Jenkins report says PSB is under-resourced. Here’s why that mattered in the Craswell case

WARNING: This story contains disturbing descriptions of child sex abuse. Resources and supports for anyone who has experienced sexual violence can be found at the bottom of this story.

A situation similar to that of substitute teacher Matthew Craswell could play out again if the Public Schools’ Branch does not receive more staff and money to bolster its human resources division, warns the author of a report looking into how P.E.I. schools handle complaints of sexual misconduct.

The report was commissioned by the minister of education and early years last year after the news of Craswell’s guilty pleas to sexually touching a student at Glen Stewart Primary School in 2024 shook the Prince Edward Island community.  

Craswell has since also pleaded guilty to an incident at West Kent Elementary School in 2023.

Former P.E.I. chief justice David Jenkins’s report concluded that sexual misconduct was not a widespread problem on P.E.I. and that school administrators acted appropriately in responding to complaints against Craswell before his criminal intent was known. 

But the report did highlight some gaps in the Public Schools Branch’s (PSB) handling of the incidents once they were reported to that body, which Jenkins attributes to a capacity problem.

“PSB HR resource is necessarily transactional and without capacity to be proactive and strategic. It is not realistic to expect the few overworked personnel in HR management to keep everything in their memory bank,” Jenkins writes in his report.

“Unless there is an effective institutional response — read funding and staffing — it is predictable that even with introduction of other measures the risk of incidents akin to Craswell breaching system defences will remain.”

One of the more shocking facts of the Craswell case that has drawn public attention was a request from the South Korean government to extradite Craswell after he allegedly broke into a female students’ dressing room at a swimming pool while working there as a teacher in September 2018.

The Canadian government did not respond, so it remained an unproven allegation, and never showed up on Craswell’s vulnerable sector check when he returned to P.E.I. and started teaching again — something he had done in Island schools since 2009.

But Jenkins’s interviews revealed that an incident of “professional misconduct” was flagged to the PSB in 2018.

“The PSB HR manager spoke to an October 2018 email HR received from a school administrator regarding alleged misconduct in Korea. PSB thereby became aware that an external out-of-province recruiter had removed Craswell from its prospects list due to an allegation of professional misconduct at a school in Korea,” the report reads.

Craswell was not employed by the PSB at the time, so a note was added to the tool the authority used to manage substitute teachers regarding his criminal record check: “CRC to be updated August 2018 – CHECK CRC CAREFULLY.”

“Their purpose was to flag for careful review before hiring,” Jenkins wrote.