Sarah Kuva says she felt a sense of shock when Global News revealed that more than 4,400 violent incidents had been reported in classrooms across the province last year.
While the Ministry of Education’s data showed violent incidents were up almost 80 per cent in seven years, Kuva, the president of CUPE 5100 at the Grand Erie District School Board, was surprised to find just 11 incidents reported in her board for the 2023-24 school year.
“I could not understand the numbers that were being reported,” she said. “It just seemed so far away from what the actual numbers were. I was just floored that that was what was being reported.”
The difference between the numbers Kuva expected to see and the data the governmant was reporting came because the province applies an especially high threshold. The most egregious incidents, where a teacher is seriously injured or someone has a weapon, are reported to the province, but everyday violence is not.
The 2011 memo, which defined violent incidents in Ontario’s schools, for example, only records an assault if someone needs medical attention. Other incidents that meet the provincial definition include sexual assault, extortion or possessing a weapon.
More minor assaults, which educators say they experience every day, are recorded by boards but the data is never sent to the provincial government.
“Examples would be hitting, slapping, biting, kicking,” Kuva said of the incidents going unreported at the provincial level.
“Those may not require medical attention, but they are still injured, if there’s physical contact, someone is injured. There seems to be this belief that it’s just a bruise, it’s just a bite.”
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At Grand Erie, where Kuva works, the provincial data captured 11 violent incidents last year, a fraction of the 4,494 reports of workplace violence her board recorded using its lower threshold. The local number included 3,587 times when physical contact was made without the need for first aid or medical attention.
“I was shocked,” Kuva said. “I was looking initially at the province-wide totals, knowing the data that exists in my own school board, which is equivalent, if not higher. I was very shocked.”
The underreporting is repeated in other places — take the Peel District School Board, for example.
In 2023-24, it held the unwanted title of Ontario’s most violent school board under the province’s data, with 431 incidents. The internal number is almost 15 times higher at 6,412 incidents.
Joe Tigani, the president of the Ontario School Board Council of Unions, said the more minor incidents also need to be centralized at the provincial level and used to address the growing level of school violence.
“School boards are harvesting that data, they are tracking that data at a board level,” he said.
“It’s important that school boards actually get that information to the government so they have a true representation of what’s going on across the province. I would absolutely support that, I think it would really peel back the curtain of what is going on in schools.”
It’s a move the Ford government appears to be considering. A spokesperson for Education Minister Paul Calandra acknowledged the current approach to the data may be outdated and pledged to look into it.
“The Minister is currently considering updates to the provincial policy memorandum regarding reporting standards for violent incidents in schools, as the memorandum was initially issued in 2011,” they told Global News.
Ontario’s existing definition of violent incidents:
- possessing a weapon, including possessing a firearm
- physical assault causing bodily harm requiring medical attention
- sexual assault
- robbery
- using a weapon to cause or to threaten bodily harm to another person
- extortion
- hate and/or bias-motivated occurrences
Tigani said he was concerned the government was currently ignoring the severity of violence in classrooms.
He hopes tracking all incidents, and not just those which result in the need for medical attention, could paint a fresh picture for Queen’s Park and prompt more urgent action.
“I do think that when you’re in the education centre it has become so normalized that we are sort of desensitized to what’s going on,” he said.
“That’s even more alarming that we are not more focused on coming up with solutions to these problems, but without knowing the full impact and having those real numbers, I don’t think everybody truly understands.”
© 2025 Global News, a division of Corus Entertainment Inc.
