TLDSB trustees updated on recent school discipline data

DAN CEARNS The Standard

KAWARTHA LAKES: Trillium Lakelands District School Board (TLDSB) trustees received an update on student discipline, from the previous school year’s numbers, at a meeting on Tuesday, October 24th.

The presentationwas made by Superintendent Paul Goldring. He started off by discussing suspension numbers.

“We’re slightly up from our pre-pandemic numbers,” he stated.

During the 2022/2023 school year, there were 1732 suspensions. This is up from the pre-pandemic school year, in 2018/2019 which saw 1708 suspensions. Superintendent Goldring noted, the highest number of suspensions come from the Grade 8 to 10 age range.

There was also some discussion on some serious incidents which happened involving students.

“Last year, we had 40 incidents, classified as violent incidents,” Superintendent Goldring said.

Among these violent incidents, 12 involved a student possessing a weapon, 10 incidents were noted to have been hate, prejudice or bias motivated, six incidents were physical assaults which required medical attention, there were five sexual assaults and five incidents where a weapon was used to threaten or intimidate someone. The final two incidents involved robbery.

In suspension pending expulsion (SPE) incidents, the board saw a higher percentage of expulsions in 2022/2023 than past years. These incidents can end in three ways: suspension, expulsion or mediation. The numbers for 2022/2023 saw 19 of these end in expulsion, 10 in mediation and 9 in suspension.