Who will discipline the disciplinarians?

Talk about investigative reporting! Using the Freedom of Information law, Janet Steffenhagen of the Vancouver Sun obtained the names of all the discipline cases handled by the BC College of Teachers in 2008 and then tracked down those teachers to find out what they are doing today, three years later. Janet found that scores of these teachers are still in the classroom today, and in many cases there is no record of their misconduct. Yet their misconduct included “sexual interference and intimate relationships with minors; rough handling of a kindergarten student; slapping, punching, and shoving students; consuming alcohol during class; threatening and stalking colleagues; and accessing child pornography on a school computer”. The BC College of Teachers’ apparent lack of concern about rogue teachers may be partly explained by the fact that there is a majority of teachers’ union representatives on the college’s preliminary investigation sub-committee. You can read more about the BC situation here. 

I would be very interested in the results if someone were to do the same investigative reporting in Ontario, as the preliminary investigation sub-committee of the Ontario College of Teachers is similarly constituted.

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