PCs broke 2020 promise to require P.E.I. school boards to report sexual misconduct: Greens
'We continue to experience the consequences of that inaction,' says Karla Bernard
Questions were raised in the P.E.I. legislature Friday about why the government didn't follow through on a commitment it made five years ago to keep better tabs on sexual misconduct in Island schools.
The Progressive Conservatives made that commitment in 2020 in light of the case of Roger Jabbour, the former band teacher at Colonel Gray High School who had been convicted in 2018 of sexually touching three female students.
After the case had made its way through the court, Green MLA Karla Bernard put forward a proposed amendment to the Education Act to require school boards to report annually on the number of sexual misconduct complaints.
At the province's insistence, that amendment was turned into an order to be brought forward by then-education minister Brad Trivers. That never happened, Bernard pointed out on Friday in the legislature.
She said it's something that might have prevented an April 2024 case of sexual interference that took place in a Stratford elementary school.
"To this day, we continue to experience the consequences of that inaction," Bernard said, in a question directed at P.E.I. Education Minister Robin Croucher, who took over the cabinet post in February.
"Would you agree that Islanders' skepticism regarding this government's commitment to children's safety is well-deserved?"
Croucher suggested Bernard's question could be answered by the third-party review he has ordered of Public Schools Branch policies in light of the case of Matthew Alan Craswell, the former substitute teacher who pleaded guilty on April 29 to sexual interference involving an elementary student at Stratford's Glen Stewart Primary School.
"I would agree that the public is looking for some answers and some leadership on this," Croucher said in the legislature.
"I assure you that we have the very best person available in the province of Prince Edward Island to conduct the review into these questions."
Province 'uncomfortable' with amendment
In Jabbour's case, as in Craswell's, complaints were made to education authorities — who initially concluded the incidents were not sexual in nature.
In 2020, Bernard and the Greens wrote up an amendment to the Education Act that would have required school boards to disclose annually how many complaints of sexual misconduct had been made, and whether they were found to be substantiated or unsubstantiated.
"Government was very uncomfortable with this amendment," Bernard said after question period Friday.
"They felt as though disclosing numbers would somehow identify students, and so the huge pushback was about confidentiality, which was addressed in the amendment."
In the fall of 2021 — right around the time the first data about complaints was supposed to have been published — hundreds of students took to the streets to protest that their concerns about sexual harassment in schools weren't being taken seriously.
This week, Bernard said publishing a number would have provided some measure of accountability — and might have flagged the first reported incident against Craswell at Charlottetown's West Kent Elementary School in 2023, the year before the Glen Stewart case.
"That would have been a very small step towards ensuring that these issues aren't swept under the rug," Bernard said. "It's not the answer, that's for sure. We still need a centralized mechanism for recording these."
Identifying patterns
P.E.I.'s Public Schools Branch said it has adopted a centralized tracking system for staff complaints over the last school year.
Some experts, however, say that reporting system could go a step further in ensuring students' safety.
Noni Classen, director of education and support services for the Canadian Centre for Child Protection, said such a system needs to be independent of both the government and the Public Schools Branch.
She said that would ensure experts could identify patterns of behaviour, something that school administrators aren't trained to do.
"What we need to have in place are systems that pick up these kinds of issues in case it is something nefarious at play [so] that there's a record of it and it's landing on individuals who have expertise," Classen told CBC News: Compass host Louise Martin this week.
"Sometimes that can't happen at a school level because if an individual moves and goes to a different school… there isn't a capability to be able to put the reports together because it's not centralized."
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
With files from Kerry Campbell