols are not followed (see Appendix F demonstrating the lockdown grid of communication). They are also about protecting the student body (or the flock) as efficiently as possible.

School lockdowns are the new ‘fire drill’ or nuclear bomb drill. The TDSB policy mandates that each school develop its own site-specific lockdown procedures and practice the lockdown drill twice a year. These practice sessions are “logged as a permanent record [which can] be accessed via the Principals’ Intranet Site” (SSA 2; Day 1: 11). Posted in each classroom is the summary of the lockdown procedures “ideally in a checklist format” (SSA 2; Day 1: 11). The lockdown practices are coordinated productions and include all emergency personnel and mini-tests within the lockdown procedure. For instance, one Safe Schools administrator recalled a story where he walked the hallways during drills and knocked on doors to ensure that the teachers did not open them – an impromptu audit to ensure compliance with the rules.

117 The TDSB lockdown policy is remarkably unspecific about the types of threats that would lead to a lockdown, opting to say it should be used for “situations that constitute life-threatening events”. It is certainly not limited to these types of events, and the spectre of the active shooter permeates the policy and training around lockdowns. Teachers have the responsibility to get everyone to lie on the floor if there are gunshots (4.4(j)), yet it is unclear if teachers would know what gunfire sounds like. Staff also must be prepared to provide information on the ‘description of the weapon’ and if ‘shots have been fired.’

Lockdowns are the quintessential security technique/technology to deal with a school shooter since even a “Glock can beat a metal detector” (SSA2; Day 2: 23), and you “can’t stop the motivated offender. The tragedy will still happen” (SSA2; Day 2: 23). Thus, there is recognition that regardless of a school’s level of physical security, people can still die and school shootings can occur. As one senior administrator said, a school “could have a Fort Knox area with cameras, metal detectors but if there are problems in the school then crime is still going to happen” (SSA2; Day 2: 34). Lockdowns are useful because there is no desire to turn the TDSB schools into ‘Fort Knoxes’ in contrast to the United States. American schools were typified as such ‘fortresses’, and the increasing security technologies were seen as decimating beautiful buildings (SSA1; Day 1: 5). Lockdowns allow schools to maintain existing aesthetics, to avoid being more prison-like, while accepting there are limits to stopping the motivated offender.

The training sessions also worked to undermine the fallacy that if one works in a good school with good students, a shooting is unlikely to occur, since “no school is immune from violence” (SSA2; Day 2: 23). In fact, it is in these good schools where there should be heightened levels of concern because educators “must worry about the quiet one with no friends, not the child with the tattoos or the gang-banger” (SSA2; Day 2: 25). Thus, the image of the school shooter is depicted as not akin to the violence experienced in inner-city schools, where “gang-bangers” are prominent, but in quiet, upper middle-class schools where educators may feel a false sense of

118 security (see DeLeon 2012 for a discussion of the racialized roots of these representations). The depiction of the school shooter conveys the unexpectedness that anyone could possibly become one, but also tries to capture the shooter as someone who is knowable, something that schools can still act upon to target and prevent. An uneasy tension exists with the idea that the school shooter is someone educators cannot anticipate yet the assumption is the school shooter can still be targeted and known through the peculiarity of becoming a school shooter.

Prevention has emerged as a constellation of responses in risk society/advanced liberal societies (Rose 1999; Ewald 2002; Ashworth and Zedner 2014), but the type of prevention envisioned by lockdowns is about minimizing harms rather than preventing a shooting completely. Garland (1996) has argued the justice system no longer believes it can solve the problem of crime, and thus reacts to crime as a normal social fact. Similarly, now that the school bears responsibility for the school shooter, the school lockdown concedes that nothing can be done to save every life. A lockdown policy is a way for the school to do something about the school shooter while insulating it from blame. The visibility of the lockdown protocols in classrooms, on the TDSB website, and in the public domain front-loads the debate of what the school is responsible for at the policy formation stage. Like the protagonist in A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Adams 1980), who had ample time to lodge a complaint about Earth’s impending demolition, the public nature of lockdown drills means the moment to ascribe blame is shifted to pre-catastrophe, and onto the very people who may later claim the TDSB did not do enough to prevent deaths. Of course, the public nature and repeated practicing of lockdowns also means that blame can be meted out post-catastrophe, if some step was not followed by a particular actor. Thus, the institution organizes the lockdown as a public discussion with the potential to disperse blame from the institution to individual actors.

The unique characteristics of a given school mean that there are some site-specific issues involved in a lockdown. The TDSB operational procedure says “while recognizing that each school and each potential crisis will vary, below is a suggested

119 set of procedures for school use, which conform to current emergency procedures within the Board.” Thus, the TDSB manages to avoid an overly prescriptive set of procedures because of the variety of situations and school sites. The TDSB is buffered from the diverse set of circumstances and school plans by creating a suggested set of procedures and unloads the responsibility of filling in the blanks in the lockdown plan onto actors within the school.

Each school has a Safe Schools team that develops its own procedures, evacuation sites, reunification zones, portable emergency kits, etc. The complete security plan for a given school is kept secret, as the “TDSB does not release this type of specific information, pursuant to the Freedom of Information Act” (SSA1; Day 5: 67). This lack of transparency is designed to prevent certain site-specific emergency details (like which door emergency personnel will access) from falling into the “wrong hands.” These invisible plans are made visible in TDSB policy only to inform us that schools have taken even more precautions behind the scenes. Interestingly, and little discussed in the precautionary literature, this is a second-order precaution or a counter-precautionary measure. It is less about the initial catastrophe, and more about countering a reaction to the initial precautions. It is well documented that risk management systems produce newer, unforeseen risks (see Ericson and Doyle 2004), yet these risks are not just governed after they emerge – often risk management systems attempt to harness the unknown risks that they have yet to produce. Here, the risk of lockdown procedures becoming too public is inhibited by local school decisions. Second-order precaution is also evident during training in hypothetical scenarios because, in the end, “we [the TDSB] can’t give the illusion that we can be prepared for all these scenarios” (SSA1; Day 4: 64). The previous statement is the ultimate second-order precautionary measure because it reflexively understands the limits of its own security strategy and makes that limitation explicit. While lockdowns are connected to this shift toward precautionary logics, one has to untangle the economy of blame to fully understand how lockdowns emerged as a salient way to improve school safety. Of course, the economy of blame needs to be situated in the institutional context, which is, as I have argued in

120 previous chapters, related to the pastoral duty of educators and to a compassionate risk management.

The Saliency of Images and Blame

The images from the Columbine massacre have endured (even winning a Pulitzer Prize for ‘Breaking News Photography’) and are different from previous school shootings because the media arrived as events unfolded. As Cullen (2009) argues, “each [previous school] attack erupted unexpectedly and ended quickly so TV never caught the turmoil. The nation watched the aftermaths: endless scenes of schools surrounded by ambulances, overrun by cops, hemorrhaging terrified children” (15). However, he also notes that Columbine only gave the illusion of watching mass murder: “None of the earlier school shootings had been televised; few American tragedies had. The Columbine situation played out slowly, with the cameras rolling. Or at least it appeared that way: the cameras offered the illusion that we were witnessing the event. But the cameras had arrived too late. Eric and Dylan had retreated inside after five minutes” (66). Thus, despite the level of carnage, Columbine becomes different to the public not because of its death toll but because of its media coverage. While Columbine is still widely misunderstood as a school shooting, when in fact it was designed to be a school bombing (Cohen 2009), the main difference in Columbine was not the level of catastrophe but the illusion that it was unfolding for public consumption in real time.

How is the school positioned as at fault post-Columbine? The ‘new reality’ is not an epidemic of school violence but that school and emergency forces somehow exacerbated the situation. In some cases, a few more lives could have been spared, as a couple of people bled to death in the hours it took for the SWAT team to reach all the classrooms. How the events were ordered after the violence started that led to questions about practice. For instance, communication with the parents of the deceased was disorganized and not completely truthful – some were told a final bus with survivors was on its way that never came. One of the victims was left outside,

121 uncovered, for 28 hours (Cohen 2009). Such concerns are less about safety and more about crisis management and reputation. I am not making a moral claim that bodies should have been covered or that the misinformation given to a victim’s parents was the right thing to do – no doubt these issues caused considerable stress. However, these are not issues of safety, but rather the logical realities of a murder scene and investigation. Post-Columbine, the lockdown is something to be used not only because it is safer, but also because it creates an aesthetic of safety. The lockdown organizes, orders, and makes things look less chaotic. The lockdown procedure also clarifies and enhances communication streams so that the information divulged is succinct and conjecture is absent (recall the block letter announcement that is supposed to be made: “THE SCHOOL IS NOW IN LOCKDOWN MODE”). With media staging areas, the media themselves are spatially organized and used to provide parents with information rather than being seen as oppositional to the crisis situation.

The policy of lockdowns is not simply a by-product of school and police officials’ preoccupation with polishing their media images during times of crisis. There are very real pastoral-related concerns for students. Yet, reputation risk management concerns permeate pastoral care, and both are evident in the deployment of a lockdown. Although not exactly akin to airlines painting over their logo during a crash scene so that it is not associated with disaster, concerns for reputation do underpin the use of lockdowns post-Columbine. The crucial point is that reputation risk management is not something that necessarily is a result of overt discussions or departments concerned with reputation (see Power 2004). Indeed, what the lockdown suggests is that secondary risks can become important in less clear and more haphazard ways. There is no concerted meeting on the part of Safe Schools administrators to use lockdowns as a form of secondary risk management, as there is in the main example of Power’s (2007) discussion. Unlike the boardroom, where companies are designing ways to manage reputational risk, the TDSB and school board officials talk about lockdowns in a matter-of-fact way of preventing more deaths, and possibly deterring school shootings (for instance, the protocol in place

122 for outdoor portables is to flip tables over and hide behind them because they can stop bullets). In the case of lockdowns, secondary risk management is infused at the outset of worrying about the primary risks: the students’ safety. Because of the pastoral concerns that exist in schooling children, the turn to reputational risk management has a less insidious tone than the private companies of Power’s (2007) opus. The school board adopts a genuine belief that this is as much about caring for students as it is prevention.

Lockdowns being about primary and secondary risks at the same time is highlighted by the non-use of alternatives. The ‘get out of the building now’ approach – or the ‘Geneva Plan' – proposed by two police officers in Illinois, claims that “Every kid out is a safe kid … Every kid inside is a potential victim” (Schmitt 2000). The officers argue that lockdowns actually inhibit flexibility, and their model empowers individual teachers to make crucial decisions. While it is unclear if the TDSB actually discussed this particular model of school safety, the evacuation technique alternative was considered when developing the lockdown policy, and the TDSB “has an Emergency Evacuation Procedure designed for 5 levels of threat. The levels of threat range from an imminent building threat to a National Emergency” (SSA2; Day 3: 42). Clearly, evacuating the building during a school shooting is one plausible option, but the TDSB does not want it used in that situation. Indeed, school officials, police officers, and the fire department were, at the time of data collection, working out what should be done when a lockdown is initiated and the fire alarm rings. The fire department was not pleased students would have been instructed to remain under lockdown and not evacuate the building. The greater fear is that the ‘bad guy’ may pull the fire alarm to lure out victims during a lockdown (SSA2; Day 3: 45). The policy debate amongst emergency personnel reveals that safety is being discursively reconstituted depending on how the hypothetical crisis is constructed.

While the Geneva Plan also attempts to counter widespread panic by training all parties in evacuating calmly, the multitude of students in the streets or at non- uniform pick-up locations means that the images will look chaotic. For example, see

123 the picture on the Globe and Mail's September 24, 2008 cover. Students were in a gymnasium when the attacker arrived, and instead of initiating a lockdown, the principal and other educators were “directing students away from the school as police searched room by room” (Walton 2008). The image of students running away with an officer perched behind a car (see Columbine pictures at the end of this chapter) is problematic. The scene looks troubling but reunification – one of the criticisms post-Columbine – is more difficult when the student body is dispersed in many directions. The evacuation technique for active shooters is not employed not because it is somehow less safe (the same number of casualties could occur in both scenarios), but because it does not allow for images or bodies to be controlled, nor does it portray a school as organized in the face of crisis. In the next section, I analyze how lockdowns spatialize bodies and information.

Lockdowns and the Spatialization of Students, Parents and the Media

A successful lockdown not only secures students but also secures images of trauma. The secondary concern of reputation and legitimacy is embedded in the primary concern for student safety, and I will argue that the ordering of students, parents, and the media in a lockdown has profound implications for institutional reputation. The orchestration involved in instituting a successful lockdown is a way for the school to use a risk management approach to demonstrate the school is safe.

If a school shooting occurs and a lockdown is initiated, the TDSB creates staging areas. The use of the term ‘staging areas’ shows a concerted effort to control how the situation is viewed. The successful lockdown is about the absence of students, parents, teachers, and especially casualties. The purpose is to represent the school shooting in its entirety with as few images of catastrophe as possible, while showing an orderly and efficient response. Well-rehearsed lockdowns show preparation for disasters. The paradox is that there is an absence of images to suggest a major incident is taking place. The staging area is not just about public relations; it is about staging a different narrative of the event. Cullen (2009) noted how the images of

124 Columbine gave the illusion that the event was actually unfolding before the audience’s eyes. The school, and the violence within, is no longer the stage for audience consumption.

Staging areas are normally located away from the actual emergency and are meant to control knowledge and the movements of parents and the media. The staging area is particularly important to prevent an onslaught of anxious parents, as Cullen (2009) observed: “at the perimeter, officers struggled to hold back the parental onslaught. TV anchors broadcast their entreaties: “As difficult as it may be, please stay away.” But fresh waves of moms and dads kept swarming over the hill” (59). The staging area minimizes the number of anxious parents photographers could capture (see Columbine slides at end of the chapter). Similarly, one administrator indicated that during the CWJ lockdown, Chief of Police Blair made a “genius move”, when he had students loaded onto TTC buses and shuttled to another location for re-unification, thereby avoiding the problem of media capturing streets full of parents waiting for their children (SSA2; Day 3: 46). In this moment, we see the fusing of risk management (reputational concerns) with pastoral power, by making sure all students were under the care of the school until parents were available.

According to a Safe Schools Officer, one of the two purported failures of the lockdown at CWJ was that the media interviewed students who were on buses, waiting to be taken to the parent reunification site. The fact that a news station was able to interview a student while they waited was one of the biggest ‘failures’ noted and was an area of concern for future lockdowns. The administrator also noted that the media needed corralling, and that an information area needed to be set up for parents with questions. The perimeter response to school shootings by law enforcement, as seen in Columbine, has been discredited as ineffective, but the perimeter mentality is still in play through these staging areas.

These concerns are not unique to the TDSB. For instance, the PASS [Parental Awareness for Safe Schools] program (Pascopella 2008) hinges on improving

125 school-to-parent communication during threats. The protocol in place at the particular school board where it is employed [Cherokee County] is for a parental team to contact other parents and help during the ‘reunification process’ to alleviate anxiety and fill out reunification forms. The ultimate measure of success of this program is that during a bomb threat, “not one parent showed up in a panic looking for their child” (37). The success is determined not only by the physical manipulation of where the re-unification process takes place (in another building) and the filling out of forms to ensure compliance, but also by the absence of panic, which can lead to images like those seen in Columbine and other school shootings.

A recurring theme in the training is that while there is a correct way to follow lockdown procedures, there is no correct lockdown checklist. Many questions and hypothetical scenarios emerged from the floor: What should be done with open concept classes? What if you are in a locked classroom and the target has the key? What if the shooters pull the fire alarm? Inundated with hypothetical situations, and unable to really prescribe any ‘right’ way to proceed, the trainers just offered basic information. The common unifying characteristic imbedded in all the discussions was how safety should be organized and what it should look like. For example, when asked whether or not the shooter should be approached, one Safe School trainer said that “could end your life … or save it” (SSA2; Day 3: 47). Therefore, it seems there is no unified accepted strategy of what a lockdown should look like – it should be practiced, it should be clear, it should be discussed, but individual actors can take it upon themselves to act contrary to protocol. With no consensus on the ‘right way’ to do a lockdown, the common threads appear to be around avoiding chaos, confusion, and the images that may result. There is also an element of appearing calm in the face of the disaster, because that is one way to care for your flock. Although the protocol is useful as it provides a general guide for decision-making during an event and in post-event debriefings (what worked and what did not), the tacit assumption is that the guiding principle, for any gray areas that necessarily exist in the face of uncertainty, is that educators will act as caring and compassionate guides. For instance, the union resisted the idea that teachers should

126 check the nearest washrooms for straggling students during a lockdown, because it puts educators at an unnecessary risk. Ultimately, the TDSB will not force teachers to put themselves in danger, but the administrator rather ominously calls to the pastoral role of the teacher: “This is a moral issue. Can you live with it [your decision]” (SSA2; Day 3: 46)? In the uncertainty of an active shooter situation, and in the spaces where policies cannot be overly prescriptive, there is a repeated appeal to the pastoral duties of educators.

Teachers do bear responsibility for controlling mass panic and student bodies since teachers must: “reassure students that the emergency is under control” (4.4(b)). However, teachers can be far removed from the unfolding situation and lack the information to make any practical claims about control. Practically, teachers should be trying to calm their students, but reassurances of control over the situation are quite different from the notion that schools cannot be prepared for everything. Classroom management becomes a key component of a successful lockdown, where a class may be under lockdown and unable to use the restrooms for more than five hours, like in the CWJ case (SSA2; Day 3: 49). The role the TDSB envisions for its teachers is not solely one of disconnected managers of reputational risk, as the board also wants to remind, and appeal to, a teacher’s higher standard of care.

In all these instances, the logics of blame are shifted and shifty. Teachers have a protocol to follow yet should let their [pastoral] conscience be their guide – revealing that there can be no strategy in place for every potentiality. In this vacuum, there is an invitation for the TDSB to bear the responsibility of not being fully prepared with a step-by-step policy, but it is understood that too rigid a policy would interfere with the educator’s discretionary ability and pastoral calling.

In training, school principals are afforded a unique set of responsibilities because they are informed they are the most likely targets. As one trainer said, this means you should avoid fuelling potential active shooters by taking unnecessary disciplinary actions against students. Here, being illiberal or unfair to your flock is

127 couched as a risk factor to being killed. 70 Furthermore, in a hypothetical scenario, principals are asked not to give the all clear when being threatened by a gun because they should weigh their life against the many (SSA2; Day 3: 46). Thus, the principal is given a sense of control over the situation before it happens and while it's underway. As the lead figure for the school, the principal, rightly or wrongly, is closely linked to the catastrophe and seemingly able to mitigate losses or prevent it from happening. However, the trainer was quick to state, “I’m telling you not to confront the shooter [because] I don’t want to be sued” (SSA2; Day 3: 47). The trainer also presented the story of an officer who was taking a law school class during an incident. The police officer could stay in the classroom and out of harm’s way, but would then have to live with the consequences. The trainer went on to say in a purposefully enigmatic tone that “[confronting the attacker] could end your life … or save it” (SSA2; Day 3: 47). The principal is thus positioned much like the captain of a sinking ship – they are blameable if they did something to provoke the incident, and blameable for doing nothing during the incident or placing more lives at risk. Through the training exercise, the principal is placed in a position where inaction, like the police officer, is unhelpful because confronting the shooter is part of the principal’s duty without it explicitly being part of their duty . Too rigid a policy guiding principals on school shooting procedures renders the school board vulnerable to critique about endangering educator lives. How do you have policies that show a duty of care to students and staff? To negotiate this conundrum of reputational risk management, school boards appeal to the educator’s sense of discretion, which is rooted in pastoral power.

During a crisis, the instructor said that administrators must “be prepared for confusion” (SSA1; Day 5: 69). The statement demonstrates the fluidity of governing in the lockdown scenario because, despite attempts at controlling the situation, it reflexively understands that uncertainty and ‘chaos’ will be a huge part of the process. The principal has a huge role to play in the event of a lockdown even when

70 Interestingly, this also may help contribute to the shift away from rigid zero-tolerance policies, or at least the ease with which school boards have adopted this shift.

128 law enforcement arrives. In fact, as part of training, principals are warned by the SSO not to “let the police talk down to you” (SSA1; Day 5: 69). Especially because, the training continues, principals are used to confusion and police are not used to crisis (SSA1; Day 5: 69).

Media relations were a key part of the safe schools training, which highlights the concern for managing risks beyond student learning in a safe environment. All communication must reflect three things: “First, an incredible sensitivity for the well-being of staff and students; second, a concern for litigation and; third, cooperation” (SSA1; Day 5: 70). The media relations training also highlighted that the media is not to be trusted, through cautions such as “be prepared for a media invasion [after an incident] and trickery;” “there is no such thing as off the record” and make sure you “talk [to the media] like you are in grade three” so there is no ambiguity in what you are saying (SSA1; Day 5: 68). The media therefore is itself a unique risk to schools, particularly during crises, because if managed improperly it could lead to litigation and blameable moments.

Yet, despite caution, the media also must be mobilized and considered an asset to the school administration, for they are the conduit for the images and information of the crisis. Many secondary risks are managed when the media are properly ‘staged’ and spatially confined, and if information is accurate and quickly disseminated to the public. The media are therefore essential to safe schools training because they help manage secondary risks such as image, pictures of crisis scenes, and parental information flow.

Indeed, the second of two errors identified by the administrator in charge of the scene at CWJ was that the TDSB was “too slow in giving out facts. This would help with residual issues now” (SSA1; Day 5: 69). Although he did not elaborate due to liability concerns, it is obvious that school administration is focused on information flow – which offers security of another kind to parents – as something that needs to be improved. Indeed, controlling information after a lockdown is one of the biggest

129 challenges educators will face (SSA1; Day 5: 70). Like Columbine, (see Cullen 2009), CWJ suffered not for failing to do all it could to protect its students, but for failing to do all it could to enhance the perception that it was doing all it could to protect its students. The information gaps leave the school administration vulnerable to future problems, because by not providing timely information to parents, the administrators, in effect, did not completely ensure safety of its students. As educators are also supposed to be proactive in stemming rumours (SSA1; Day 5: 70) – the lack of information (or misinformation) becomes a blameable moment despite being only loosely tied to actual student safety.

While lockdowns seek to control uncertainty by re-spatializing bodies, they produce more uncertainty (see Power 2007). The use of a lockdown not only creates uncertainty for the institution but also embeds it in the lived experiences of staff and students, as no information is passed in or out. The lockdown cuts off the information flow from the classrooms since cell phones are not to be used, televisions are not to remain off, and the class is to be kept away from doors and windows. This shutting off of information flows is also practical, as there have been serious issues with emergency personnel unable to use telecommunication systems during a crisis. Thus, a lockdown also attempts to order information and increase its efficiency. The flow of information is also controlled at media staging areas, which act as ways to inform the public and parents. In the case of keeping parents in the loop, these better communication flows are designed not only for practical reasons, but to buffer against parents running into cold institutional rituals like what happened at Columbine (Cullen 2009). Compassion/caring remains a primary concern, along with student safety, because it is wrapped up in the legitimacy of the school as an institution. Parents not only have an expectation that students will be secure but that educators will be caring which is demonstrated (if not necessarily in practice) throughout the lockdown procedures. Having positioned lockdown as a new mode of (compassionate) risk management, I turn to theorizing how this new technique should be understood.

130 Theorizing Lockdowns: A Shift of the Panoptic Gaze

In this section, I pull some threads from the above analysis to tie in with broader claims about the theories of lockdowns. Some have argued that the emergence of lockdowns questions the notion that schools are still disciplinary institutions and have instead become interspatial zones governed by the state of exception (see Lewis 2006; Agamben 2005). The lockdown has to be practiced twice a year and it is routinized. Students and teachers are drilled in how to be a part of a good lockdown. Furthermore, through the process of a lockdown and the spatial organization of bodies in the school, students are disciplined, and physically demarcated from an outside ‘other’ threat, thus creating different and new conceptions of normalization. Those inside the classroom, huddled in the middle of the room, are engaged in a physical signalling of who or what is normal.

Furthermore, schools themselves are disciplined along the lines of the lockdown: “if a major incident happens at your school the first question that will be asked by the media is when was the last time you practiced a lockdown?” (SSA1; Day 5: 68). The ritualized practice validates the school as one engaged in preventative measures and will be useful in demonstrating that this school is a safe one when held accountable by the media. Lockdowns, and how they are practiced, are one way for the school to compare itself to others in the board. The lockdown itself does not necessarily mean the school is unsafe, as the lockdown ritual assumes an active shooter situation can occur anywhere. However, the practicing and recent preparation for an emergency shows that a school is relatively safer by moving the student body more efficiently. The concept of safety in a lockdown supposes that an active shooter does not unhinge the actual reputation of the school. The school is still a good school, and there was little the school (and educators) could have done to prevent all of the deaths and injuries. When a school has adequately rehearsed the lockdown procedure and extra lives are saved, its reputation is more greatly solidified. Thus, in this manifestation, the lockdown is highly disciplinary on multiple levels. The

131 lockdown drill also simultaneously shows that you are a caring school and doing your best to fulfill your responsibility to protect all students.

It is in the process of ordering and spatializing bodies that the lockdown comes to closely resemble sovereign displays of power, and can also be co-opted by more repressive logics, as has happened in some American contexts (see Hirschfield 2008; Lewis 2006). However, I argue it is the disciplinary power of the school meshing with a form of power that Foucault (2009) calls ‘security.’ Foucault, when talking about security, states: “the specific space of security refers then to a series of possible events; it refers to the temporal and the uncertain which have to be inserted with a given space. The space in which a series of uncertain elements unfold is … the milieu” (Foucault 2009: 20). Foucault argues that along with sovereign and disciplinary forms of power, security has always co-emerged and manifested itself. Security is essentially another form of power that may or may not be activated in different contexts and along with different modalities of power.

Disciplinary institutions have always been focused on security. However, the prevailing sentiment was that security of the school could be achieved through the proper program and the correct disciplinary regimen. The threat to school safety was constituted as coming from within, and not from an outside attacker. 71 Discipline embedded security into itself. Thus, students who were normalized within the machinations of the school would become known and good – they would become certainties. The students who were outside the normal distribution were targeted for interventions or removals from the school. The schools, like the juvenile justice system, were ‘laboratories’ (see Rosenheim 2002) to help cure delinquency [operate on those on the margins] and produce docile citizens out of the majority of the population (see Raby 2005; Jones and Williamson 1979; Ball 1990).

71 Of course, shooters are typically students within the school – but school shootings are simultaneously framed as an inside issue perpetuated by a student and emerging from an external force or threat in the disembodied and acontextual way lockdowns are talked about.

132 The realization that this turn of the century project is unattainable embeds uncertainty into the project of the school. Along with this realization is the co- emergence of choice and student responsibilities (see Levinsky 2016) – the school is turned into a security milieu. Disciplinary power is still present, but the emphasis on security in the Foucauldian sense ensures quite a different enterprise is created. Using terms borrowed from Foucault, one could say that there is a shift in the ‘economy of power’ within the school. The emphasis on prevention or precaution is not necessarily new, because the population/people relationship of security is not like the obedient/delinquent relationship of disciplinary power. Indeed, as Foucault (2009) says, “security lets things happen and leaves things alone whereas discipline abandons nothing” (45). The practitioners teaching lockdown methods know people will die if an active shooter walks into the school. As one trainer explained, during a lockdown, the first four police on the scene enter the school in a diamond formation and ‘climb over the dead bodies’ looking for the threat (SSA2; Day 3: 43). The candid and detached depiction of potential victims as obstacles reinforces the point that when a lockdown is initiated, and a shooter is in the hallways, the school is ‘letting things happen’ until the police arrive. The role of the school is to manage the flow of populations within the school, in order to prevent multiple casualties.

The lockdown imagines the school shooter as anyone in the school – in fact, the shooter is anonymous. For the lockdown drills to be considered successful, the focus shifts from the shooter/subject to what the victim/object could be doing to prevent being victimized instead. The lockdown also re-focuses attention from the problem kid to the good kid. Recalling an earlier quotation, if you are afraid of potential school shooters, do not worry about the gang-banger with tattoos but the good kid with no history of violence (SSA2; Day 2: 25). The lockdown has to problematize the unproblematic ‘good kid’ because uncertainty is embedded in the very practice of security. Every student is seen as a potential threat in the preventative (yet pastoral) discourse of the lockdown. Raby (2014) makes a parallel point in regards to the double-edged sword emergence of discourses on children’s participation and choice. Framing students as participatory, despite being in line with social justice,

133 can also reinforce existing neo-liberal hierarchies. In the case of school safety, this emergence of discourses of autonomy can reinforce the preventative logic of risk management approaches, while fostering a greater uncertainty (undermining pastoral care). The school is becoming the very ‘milieu’ Foucault described where the uncertain unfolds.

Paradoxically, the easiest schools to lock down and draw on security are those built as disciplinary machines, since “open concept schools are the hardest to lock down” (SSA2; Day 3: 49). The theory behind the lockdown flows from the originally intended disciplinary power of the school, and not from some absence of rights in an Agambenian sense. When the idea of lockdown emerges as a way to promote safety and security in schools, the alternative is that everyone simply vacates the space. The evacuation strategy, at least in the TDSB, disappears as an alternative precisely because it does not utilize the disciplinary power embedded in the school to its advantage. However, new schools are being built with lockdown and crime prevention through environmental design in mind (SSA2; Day 3: 49).

As Foucault (2001) observes in his essay Truth and Juridical Forms , the body in disciplinary institutions was “something to be molded, reformed, corrected, something that must acquire aptitudes, receive a certain number of qualities, become qualified as a body capable of working” (82). Thus, at the outset, the school as a disciplinary institution carried an immense confidence that bodies could be molded, that existence could be projected – thus, security as a modality of power was subsumed under this rubric. As Foucault argued, the disciplinary institution has the “self-assumed responsibility for ‘existence as a whole’” (as cited in Deacon 2005:96). However, as I have argued in terms of how bodies are ordered in lockdown procedures, the concern has shifted to embed uncertainty into the disciplinary machine. Thus, instead of an oscillation between ‘fear for children’ and ‘fear of children’ (Rosenheim 2002), both fears are united in the strategy of a lockdown.

134 Lewis (2006) has argued that the American experience of zero-tolerance procedures, new security measures, and lockdowns are examples of Agamben’s theory of the camp. As described by Lewis (2006) lockdowns in the US are quite different than those in Canada. For instance, lockdowns are used to search student lockers, especially in inner-city schools, and are deployed in more oppressive conditions than in the TDSB. Lewis (2006) argues that the school is similar to Agamben’s (2005) theory of the camp because “the camp does not function to produce docile bodies or subjects of the law. In fact, the camp strips the subject of his or her subjectivity” (164). More to the point, Lewis claims that “education in the inner city is intimately linked with biopower in that its primary function no longer seems to be creating a productive, docile, industrially competent worker subject but rather simply children’s survival itself” (167). Therefore, the emergence of the lockdown and other disciplinary procedures prevalent in American inner-city schools represents this state of exception .

While the claim that school is shifting away from producing docile bodies to ‘zones of exception’ is misleading and overstated, at least in the Canadian context (see Raby 2005; Levinsky 2008), what is more problematic is the theoretical underpinnings driving Lewis’ analysis. The erosion of the disciplinary power/role of the school and the unhinging of the production of docile bodies does necessarily create a camp-like space in the school, where the sovereign can act at will. Lewis (2006) claims “Agamben questions the underlying spatial metaphor of Foucault’s work, emphasizing the centrality of the camp over the now peripheral model of the panopticon” (163). There are two problems with this analysis: First, with lockdowns, the panopticon’s gaze shifts from being within the school to across schools. Now, schools are disciplined to practice lockdowns in a turning out of the disciplinary mechanism, and students and teachers are drilled on what behaviour they should display when a lockdown is underway. Second, while Lewis is correct in seeing that disciplinary power is shifting in schools, what he ignores is Foucault’s conception of security (see Foucault 2009), and how that may help explain the shift without having to make the leap to understand the school as an absence of rights.

135

Furthermore, the school has always been a state of exception if looked at through a strict interpretation of Agamben. If situated correctly, the school itself is an example of the camp . Obviously, there are normatively better things happening in the school from a subjective standpoint, but all students are homo sacer in that they have no choice but to attend school. As students cannot be killed justifiably, they are banished to the school during the day. While students are only temporarily in this state, because youth is transitory and they are home at the end of the day, they still retain the right to not be killed. They are ‘students,’ which actually decontextualizes their identity – like camps do – and stripped of their rights to attend school or not. Taking the analysis to the extreme, schools emerge out of a crisis at a particular point in history – that idle young people on the streets need to be civilized (see Platt’s 1977 reading of the Child Savers movement). Thus, we could argue that the school is an example of the state of exception becoming institutionalized . But this is a profoundly unhelpful way of understanding the school and how the school operates, because woven into this fabric of the school is a pastoral care for students that is seemingly absent from other examples of Agamben’s camp. As my analysis has shown, pastoral power and a duty of care are imbricated complexly with risk management and disciplinary power. Thus, Lewis’ (2006) analysis fails because of the conceptual instability of applying the totalizing idea of the state of exception to the school.

Hischfield (2008) and others (Giroux 2003a; Simon 2007) have looked at schools as becoming over-criminalized and as a way to prepare for prison. However, for the reasons discussed above, lockdowns are not about hyper-criminalization or getting tough on certain behaviours. In fact, lockdowns seem to be generally ignored in academic literature or, when they are mentioned, are understood as ways to further subjugate students (see Lewis 2006; Lyons and Drew 2006).

Lockdowns in the American experience are used for random drug searches – clearly a display of sovereign might and authority. However, the TDSB experience with

136 lockdowns has shown us that they do not necessarily lend themselves to such displays. While lockdowns are used for security issues and safety concerns beyond the active shooter (for instance, a nearby bank robbery, a molester in the bathroom, or a bomb threat), the lockdown starts off as something very different than a sovereign act of might. Bazemore (2008) argues, the “show of force becomes and end in itself. It allows sheriffs, police chiefs and school administrators to claim with straight faces that they have addressed the problem” (88). As I demonstrated, there is more than just a sovereign display of power because there is an entire re- organization of bodies and information.

As part of his governing through crime thesis, Simon (2007) attempts to advance the argument that crime has reshaped the substance of schooling. Simon bases this claim on the emergence of a national safe schools policy in the United States, and on the various governing strategies he says are borrowed directly from the realm of criminal justice. In discussing this movement to what he calls a ‘penal pedagogy,’ Simon uses the emergence of zero-tolerance and the use of in-school detentions as examples of an increased criminalization and governing through crime. As I argued in earlier chapters, these two strategies are not used in the TDSB because of secondary risk considerations. Zero-tolerance lost its cache as a way to ensure safety, and in-school detentions are considered too informal and have no official forms of documentation. While schools are more concerned with crime, even in the TDSB, the governing through crime thesis, at least in a school setting, is more of a superficial shift. The deeper and broader shift underpinning the movement to governing through crime is the shift in governing secondary risks. Indeed, Simon (2007) argues “the threat of criminal victimization of their children is at the heart of the schooling experience for many parents. Compulsory education ultimately means surrender of parental control over the safety of their children for the length of the school day. While that fact is in many ways independent of the educational objectives of schooling, it is by no means secondary to it” (230). Simon is precisely touching upon the emergence of secondary risk management without really identifying it beyond safety. Safety is tied to schooling objectives but as part of the

137 wide-ranging ‘benchmarks’ schools must address. When we examine Simon’s thesis on other trends in education (such as standardized testing and reporting; the use of benchmarks in education; the emergence of parental involvement [see Apple; 2001a; Dehli 1996]), we can see that there is a growing pre-occupation to establish that the school is doing a good job – for which safety, and governing through crime, is but one facet. The larger trend is governing through reputation . As Simon points out, “prisons and schools increasingly deny their capacity to do much more than sort and warehouse people” (231). The dream of a liberal education having failed, much like Garland (1996) documents with regard to the criminal justice system, there is a refocusing on the management of secondary risks to ensure a continual justification. Schools can be compared to each other using on a number of metrics – literacy rates, suspension rates, number of police officers or school resource officers, testing scores, etc. – for consumers to make an informed choice.

What Simon mistakes as governing through crime are strategies schools can use to advance the perception of providing a safe environment and meeting safety targets. Strategies for ensuring school safety, like CCTV, uniforms, metal detectors, or uniformed police officers, are all part of the shift to making the invisible visible (Strathern 2000). While actual safety is questionable, these are visible strategies to ensure safe schools, and generally alter perceptions of a school’s safety. Safety has become a performance indicator in schools and, like the audit, the school’s level of safety must be made visible and transparent. Strathern (2000) has argued “As the term accountability implies, people want to know how to trust one another, to make their trust visible, while (knowing that) the very desire to do so points to the absence of trust” (310). The statement echoes those made by people who have looked at the expansion of security technologies in schools (Levinsky 2008). Security technologies are one way to ensure that safety is made visible; yet at the same time, this visibility fosters mistrust and suspicion of the students (see Casella 2003a; Gallagher and Fusco 2006). What those who research school safety tend to miss, however, is that these security technologies and techniques are not solely about hyper-criminalizing the educational sphere. Security technologies are ways to

138 ensure the school makes visible the desire to create a safe environment and can use measures, such as how often a school lockdown is practiced, as performance indicators.

Casella (2003b) has pointed out that security is very much a consumer activity that can involve the choice to segregate oneself with a variety of visible security measures. Noguera (1995) has argued that the increasing use of security measures is meant to show that the school administration is serious about cracking down on violence. Levinsky (2016) also found that the Safe Schools Act in Ontario was perceived by principals as a way to ‘get serious’ about school discipline in the post- Columbine environment. The linking of security and visibility implies that reputation is at stake if nothing is done to alleviate the problem. While a precautionary logic is a part of the shift in governing bodies (see Ericson 2006), it is not enough to simply be precautious because it must be achieved in a visible manner. While part of the visibility of security techniques is reliant on the misperception of a rational choice theory, which suggests they will operate as a deterrent (recall the quote “the lockdown if done properly can act as a deterrent”), the visibility of these techniques benefits not only potential offenders but potential victims, who can see security as something tangible. The institution benefits because blame can be partitioned elsewhere by demonstrating the precautions taken.

Dohrn (2002) says that “many schools became more prisonlike [in the 1990s]: locked doors, closed campuses, metal detectors, classroom lock downs and simultaneous locker searches, heavily armed tactical police patrols, dogs, camera surveillance, uniforms, expansive disciplinary codes, interrogations, and informers – these are some of the elements that contributed to the criminalization of school life” (283). However, the school and the prison were already interrelated at their inceptions – the prison is in fact modeled on the school, and both are disciplinary institutions (see Foucault 1977; Jones and Williamson 1979). The lockdown is more than simply another instance of the school becoming more ‘prison-like.’ While the term itself does come from the prison, the lockdown in the school is not solely about

139 protecting the students in its concerted effort against an active shooter, but also the reputation of the school. The lockdown is a way to minimize losses. Unlike in a prison, where a lockdown is imposed to maintain order and legitimacy, in schools the lockdown is to minimize casualties. For instance, the first police patrol officers responding to an active shooter in a school are instructed to go in immediately. There is no waiting for tactical teams because the very nature of school shootings demands an immediate response. Far from being prison-like, with armed guards trying to re-enforce institutional order, the school lockdown is about preventing the body count from rising beyond an expected number. The lockdown resembles the prison only in the way in redistributes bodies in space, but they are different in underlying logics.

Limiting access to the school on a daily basis is also tied to active shooter responses because such restrictions make it easier to initiate a lockdown. The use of access control by schools, a situational crime prevention strategy, is not a set policy by the TDSB, but 525 to 550 of their 600 schools have “tightened up” in terms of restricting access. Part of this rapid informal dissemination is related to training, but also is a result of listening to suggestions from Safe Schools Officers. As one officer said, “it is better to lock your doors in today’s climate. There are interesting folk walking around in the school” (SSA2; Day 2: 33). The sheer pull of the logic that everyone else is doing it so you should, coupled with security and reputational concerns, makes access control more desirable than having all school doors unlocked. The pervasive logic is that of efficiency in managing populations, as “it is easier to lock up the school and deal with challenges and issues around it” such as:

- Physical education classes – they go in and out of the gym

- Portables – maybe use a swipe card

- Deliveries

- Recess and Lunch – when the threat is in the yard

- Multi-partner facilities

140 - Parent and community reactions (SSA2; Day 2: 34) The recognition of #6 highlights how the TDSB, and individual schools, are evaluating the economy of blame by accounting for backlash in deciding to close school doors to the community – but this backlash is a less of an acute blameable moment for school administrators to handle compared to a major incident.

Threat Assessments: Predicting the Unpredictable

Coupled with the emergence of lockdowns, which assumes a level of unpredictability and inability to make loss of life zero, the threat assessment is a way for school officials to determine if a student is particularly likely to become an active shooter through interviews. Currently, the TDSB is ‘behind’ in this burgeoning field with only one expert (Kevin Cameron), but they speak highly of the Limestone School Board’s Policy and are working to use it as a template for their own procedures (SSA1; Day 4: 62). In this section, I will focus on the Limestone District School Board’s Community Threat Assessment Protocol because it was the template drawn on by the SSO in the TDSB.

Threat assessments assume that the school shooter has presented tell-tale signs in daily interactions with educators and other students. The logic, best explained in Rampage (Newman et. al. 2004), heavily relies on the literature of Vaughan (1997) by suggesting that deviance displayed by potential school shooters is often ‘normalized’ by school actors, and therefore early warning signals are misinterpreted, ignored, or not properly communicated. Vaughan’s analysis is quite strong and helpful in revealing structural issues within organizations that lead to bad decisions or unheeded signals. Indeed, there is a new fascination with early warning signs and ‘near misses’ (see Centre for Analysis of Risk and Regulation conferences at the London School of Economics). There are however various issues with using Vaughan to discuss the school shooter. First, the literature on organizations and how they ‘normalize deviance’ mainly starts with the technocratic

141 schematic of some object – in Vaughan’s discussion it is an O-ring. In another, it is the physics behind an airplane’s fuselage. In the case of insurance companies and the economic world, we are usually presented with actuarial tables. There is no schematic of the properly working child. Deviance, in the case of the student, is quite different than NASA normalizing how the O-ring performs under extreme weather conditions. The slippage in metaphors is not just a semantic issue. Threat assessments and the analysis by Newman et. al. (2004) assume that students are fixed objects that emit warning signs when a catastrophe is imminent, and it is up to the school authorities to identify and act properly. Whereas O-rings will not operate at 100% efficiency at a freezing temperature, there is no simple scientific comparison to students and similarly experimentally tested situations because of agency. Yet, as Douglas and Wildavsky’s (1982:1) often cited maxim reveals: “Can we know the risks we face, now or in the future? No we cannot; but yes, we must act as if we do”.

Newman et. al. (2004) argue that “the culture and social structure of American public schools leads to information loss, which in turn obscures the pain and anger inside some students … The question is not how individuals could have missed the warning signs, but rather how the organization of public schools prevents them from recognizing and processing the information correctly” (79). The reliance on Vaughan’s typology and the language of the ‘near miss’ (see Downer 2009) assumes that the student’s pain and anger will operate objectively, and cause stress fractures similar to an O-ring that gives off warning signs that need to be processed effectively. The message is that all the information, properly collected and transferred, could have controlled the situation. Teachers become classroom engineers who “without more information, even an experienced teacher [may] not see the storm brewing” (95). This process also makes an individualizing error as explained by Maurutto and Hannah-Moffat (2007) in the context of risk/need tools in the youth justice system. The information collected by the teacher in daily interactions is specific to a given student, which is then used to make a predictive claim about the individual, where these ‘warning signs’ are based on broader

142 population probabilities and retrospective looks on successful school shooters. These assumptions about probabilities become substituted for inevitabilities at the individual level if nothing is done. One of the more pernicious aspects of the theoretical basis for threat assessments is that these assessments are understood as necessary preventative devices, yet there is general agreement no accurate profile of a school shooter exists.

While structural secrecy may be embedded in school systems, the analysis of Newman et. al. (2004) effectively places the locus of blame on the organization of the school for these types of incidents. This argument, in turn, reinforces an institutional focus on reputation risk management. If schools and school officials are like NASA engineers in the way both parties approach their objects of significance (the students or the O-rings), then it follows that perfect information flow would prevent catastrophes. Newman et. al.’s (2004) analysis is interesting not just because it attempts to get at the sociological roots of school shootings, but because it is embedded in the emergence of reputation risk management, since the argument assumes the organization’s day-to-day operations have the ability to normalize deviance and produce disasters. The school is now implicated in these random shootings and the tacit assumption is they are predictable. As one administrator pointed out, for every school shooting there are a ton of near misses (SSA2; Day 2: 25).

In training for threat assessments, the message was similar to calling a lockdown that turns out to be unnecessary – “don’t under-react” (SSA2; Day 3: 42). This phrase appears to have been borrowed from Kevin Cameron-led training for the so- called “Violence Threat Risk Assessment,” or VTRA. For example, Cameron and his threat assessment team send out continual information through their websites (www.safescholstogether.com and http://www.cctatr.com) where similar phrasing is often repeated: “Under-reaction is still the biggest problem we have where even VTRA trained professionals, for a variety of reasons, do not activate the protocol” (see http://saferschoolstogether.com/alerts-2/ ). This inertia is particularly a

143 problem, we are told, during “Extended Critical Periods” such as the end of the school year or during other high profile violent incidents. The heightened level of precaution is not just about ensuring student safety, because administrators are being explicitly trained that if they under-react and something happens, they are in a very vulnerable position. In the case of a lockdown, it is “a lot easier to call a lockdown by mistake than pick up a dead body” (SSA2; Day 3: 45). Threat assessments are based on the premise that all shooters tell someone about their plans but the information never reaches the appropriate channels. Indeed, administrators suggest “someone knew about the shooters in the majority of cases but did not tell anyone” (SSA3; Day 3: 42). The threat assessment is used as a way to “identify those likely to cause havoc,” although they can never be perfect because “someone will slip through the cracks” (SSA3; Day 3: 48). At the same time the threat assessment attempts to gain control over the uncertain, expert knowledge embeds uncertainty into its very process. Threat assessments therefore typify a fluid form of regulation where, although attempting to categorize threat-making behaviours of students, it is aware of its own limits. Indeed, one trainer erroneously bought into the myth of Hitler’s Birthday of April 20th being a cause and told the room full of school administrators to “mark that date on your school calendars and be more alert to behaviour that should send flags out. Columbine is the benchmark and there are those that want to beat that record” (SSA2; Day 3: 44). Despite the sense of situational control gained through the use of threat assessments, it is clear that there is no ultimate way to lower the risks to zero. 72

Threat assessments attempt to not only gain control over the uncertainty of who may become a school shooter, but also seek to problematize the unproblematic. Part of this is connected to the fear that shootings are not an urban thing, but more likely to happen in rural, white, middle-class schools (see DeLeon 2012 for an analysis of the racialized roots of such fears and representations). School shootings cannot be easily understood as the product of a ‘bad neighbourhood’ by those in the

72 I say erroneously because the graffiti 4-20 tends to signify support for marijuana use rather than supporting mass murders.

144 increasingly fortified suburban communities (see Davis 1990). In threat assessments, there is no oscillation between a fear of children and a fear for children, in a cycle that Rosenheim (2002) suggests is a feature of regulating young people – instead these fears exist simultaneously. Indeed, the LDSB protocol states: “Note: Do not be deceived when traditional risk behaviours do not exist. There is no profile or check list of the high-risk student. Some students who actually pose a threat display very few traits of the traditional high-risk student” (Canadian Safe Schools Network 2008: 76). This highlighted section problematizes students who have been determined to be, by the very process of threat/risk assessment, low risk/threat. By definition, the ‘unproblematic’ should still not be free of suspicion. Furthermore, the research that suggests school shooters cannot be profiled (see Reddy et. al 2001) helps maintain a widely cast net of suspicion. Thus, despite research suggesting administrators should avoid profiling because of its low predictive capability and the potential negative impact it could have on the selected students (see Reddy et. al. 2001), LDSB essentially turns the research on its head and implies that since no risk profiling method will be 100% accurate, every student is implicated. Therefore, instead of the selected students having negative consequences flow from their identification, essentially all students are held in the limbo of suspicion.

Threat assessments are a mutation of risk assessments, despite trying to appear different. The major difference is that risk/need assessments are used on a specific person caught up in concrete surveillance systems like prison, probation, parole, psychiatric wards, etc. The threat assessment can be used for anyone. Casella (2003b) notes: “Risk discourse cultivates insecurities, shifts blame to scapegoats, supports the security industry, and forces people to rely on expert knowledge about risks – a knowledge that creates new insecurities – as the only solution to insecurity” (138). As a tool to identify the school shooter, the threat assessment is one such expert discourse that achieves more insecurity. The secret service (Reddy et. al. 2001) identified that there was no profile of the typical school shooter, yet also

145 advanced the notion of a threat assessment as the best tool to prevent school tragedies.

Conclusion

I have argued that school board policies and academic discussions of school shootings contradictorily position the school shooter as someone who is at once potentially anyone, yet someone easily identified and objectifiable through better knowledge. The dual presentation of the school’s role means they are simultaneously an innocent bystander and a guilty party. Indeed, in media representations of school violence, Kupchik and Bracy (2009) found the common theme that while school violence is unpredictable, schools are blameworthy for not preventing or predicting violence. I argued that the TDSB’s policies, which contradictorily imagine the school shooter as an unknown and knowable, is a way for the school board to address the paradox that exists when they are considered at fault for random acts of violence.

Brown and Munn (2008) argue that “a timely question yet to be addressed is how academics and researchers have contributed to the rise of the ‘school violence’ phenomenon” (225). They go on to point out that the emergence of school violence as a ‘field of study’ needs to be implicated in the rising concern of school safety. This point is important because the academic focus on reputation risk management, and on how the organization contributes to school shootings, helps position the school as a blameable subject.

Columbine did not change the game. Major school violence, although rare, has always existed. Shootings happened; bombings happened. 73 What did change was in how schooling was understood prior to Columbine. Schools were somehow positioned as blameable – as responsible for these massacres. Somehow, the school

73 Recall one of the deadliest school massacres was in 1927 at Bath School where one man detonated dynamite killing 44 people (37 schoolchildren aged 7-14).

146 did not do enough to stop these outbreaks of violence, whether because of the policies in place, or because of a failure to identify who would potentially shoot up a school. Columbine becomes the focus because it is when this break was finally affirmed and shored up in policy. Columbine is therefore not different because of what happened during the incident, despite more casualties (higher number of casualties were possible in other cases as well), but because of what happened afterwards. The C.W. Jefferys inquiry is also part of this shift because in the aftermath of a school shooting, it focused attention on the school itself – gun control and personal psychopathologies are part of the story, but no longer were as central to preventing major school violence. 74

The school shooting is an extremely rare occurrence, and I have devoted a lot of attention to it – which in a way perpetuates the normative concern with this type of grand catastrophe. However, the ‘active shooter’ permeates multiple layers of discourse in the governance of schools. He is present in bullying prevention initiatives because of the belief that shooters are bullied. He is present in the new TDSB tip line, which tries to ensure the information that is known to exist lands in the right hands. He is present twice a year in every school in the TDSB when lockdown drills are practiced. He is behind the extra caution teachers take in marking term work, not only for style, content, and grammar, but also in looking for unnecessarily violent depictions. He is present in how principals are trained to ‘lead with compassion’ so as not to be the target of an angry shooter and put his/her whole school at risk. Most schools in the TDSB have limited access control, meaning very few entry points into the school. As one Safe Schools officer pointed out, “only 30 schools are not all locked in Toronto. This isn’t the result of any policy. It was just done. Most [schools] complied with that so they could continue to be viewed as safe havens in the community” (SSA1; Day 2: 33). The school shooter is behind this compliance as well. While he is rare, his image is constantly invoked as the worst- case scenario to avoid and thus becomes the litmus test for safety in schools.

74 Recall the discussion in Chapter 1.

147 Lockdowns and threat assessments, both preventative reactions to the active shooter, combine multiple rationalities. Pastoral and disciplinary powers (traditional aspects of the school) are fused with a governmentality of risk management that tries to make the uncertain more controllable. In the above study, there is a clear shift to reputational risk management concurrent with shifts across institutional settings. However, in the education system and the school, this secondary form of risk management has to show a duty of care to students. The lockdown and threat assessment in other institutional settings, like the prison, are understood as more repressive forms of regulation that aid in exclusionary governance or in an exclusionary institution. 75 In the context of the pastoral power of the school however, inclusionary forms of governance also are activated, making it tough to characterize these shifts as rooted in exclusionary logics or in the notion that schools are increasingly states of exception.

The above analysis should provide a caution against assuming techniques that appear similarly across institutions are invoked in similar ways. The school board, while concerned intensely with very rare events and the use of preventative logics which can activate more repressive circuits of exclusion (see Rose 2000), is also concerned with its reputation as a good shepherd who takes care of every student in an inclusive way. While neo-liberalism has shifted some of the goals and ways we assess the success of a given school, it has not re-written the original (and somewhat contradictory) promises of mandatory education. We are left with a complex intermingling of rationalities that mean in some cases more repressive forms can be activated, but pastoral roots are never completely undermined, as pastoral care is continually evident in turns to prevention and risk management. Mapping out these nuances helps to reveal that there is nothing necessary about the forms that risk management and prevention take.

75 Of course, some scholars do point out how risk need assessment tools act on populations in a blending of exclusion with welfarist inclusive logics (see Hannah-Moffat 1999; 2001)

148

The photographs below of the Columbine massacre were awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Denver Rocky Mountain News in the Breaking News Photography Category. All photos and captions are adapted from http://www.pulitzer.org/works/2000- Breaking-News-Photography .

Tears turn briefly to joy as teens watch classmates flee to safety.

Terrified students edge nervously up a hill against a wall of the school while police search for the gunmen.

149

Daniel Rohrbough lies dead on a sidewalk, soda from a can he dropped trickling downhill near him. At left, students crouch behind a car with a police officer who aims his gun at the school.

150

A student just evacuated from the school is embraced by friends, overjoyed she is safe.

Students sprint across a parking lot toward school buses waiting to evacuate them.

151

Bloody shoes and socks lie near an ambulance outside the emergency room at St. Anthony Hospital Central, where wounded students were taken.

Emergency workers treat wounded students as friends and loved ones provide comfort at a triage site on the lawn of a neighborhood home.

152

A frantic parent trying to get through a roadblock at Pierce Street and Weaver Avenue is restrained by officers near the school. Parents rushed to the school to try to find their children.

153 Grief overcomes Columbine High School students Jessica Holliday, left, and Diwana Perez moments after they fled the school during a violent rampage by two fellow students April 20.

Two anguished students embrace near the school early in the siege. "We didn't think it was real and then we saw blood," one student said.

154 Chapter 5: Conclusion

The present study explored how a risk management ethos reshapes safety in schools, but also found that the compassionate and pastoral focus of the school re- shaped risk management. The study of how risk management emerges in institutions often hinges on a description of the institution's descent into a neo- liberal torpor. Similarly, the study of safety in schools often devolves into a discussion on the social justice implications of exclusionary policies without exploring how inclusionary polices are formed and rendered meaningful. Risk management, compassion/pastoral power, and safety/security all combine in different ways in the context of the Ontario public school system. The present study tried to bridge this gap by looking at three distinct areas: the emergence and disappearance of zero-tolerance in Ontario; the creation and perpetuation of the Safe Schools Office and the emergence of, and solutions to, the school shooter as a new problem. I will now summarize how each part adds to the thesis.

Zero-tolerance, when invoked with regard to school safety, is often too harsh and repressive a response, leading to unfair practices and the impression there is a war against youth (Giroux 2016). Despite this, or in spite of it, zero-tolerance failed to gain traction in Ontario schools. The pessimistic view is that the removal of zero- tolerance was more about keeping up appearances than substantive change; however, it is clear that not all the processes at play in school safety and discipline are about exclusion. Zero-tolerance provided a shield to educators, leaving decision- making to their discretion, yet this ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach was believed to be too strict and too American (see Chapter 2). The Canadian narrative of tolerance and compassion in the face of difficult social issues spanned the political spectrum. While this narrative may be a comforting fiction, 76 it has implications for the techniques of school discipline. Underneath this veneer of tolerance it is highly probable there are still strategies at play to move working-class and racialized

76 I borrow this turn of phrase from Sarat (2000).

155 bodies out of these spaces (as per the school-to-prison pipeline literature) but my focus was on the organizational story the TDSB told about itself.

Since my study was interested in this organizational story, it was important to trace the development of the Safe Schools Office (now named Caring and Safe Schools) and discuss the work the SSO does. The exclusionary tactics and marginalization that occurs through the disciplinary process appeared at odds with how the school board understood and managed risk. The SSO chapter showed that school discipline was not all about exclusion and that administrators and educators were concerned with injustices. Of course, injustices do happen and do recur, but I have raised new concerns not typically a part of the study of student discipline and safety. There was pressure to ensure that student rights were being protected and that educators were held accountable for bad decisions. Of course, the concern is often one of mitigating future litigation – but this concern is tied to the pastoral care and compassion evident in board policies. In the words of a senior administrator we find the fusing of these different and competing rationalities: “Yes we do what is best for the child, but we do what is right and what is legal” (SSA1; Day 1: 16). The concern and compassion displayed by school boards and educators are often portrayed as being swept over by the rising tide of securitization, or the result of a rogue hero battling the tide of the exclusionary circuits of neo-liberalism. However, as I argued, these different rationalities of compassion, risk management and security co-mingle and are evident in policies and procedures.

Perhaps the most acute way I have argued for nuance is in the context of the school shooter and lockdowns. It is easy to use the emergence of lockdowns as an example of how schools are turning into prisons since the lockdown is an explicitly prison- like strategy. The lockdown is increasingly used to secure cities and universities during rampage shootings, but this is not simply another example of the carceral being exported to society (see Foucault 1977). In the context of the school, the lockdown achieves much more than turning students in homo sacer (Lewis 2006) or domestically militarizing schools (Giroux 2016) – at least as it pertains to the TDSB.

156 The lockdown represents a physical combination of compassion, risk management, prevention, and securitization. While it is easy to see prevention and securitization in lockdowns, the compassionate risk management at play is also important in constituting safety.

Weaving these threads together, I argued that risk management in the context of the TDSB looked different than other risk management systems. Of course, this is not a novel observation as “risk management routines may have more to do with a certain kind of organizational legitimacy and responsibility framing than with having the organizational capacity to encounter risk inventively and intelligently” (Hutter and Power 2005:15). Risk management in the school system took on more than a strictly exclusionary or cold neo-liberal logic and was infused with compassion and inclusionary circuits. The compassionate turn stems from the pastoral power of an education system responsible for other people’s children. Many have debated whether the education system has achieved its original lofty goals (see Illitch 1971; Friere 1970; Platt 1977). However, pastoral power and a duty of care to students inform policy and practices. The original dreams of the education system remain important even with broader shifts to preventative justice (Ashworth and Zedner 2014) and preventative detention in schools (Casella 2003b). How compassionate risk management looks in practice remains understudied because current shifts in school safety are often accompanied by a hardening of security strategies that are less subtle. It is also easy to see how education systems are shaped by current trends in governance and regulation 77 – but less obvious is how educational theories reshape those trends. In particular, this dissertation looked at how risk management is re-formed by the use of compassion in the education system. Compassion here signifies a duty of care that educators have for students in loco parentis and is not meant to imply that the school always works in compassionate or just ways.

77 For the definitive history of the shifts in the education system in Ontario during the last half of the 20 th century see Gidney (1999).

157 There are several limitations to my study but these areas offer newer sites of research that can use this dissertation as a base. First, my study is focused on one school board in Ontario, making generalizations difficult. However, schools are increasingly governed through risk management logics, though they may use different techniques. In fact, the training was in place for educators from different school boards in Ontario and the TDSB trainers were quite clear they were also interested in developing best practices by examining other jurisdictions. Rather than simply being a visceral punitive response, zero-tolerance is a strategy used by some schools to move troublesome students elsewhere to heighten institutional efficiency. Sometimes, as the present dissertation argued, zero-tolerance is understood to have more negative connotations and is seen as more problematic from a reputational standpoint. The very fact risk management takes on different forms in different contexts is what makes the present study integral in mapping out different possibilities. The small step I have made towards ethnography, using institutional subterfuge after being denied access,78 has added an additional lens through which to explore the permutations of risk management. The centralized office called Caring and Safe Schools (née Safe Schools Office) has been exported within the province, suggesting it has gained some traction in the risk management marketplace, not to mention the solidification of the lockdown as a safe school strategy – both of which, as I have shown in my dissertation, are heavily indebted to risk governance.

A second critique is that the present study did not explore how these safe schools policies and procedures are actually implemented. On one hand, because of the emergence of risk management and the new institutionalism, it is increasingly difficult to do research within institutions. Institutions are hesitant to reveal internal documentation or allow researchers easy access to practitioners and front- line workers. The research methodology chosen is a reflection of the pervasiveness

78 I would like to again reiterate that I only call it subterfuge to flag creativity in data collection during an era where institutions have become insular to outside research. I did not deceive or misrepresent myself to any participants in the study or training seminars.

158 of risk, which this dissertation contends has reshaped safety and the limits of what knowledge we researchers can gain from institutions. On the other hand, this research methodology also takes the novel approach of studying training seminars so that ‘the institutional story of itself’ is better mapped out. How those on the ground enact policies and how procedures play out in the classroom and hallways are crucial questions to explore. However, there remains little research on the institutional ways safety is communicated and shaped, which this dissertation addressed.

Third, this study is limited to a specific period of time in education in Ontario. Although I have traced some legislative developments into the current epoch, much of my empirical research is from the transitory period of an ostensibly zero- tolerance policy to a progressive disciplinary framework. I would suggest this time period makes the empirical work relevant – even if things have changed in how educators are trained or how the Safe Schools Office administers things. The empirical work helps build upon earlier work I have done on the enactment and implementation of the first SSA (see Levinsky 2016) and further lays out an analytical map to examine more current trends in education. For instance, do new policies and procedures show a solidification of compassionate risk management? Some of the answers may be gleaned from the legislative titles governing school safety, such as the Accepting Schools Act (2012) and the Equity and Inclusive Education Strategy (Ontario Ministry of Education 2009). A preliminary hypothesis would be that compassionate risk management has continued to make an impact in the form of ‘equity’. For instance, the recent TDSB report on expulsions and expelled students’ experiences focused on creating “equitable learning environments [that] can benefit every student, including those expelled” (Zheng and De Jesus 2017:4). 79 Future research is needed to map out the various forms compassion and risk management have taken in school discipline.

79 See also the “Enhancing Equity Task Force Report and Recommendations” (December 13, 2017) submitted for Trustees consideration recently.

159 Finally, I have potentially ignored the troubling aspects of the turn to neo-liberalism and risk management. I have argued that some of the original, albeit potentially flawed, lofty goals of the Ontario education system shape the particular forms that risk management has taken. I have argued throughout the dissertation that these inclusionary circuits and the pastoral power involved in teaching students does have implications for how risk management and other safety strategies are developed and used. 80 These contradictions and tensions are often ignored in the very necessary discussion on school discipline and broader shifts in education (see Giroux 2016; Kupchik 2010; Simon 2007; Kim et. al. 2010). My intent is not to suggest the research on exclusion is misguided, but rather to bring nuance to the discussion. If neo-liberalism is shifting education and discipline, we cannot simply look at the exclusions and ignore the aspects which seem natural for education systems to engage in. For instance, Raby (2014) talks about the double-edged sword of student participation as a neo-liberal technique that also creates new possibilities of understanding the student. It is my hope that from the present study, we get a better conceptual map of risk management to help reveal how a specific institution, in this case the school, encodes things differently. For instance, knowing that compassion is melded, often uncomfortably, with risk management, provides more avenues for action to question unjust policies and procedures – it gives us the language that the school system uses so we can question and challenge.

All the above points also present further opportunities to explore: How are risk management strategies transferred (or do not gain traction) to other school boards and school systems? How do different jurisdictions and communities shape what risk and safety mean? How are these risk management logics reshaped by the daily interactions of principals, teachers, parents, and students? It is important to understand how risk shapes institutional thinking but also how institutional thinking re-shapes risk. In this sense, the compassionate turn I have documented is a new layer to the existing work out there on school safety. School safety literature

80 The literature on ‘at-risk students’ makes similar analytic points (See Kelly 2003; Bessant 2001).

160 generally focuses on how the current political climate (various scholars have called it different things: neo-liberal, exclusionary, neo-conservative, new Right, zero- tolerance) impacts schooling and the liberal-democratic ideals of an education system for civil society. I have shown how the education system as an institution has shaped, not politics or ideology per se, but the governmentality of risk.

I want to end as I began, with a narrative. There was a sign near a schoolyard as I was thinking about compassionate risk management. It read: “Safety…is people not getting hurt.” Safety was conceived of in an inclusive way – people . In the context of the school system and all young people, even those who may be considered problematic or cause serious issues, are part of the flock, and the school still owes all students a duty of care. We know that is rarely how it works in practice and quite frequently groups are othered, getting removed from my simplistic calculus. However, in that moment near the schoolyard it became clear to me that some policies of the TDSB map out inclusionary circuits to resist the tide of exclusionary ones. The interplay between these two circuits within education systems has lasting implications for the risk management of everything and those interested in countering the often sterile and neo-liberal manifestations of risk. For example, the TDSB collects Student and Parent Census Portraits across a wide range of categories (see Yau et. al. 2014 for an overview of the data gathered and reported). The TDSB publishes these portraits separately along the lines of sexual orientation; gender; students with special education needs; socio-economic status; and ethno-racial categories (for instance black, aboriginal, white, Middle Eastern, Latin American and East Asian). These reports emerged in consultation with the Ontario Human Rights Commission to, among other things, “identify systemic barriers to student achievement and implement changes to removes those barriers…establish a baseline of data to measure system improvements in the educational outcomes for all students” (Yau et. al. 2014: 2). The TDSB has thus continued on this track of combining compassion and risk management approaches – a track which grew in large part from the reaction to the idea of zero-tolerance in school safety.

161 The interplay between compassion and a risk management of everything, and the surprising things achieved in the name of both, such as the Census Portraits, suggests there are spaces to stem the tide against strictly exclusionary measures. Different institutions will have different capabilities to resist the unjust throes of prevention. Prevention, a core feature of risk management, can even be formulated in novel ways, as in the prevention of harm to the whole flock. The school may be better positioned than other institutions in countering the unjust tendencies of risk management logics because of the stakes in raising other people’s children and the reverberating dreams of pastoral care buoying educators. The school does present a simplistic road map for other institutions, like the criminal justice system, to follow. Change the subject-position of the primary risks of the institution so that these subjects are seen as part of a larger whole rather than as outsiders. Or, ensure that workers within an organization are invested to effect change for the benefit of all – even if this means going against current institutional goals. Both are easier stated than enacted but they are starting points that can perhaps topple, or at least shift, some of the complex machinations that lead to injustices.

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179 Appendix A – Mother Assumpta

180 Appendix B – Timeline of Key Events, Legislation and Policies

June 8 th 1995 Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario wins election and Mike Harris becomes Premier

April 1997 Fewer School Boards Act (Bill 104) comes into force

December 1997 Education Quality Improvement Act (Bill 160) comes into force

June 11 th 1998 Newman’s Safe School Act (Bill 21) is given first reading

April 19 th 1999 Progressive Conservative of Ontario re-election platform, Blueprint for Change, is released

April 20th 1999 Columbine school shooting

April 28 th 1999 W.R. Myers High School Shooting in Taber, Alberta

June 3 rd 1999 Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario wins re-election

September 1999 Safe Schools Office in the TDSB begins its first full school term

September 2001 Ontario’s first Safe Schools Act (Bill 81) comes into force

October 2 nd 2003 Liberal Party defeats the Progressive Conservative Party in Ontario elections

December 2003 Trustees in the TDSB establish Safe and Compassionate Schools Task Force

April 29 th 2004 Safe and Compassionate Schools Task Force releases report

December 2004 Safe Schools Action Team is created to see impacts of first Safe Schools Act .

June 2006 Safe Schools Action Team issues report to Ontario Government

May 23 rd 2007 Jordan Manners is shot at C.W. Jefferys Collegiate Institute

January 12 th 2008 School Community Safety Advisory Panel delivers final report, The Road to Health, to the TDSB (also called Falconer Report)

February 1 st 2008 Education Amendment Act (Progressive Discipline and School Safety) proclaimed in force

181 Appendix C1 – Steps to Follow

182

183 Appendix C2 – Checklist and Tracking Sheet

184 Appendix C3 – Steps to Consider

185

186 Appendix D – Safe Schools Audit

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198 Appendix E – Case Studies

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201 Appendix F – Coordinating Threats to School Safety

202