Assaults, injuries and classroom evacuations: Alberta teachers detail violence in schools

Alberta teachers say they face increasingly dangerous conditions at school, with the most common threat coming from their own students. 

CBC News surveyed teachers across the province this year. Hundreds wrote about violence they experience on the job, including suffering concussions and other injuries; students kicking, scratching, punching and biting them; and regularly having to evacuate a classroom because of a student's temper.

Many respondents detailed how classroom complexity can sometimes tie into disruptive and violent behaviour in their classrooms.

But some educators, as well as experts CBC interviewed, expressed that parents need to be more accountable for their children’s actions, and slammed school discipline policies for being too lax.

“It’d be unheard of, of any other profession, that your patrons are able to verbally assault you and physically assault you, and expect to have the services back,” said Salvatore Durante, a teacher turned registered psychologist in Edmonton. He qualitatively studied a group of teachers from B.C., Alberta and Saskatchewan who were each assaulted by students for his PhD thesis, after a student tried stabbing him while substitute teaching.

In January, CBC gathered more than 23,000 addresses from school websites in Alberta and sent a questionnaire, in order to learn about the feelings and experiences of as many teachers and educational staff as possible. CBC is not interpreting the survey results as having statistical certainty, as the questionnaire wasn’t sent to a scientifically-validated random sample, nor was it locked with a password for teachers only.

But of the more than 6,000 total responses received, a few hundred used the open response section at the end and their descriptions of complexity to recount their experiences with aggression in the workplace — which was a key issue during October’s provincewide teachers’ strike.

The responses echo the provincial government's own findings last summer from front-line educational staff. Alberta's Aggression and Complexity in Schools team reported increased staff injuries and medical leaves, and unsafe environments for students and staff.

Its report also says educators are concerned that students are “unsafe, unsuccessful and unsupported, with limited opportunities to learn,” and that classrooms are constantly managing crises “with no proactive ways to support students.”

The anecdotes align with what the Educator’s School Safety Network, a U.S.-based non-profit dedicated to school safety training, has been hearing more frequently through its work with teachers, according to Amy Klinger, its director of programs.

Most of the training American teachers and educational staff receive revolves around active shooter situations and trying to prevent them, said Klinger, an educator since the 1980s. But that has left them unprepared to deal with aggressive behaviour from students, parents and other community members who enter a school.

“You're preparing people for the least likely thing they are going to encounter — which you absolutely must do,” she said. “But you also have to be able to walk and chew gum at the same time. So we also have to look at, ‘What are they actually going to encounter on, almost, a daily basis?’”

There’s scant publicly available data pointing to how violence impacts Alberta’s teachers.

Workers’ Compensation Board-Alberta data shows, from 2021 to March 7 of this year, about 700 public and separate school board employees provincewide have had to take time off work due to ‘Assaults/Violent Acts/Harassment.’ Such incidents caused the second-most lost-time claims for those workers in that span, and claims have risen since the pandemic.