Chelsea Sculnick sits in her Dawson College math class and copies exercises from the board, until her friend gets the call.

“Where are you?! Are you OK?!” a woman screams on the other end.
 
“Of course I’m OK, I’m in my math class,” answers Sculnick’s friend, but her calm voice quickly changes. “Professor! My friend says there’s a shooter in the school!”

As everyone stares in disbelief, another teacher runs into the class. “What the hell are you still doing here?” she says. “You must be the last ones left in the whole school!”

The class rushes to the door and out a fire escape, but Sculnick is still skeptical. “It’s for sure a fire drill or something. Someone fell, scraped their knee and everyone’s exaggerating!”

As she exits the building, it takes only one sight for Sculnick to realize she is wrong. A fellow student lies on the ground bleeding from a bullet wound in his arm. 

Reports from CBC News have since confirmed that on that day, Sept. 13, 2006, Kimveer Gill marched into Montreal’s Dawson College, wounded 19 people, and killed 18-year-old Anastasia De Sousa.

Looking back on the incident, Sculnick said the school she used to love has now become one of her greatest fears. “Every time you walk through the front door, or any time you’re in a hallway, you’re thinking, ‘What if another one comes down another hall? If it happened once, it can happen again.’”

Here in Ontario, government officials, school boards, and individual schools have introduced measures to ensure local students don’t have to worry. Patricia MacNeil, spokesperson for Ontario’s Ministry of Education, said the Safe Schools Act, created in 2000, was established to cut down on school violence. She added that many of the programs, including Kids Help Phone’s 24-hour counselling hotline, target bullying, which the ministry recognizes as one of the leading contributors to school violence.

According to CTV News reports, prior to the Dawson incident, Gill had kept a blog on goth website VampireFreaks.com. In his blog, journal entries made in his name indicated that he was bullied by students at school and was a lonely, troubled person. Posts also reflected a hatred for society and authority figures, and included photos of Gill holding a semi-automatic rifle.

The Safe Schools Act also includes programs that target safety concerns more directly. For example, the Zero Tolerance initiative enhances administration’s authority, and the Schools Welcome Program makes schools more accountable for visitors.

The Safe Schools Action Team is responsible for reviewing the implementation of the Safe Schools Act. The team visits schools across the province and judges them primarily on their number of suspensions. In a review prepared by the Ministry of Education in 2005, the team found the act was not consistently applied across the province. Some boards reported suspension rates of 36 per cent of students, whereas other boards reported suspension rates of only 0.5 per cent.

Minaz Jivraj, security and school safety officer with the Dufferin/Peel Catholic District School Board, said he thinks his board is a leader when it comes to school safety. He explained that his board not only follows the ministry’s guidelines, but also implements further safety initiatives, most notably, the Schools Police Emergency Action Response (SPEAR) program.

The SPEAR program is a partnership with the Peel Regional Police, and requires that schools provide vital information such as floor plans to make police reaction to serious incidents more swift and effective. “If students are calling in and telling the police, ‘He’s in the gym, he’s in the gym!’ It’s no good if the police say, ‘Where the hell’s the gym?’” noted Jivraj.

The Toronto District School Board (TDSB) is also taking a serious stance with safety, said Vonda-Kaye Williams from the board’s Safe Schools Office. Williams said the 556 secondary schools within the TDSB have lockdown procedures, video surveillance, and hall monitors so the schools are prepared to handle any situation. She explained that these preventative initiatives will protect students, making them less likely to fear school.

Toronto’s Jarvis Collegiate Principal Andrew Gold said the TDSB’s safety initiatives are working. He said a questionnaire was distributed to more than 90 per cent of his student body, and 91 per cent of respondents said they feel “very safe or quite safe” while at school.

Chris Glover is a second-year journalism student at Ryerson University