The first day of school is fast approaching for students and educators alike. This is why the union representing 5,000 school support workers essential to everyday learning—the Canadian Union of Public Employees—is demanding action from the provincial government to make their workplaces safe to return to.
On Thursday, Aug. 15, CUPE Nova Scotia and the Nova Scotia School Board Council of Unions—which represents all eight provincial education sector locals at the bargaining table—held a press conference in downtown Halifax to release a worker-led review of the problem of violence in schools, called Safe Staff, Safe Schools.
“We want parents and families and the public to know the reality of the issue and the scope of violence in our schools every day,” said CUPE NS president Nan McFadgen at Thursday’s press conference. Support workers include teaching assistants, custodians, bus drivers, early childhood educators, librarians and secretaries who interact with students daily. They have been raising the issue of violence at their work for years—and they see nothing being done to address it.
As reported by the provincial auditor general in June, there were 27,000 incidents of violence in the 2022-2023 school year across Nova Scotia’s seven regional centres for education and the Conseil scolaire acadien provincial.
A member quoted anonymously in the report said, “workplace violence is traumatizing for those who experience it directly (support staff), but also those students who witness it happening to staff or classmates.” Another anonymous member said in the review, “in my seven-plus years working as an [education program assistant], I have been bitten, kicked, slapped, punched, spat on (in my face), had things thrown at me, verbally abused and been threatened; I have also watched other children be hit and all of the above.”
Violence in schools is measured through reported incidents. These are instances of “unacceptable behaviour” from students towards themselves, each other and education workers, and are reported in an online tool called PowerSchool. PowerSchool is meant to work with the Provincial School Code of Conduct to help give students a safe learning environment. But, it isn’t designed to be used as a workplace violence incident reporting system. And, importantly, violent incidents are also workplace violence—which is why CUPE workers are affected disproportionately compared with teachers and administrators. According to the audit’s survey of workers, 65% of school support staff said they witnessed or experienced violence in schools on a weekly basis and 31% said it happened every day. For teaching assistants, that number rises to 52% who report directly experiencing violence daily.
Yet, school support staff do not have access to PowerSchool and must ask teachers and administrators to file reports of violence on their behalf. Support staff do have access to Occupational Health & Safety incident reports and Workers’ Compensation Board reports, but these are separate from PowerSchool. As the auditor general reported in June, these separate reporting channels mean the full extent of the problem cannot be comprehensively analyzed.
CUPE and NSSBCU’s worker-led review released Thursday is an attempt to provide a fuller picture of school violence. It combines a 2022 survey of union membership on witnessing and experiencing violence at work, which was included in the auditor general’s report, as well as reporting data from the 2023/24 school year provided by two joint occupational health and safety committees: CUPE Local 5047 in the Halifax Regional Centre for Education and CUPE Local 4682 in the South Shore Regional Centre for Education.
CUPE-NS and NSSBCU asked for OH&S data from all seven regional centres for education and CSAP; however, Local 5047 and Local 4682 were the only two to meet the request, says CUPE Atlantic’s national representative, Mary Fougère.
CUPE’s review of school and workplace violence says that from September 2023 to March 2024, most of the 2023/24 school year, over 600 incidents were reported at the Halifax Regional Centre for Education, and nearly 70% were from CUPE workers. In the South Shore Regional Centre for Education, there were 213 violent incidents reported to OH&S and 81% were reported by support staff. Says the review: “Generally, almost half of school support staff have reported experiencing violent incidents, at least occasionally—examples of these violent incidents include being struck, tripped, grabbed, bitten or verbally assaulted.”
McFadgen said Thursday that school support workers “represent the front line in education” and that, if the current trends in violence continue, “we estimate that there will be 35,000 reported incidents in this school year.”
Per CUPE’s review of “the current crisis of violence in public schools,” half of school support workers province-wide have reported violence in the workplace, and a third were unsatisfied with the response their reporting received. “Over half never received a response at all,” reads the review. What’s more, the review underlines the fact that despite requirements for employees under the Provincial Occupational Health and Safety Act to “develop a workplace violence prevention plan where a significant risk of violence is identified…there is currently no province-wide strategy to address violence in schools.”
This review comes during bargaining for a new contract between CUPE and the Department of Education and Early Childhood Development—the EECD Their current collective agreement expired in March. In a recent bargaining update at the end of July, CUPE Local 5047 told the membership that CUPE’s provincial council, the NSSBCU, has met with the EECD on two occasions thus far since bargaining began. However, they write, “there has been little progress on any provincial issues,” such as violence and that “while we want to remain optimistic that both local and provincial issues will progress, we also do not want to be without a contract for an extended period and want to ensure that we achieve a contract that is a meaningful benefit to us all.”
CUPE Atlantic’s national representative, Fougère, tells The Coast that in the last two rounds of bargaining, there was a common table for all CUPE locals to negotiate at in the absence of a full provincially based bargaining process. “We had an agreement between [CUPE] and the corresponding employers on things that would be common, with the intent of standardizing those provisions and moving towards a single collective agreement,” says Fougère. “We don't have that this round.” According to Fougère, the EECD has said they can work things out at individual, local tables instead. “Unfortunately, that has not been our experience: we have common language; we bargain in common language; we just finished signing off on one of the most significant pieces in the last round around wage harmonization [through single table bargaining], which soundly had a positive impact on all our members.” Therefore, Fougère says not being able to negotiate across locals at a single table for this round of bargaining is “challenging and troubling and we’re not getting much done now as a result.”
Issues from CUPE’s review on workplace violence that will be part of bargaining include:
- Understaffing. If there aren’t adequate staffing provisions for support staff workers, there’s a higher risk of burnout and less time to support students outside crisis management. Says the review, “The lack of adequate support for students is a risk factor for violence on its own.”
- Compensation, benefits and job security. According to the review, the average annual salary for CUPE workers in public schools is $35,000. This means that support workers often hold two or more jobs, CUPE reports, yet, according to a union member quoted anonymously in the report, “this kind of role is one where you need to go home and unwind, not go to a second job afterwards.” The review says that “subpar wages,” which haven’t kept up with the rising cost of living and workplace violence, contribute to overall recruitment and retention challenges.
- Barriers to reporting incidents, exclusion of school support staff from discussion tables. Workers want access to reporting violent incidents at school through PowerSchool or their own reporting tool. Says the review, “School support staff cannot be required, or expected, to convey incident reports through another member of school staff.” They also want their voices heard when it comes to making decisions on preventing and addressing school and workplace violence. “If the EECD wants us to believe they are taking this issue seriously…workers must be part of any subsequent consultation and policy development.”
The EECD has been hearing about workplace violence in schools for years–from CUPE, the Nova Scotia Teachers’ Union and, in June, the province’s auditor general’s report on school violence and the public accounts committee review of said report weeks later.
Nelson Scott, chair of NSSBCU and president of CUPE Local 5050, which represents roughly 1,000 members in the Cape Breton-Victoria Regional Center for Education, said Thursday; “I get phone calls starting at 4:30 in the morning from concerned members scared to go to work.” Scott said “we need to stand our ground with the government and make them understand that we need help now.”
Shelley McNeil, president of CUPE Local 5047, which represents 1,900 workers in the Halifax Regional Centre for Education, has an answer to how the workplace violence crisis in public schools can be resolved: “Listen to us; we are the experts. We need more professional development, more workers on site, and increased wages.”
The Coast has reached out to the EECD for comment on what they are doing to respond to CUPE members’ review and concerns over school and workplace violence, and has not heard back in time for publication.
Said McNeil, “We are the backbone of the education system, [yet] we have not heard any update from the Public Accounts Committee meeting—and to think many of these [violent] incidents could have been avoided if only we had been listened to earlier.
“Things need to change and they need to change now.”
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