It is always disappointing, if unsurprising, when progressive ideas are called ‘naïve and unrealistic’. There are a few ways in which Saturday’s article, ‘New York Educators call report naïve, unrealistic’ is a mischaracterization of the Falconer Safety Panel’s final report on school safety in Toronto schools. From my reading of the document, a significant number of the 126 recommendations cast an eye towards measures of prevention and find an important middle ground between the ‘culture of silence, fear, and denial’ at the one end, and at the other, the over-zealous installation of security technologies that considerably alter the learning environments of our schools, stigmatize particular communities, and represent a social disinvestment in youth. A culture already fearful of youth has served to rationalize a regime of security measures while also entrenching a criminal view of urban youth in and outside schools. In our schools, we would do well to remember that we are "in loco parentis;" we are acting, and have always been acting, in the place of parents. Let us not forget this; it is a significant foundation upon which to build a system of education.
Let us also be clear about how the ‘sniffer dogs’ -far from ‘Alabama-style martial law’- offer an important and arguably less intrusive alternative to the so-called ‘smart technology’ of metal detectors and ‘identification swipes.’ The report makes plain that these dogs are 30-pound Springer Spaniels trained to search out weapons in lockers while students are in classes. Two TDSB-owned dogs, handled by TDSB employees, could complete an entire school in two hours and at an 80-90% effectiveness rate. These mobile and cost-effective dogs could travel to any school in the city, which is undoubtedly important given how the data from the report offer conclusive evidence that weapons are a ‘city-wide’ problem. Obviously, it would be prohibitive to install metal detectors across 150 schools in the GTA. The already-scarce resources would then be diverted away from the many important recommendations for prevention that place equity for marginalized communities at the centre of the school safety project. Private security companies, and those who manufacture the ‘smart technologies,’ would certainly stand to lose a lot should the TDSB decide to take up this particular recommendation and channel necessary resources into prevention and support for Toronto’s most disenfranchised school communities.
But there is a much more significant story here and one that requires the voices of young people to fully appreciate. Beyond the less intrusive use of sniffer dogs, the exorbitantly expensive installation of metal detectors and their unproven record, the necessary funds directed away from desperately needed school programs, the issue of how young people see their own health and safety is at stake. The safety report is aptly named A Road to Health. School safety, as I came to learn over the course of my 3-year ethnographic study in New York and Toronto high schools (2002-2005), has everything to do with the social health of schools and classrooms. Through this research, funded by the federal Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, I heard from countless youth about how they feel criminalized and further disengaged in their new ‘high-security’ schools, despite the discourse of ‘turning violence problems around’ that such technologies propagate. I also came to understand the gendered and racialized violence of such ‘smart technologies.’ In my 2007 book, The Theatreof Urban: Youth and Schooling in Dangerous Times, I document my work in four Toronto and New York schools, paying particular attention to young people’s accounts of their experiences of school. My research began as a study on social cohesion in schools and the role that drama plays in the lives of young people, these classrooms being richly fertile spaces in which to study how students interact with one another. But the conditions of urban schools that I found when I began the study forced me to think differently about what I might be there to learn.
In Toronto, greater reliance on technologies of surveillance has interestingly coincided with the disappearance of people from school hallways. Parent committees are less active, user fees have prevented community groups from sharing school space, shared administrative staff and decreased custodial staff have made the outside and the inside of schools more barren. These changes have had a real impact on how we all experience school space. In one New York school, the morning metal detector routine began at 7:30am for some 3000 students, who were then held in the school auditorium until classes began at 9am. Drama classes could, therefore, no longer use the school auditorium because it was in terrible disrepair. The students knew it for what it was: a holding cell. Empty corridors is the new and desirable norm, and the ‘Office of Security and Discipline’ ensured, through their routine ‘sweeps’, that no students could be found in the hallways. In this same school, there was no need for searches of student lockers because the lockers were permanently sealed. The students had to carry all their books in their knapsacks all day. On my first visit, the ‘smart-technology’ at the school entrance singled out a young Black girl when she swiped her I.D. card for admittance, insisting she was suspended and not permitted on school property. She pleaded with school officials, insisting that the computer had to be malfunctioning and she desperately wanted to get to her classes.
Given the prevalence of sexual abuse of young women uncovered in the Falconer report, there is also an important gender analysis to be made here. As in McCormack’s (2003) study of an urban school in New York, she found that young women regularly experience the “twin abuses” of sexism and racism during these kinds of ‘security’ activities that both criminalize and sexualize the female student. In other words, young women who are already being sexually harassed in significant numbers, so we learn in the report, would feel further violated by the school’s security practices. Participants in McCormack’s study felt that security guards “…can get closer than they can ever get in a normal way…” and that young women often build up a “shield” to protect themselves from these routine procedures. McCormack’s school, too, had routine “sweeps”, a term, she notes, that has been borrowed from police lexicon.
There is no more time for denial or silence. There is both symbolic and real violence in schools in Canada and the U.S. and weapons in schools lead to serious, and as we now sadly know in Toronto, fatal consequences for youth. As the report clearly articulates, “…conditions must be altered so that youth trust the safety of their environment enough to part with the weapons.” Schools need to be safe for young people and teachers, free of violent incidents. They also need to be free of the structural violences of institutional racism and sexism. How we go about making safer and more humane school corridors and classrooms remains, therefore, the central question. Punitive measures and policies, without the necessary supports for ‘complex-needs’ students, lack the language of ethics and social justice that schools desperately need; they do not represent a social investment in youth.
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