Ontario Safe Schools Act - Liberals plan to abolish zero-tolerance policy. Too many black students being expelled

From Canadian Press via the Globe and Mail (Ontario to ease school policy on expelling students for violence, April 11, 2007):

Delinquent Ontario students are going to be supported -- and not automatically suspended or expelled from school -- this fall after the province abolishes zero-tolerance policies that have prompted appeals to the province's human-rights commission, Education Minister Kathleen Wynne said yesterday.

While critics are holding their applause until they see the changes, the move is being hailed by some who say the Safe Schools Act unfairly targets black youth and drives them into gangs.

[. . .]

Selwyn Pieters, a Toronto education lawyer who has dealt with around 150 cases relating to the act, settling two of them before the Ontario Human Rights Commission, said the changes are long overdue.

"You have kids who are expelled for accidentally touching someone, you have kids who are expelled for stealing pop and chips," he said. "It criminalizes them and it diminishes their choices. Those kids are not going to be able to go to university or college."

Worse, Mr. Pieters said, those students often fall into the hands of gangs -- something that has led the Safe Schools Act to be called the "gang recruitment act."

[. . .]

Read all of the CP story.

Reading this I was reminded of something Jared Taylor wrote in the speech (Is Racial Diversity Good for Canada?) he was prevented from giving in Halifax:

We find yet another interesting diversity issue in the case of Toronto's now-defunct zero-tolerance policy on crimes in schools. Students were committing so much robbery, drug dealing, sexual assault, and weapons violations that in 2000 the province passed the Safe Schools Act, requiring that any student guilty of these offences be expelled or suspended. Just four years later the province had to drop the policy. Why? Non-whites were being expelled and suspended all out of proportion to their numbers. More than 1,000 children under the age of seven had been suspended — for things like robbery, weapons possession and drug dealing — and the majority were black. So Toronto had to junk the zero-tolerance policy.

This story illuminates two things: First, we learn that non-whites were the major source of the problem; you did not have a rash of crimes like this when the schools were overwhelmingly white. Second, a sensible, non-discriminatory solution had to be ditched because non-whites were getting more of their share of the punishment. Here, racial diversity both caused the problem and made it impossible to apply an obvious solution.

While we're on the subject of Toronto schools, in 2005, a black school board member proposed setting up an all-black school. Lloyd McKell, who had the title of executive officer of student and community equity, said all-black schools might be a necessary way to fight high dropout and expulsion rates.

Read all of Taylor's remarks.

Note: Although Taylor was prevented from speaking at Dalhousie, he eventually got to debate another Canadian professor on the radio. See here.

See also:

Student shot dead outside Burnhamthorpe Collegiate

Are teachers losing control of some Toronto schools? Are gangs starting to take over?

16 BLACK students charged after WHITE girl complained of 18 months of sexual harassment and abuse at Toronto Catholic school

Toronto schools - "The escalation of guns and violence has made lockdown practices as necessary a routine as recess"