The parents of two 15-year-old girls at Evan Hardy Collegiate in Saskatoon say they went to police and the school multiple times between June and August 2024 with concerns about escalating online threats from the student now accused of setting one of the girls on fire in a school hallway.
“We went through all the resources and asked for help, over and over again,” said one parent in an interview. “Three police reports. I had 17 email exchanges with the principal.”
They say they went to the police and the school because the text messages and online threats from the then-14-year-old classmate were escalating into violent territory. CBC reviewed the dated and time-stamped texts.
“We thought as parents that we did what we were supposed to do, that we did the extent of what we could do,” said one parent.
As always, ACAB.
Is it really a police responsibility in this case?
The school seemed to know the attacker was in psychiatric care, was aware of the text messages, was aware of their previous vandalism, but still chose to keep the attacker in the same school as the victims.
Wouldn’t it make more sense for the school board to have moved the attacker to a different school?
I would think that not reporting a student that is threatening another to police is probably a violation of the legal requirement that schools must act in loco parentis since they obviously didn’t do anything to protect that student from threats and perpetration of violence.
They should have reasonably known that the other students were a threat due to the numerous complaints. Not involving police at that stage is negligent.
I’m saying that the school should have removed the bullies from the victims environment regardless of police involvement.
The cops definitely should have been called, but blaming everything on them ignores a clear failure by the school.
Fair enough, the school didn’t do enough. I wonder if the board had a wait-and-see approach in this instance or if they just don’t care about threats as a general rule.
Judging from the article and how it details the perpetrator’s obvious mental health troubles, either tactic would be a massive failure on the school’s part and I hope they’re sued, but I’m curious and they’re being very tight-lipped for numerous reasons.
It’d be interesting to know how they come up with their responses to bullying. Is it the kind of thing each province or school board comes up with independently, or is the central guidance?
God forbid administration has to do a lift a finger for some pedon’s kid.
Yes it is. Those two girls were uttering threats and should have been charged.
I’m not saying they should have done jail time, but at least being charged gets them into the system where a judge can rule they need psychiatric assessment and treatment.
Cops washing their hands of the whole thing was stupid, and a failure to care for the whole community.
Ps. Why would you just want the girls transferred to another school where they could begin threatening a different student?
The accused was already undergoing treatment over the summer.
Even if she was charged, she’d presumably continue going to the same school until a court date.
That wouldn’t have helped the victim.
The school and school board has the same responsibility and more tools available. The cops can, at best, lay charges and hope the courts handle the case in time. The school doesn’t need to go through a legal process, administrators can transfer, reprimand, or expel the accused with less overhead.
I don’t want that, but it’s a minimally invasive tool to get the killer kid away from potential victims. There’s no guarantee she would start threatening others in a new school. At the very least it would have kept the victim safer.
It sounds like the accused needed to be in a psychiatric institution, but those don’t really exist any more.
Psychiatric hospitals do still exist. We just started moving away from them being warehouses for inconvenient people.
Schools are not responsible for criminal behaviour, at which point the police are involved. It’s that simple.
Your shift of blame on which institution should have been responsible is exactly the kind of waffling that led to the girl being hurt.
There are undoubtedly other kids getting bullied that need intervention from the school. Ignoring the school’s failure here just enables that shit.
The cops fucked up too, there’s no question of that. But the school failed its responsibilities too.
No. “She had been in and out of psychiatric care that summer”. That’s not full-time intensive care that this girl obviously needed.
Never presume. It’s highly likely the school would have suspended the student if the cops had charged her with harrassment in the first place.
The school shouldn’t have waited.