The Breaking Point
The assault took mere seconds. Bridget Healy, a Grade 4 teacher in Innisfil, Ontario, had followed every protocol when a student in her class began acting out on the eighth day of the school year in autumn 2023. She stepped back, avoided engagement, and signalled for help. But the child—diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder—moved faster than the educational assistant could intervene. He struck the back of her head three times before being pulled away.
Healy knew immediately she had suffered a concussion, a conclusion a doctor would later confirm. She would not return to full-time classroom duties for months.
“Every single day since the start of school he would come right up to my face, scratch me, hit me,” Healy recalled. “I would walkie for help and they would come.”
The sequence had become routine. One educational assistant split her time between Healy’s classroom and the one next door, where a six-foot-tall, 200-pound student with behavioural challenges required most of the support.
What happened to Healy represents an extreme case of a pattern playing out across Canadian schools with alarming regularity.
The Numbers Tell a Troubling Story
Data gathered from school boards nationwide reveal a consistent upward trajectory in violence against educators. The Toronto District School Board, the country’s largest, documented 5,138 violent incidents involving students against staff in the 2024-25 academic year—攀升 26 per cent from the 4,077 recorded in 2018-19. During the same period, the student population actually declined slightly.
The surge is even more pronounced elsewhere. The Peel District School Board, Ontario’s second largest, logged 7,039 incidents in 2024-25, compared with 3,102 five years earlier—a staggering 127 per cent increase. Edmonton Public Schools reported 25,783 incidents last year, a rise of 161 per cent from the 9,883 documented in 2018-19.
Nova Scotia saw 27,117 school violence incidents in 2024-25, up 82 per cent from 14,864 in 2018-19, according to provincial education figures.
These incidents encompass a broad spectrum: verbal threats, spitting, kicking, punching, hair-pulling, stabbing with pencils, and hurling desks and chairs. Since students returned to in-person learning following COVID-19 lockdowns, frequency has intensified.
The human toll extends beyond immediate injuries. In British Columbia, 575 teachers and teacher assistants filed successful short-term and long-term disability claims stemming from workplace violence last year—more than double the 285 claims in 2018. Alberta experienced a 59 per cent increase in accepted workers’ compensation claims for school staff injured through violence over the same period.
A survey of 4,000 education workers published earlier this year by University of Ottawa clinical psychologist Dr. Darcy Santor found 78 per cent had experienced at least one act, attempt, or threat of physical violence, while 26 per cent reported symptoms consistent with PTSD.
“Violence is a product of frustration, primarily,” Santor explained. “There are some folks that just want to be violent, and that’s when law enforcement is going to be needed. But in most cases, it’s an inability to manage frustration.”
A System Under Strain
The root causes remain contested, but certain factors emerge repeatedly: overcrowded classrooms, increasingly complex student needs, and insufficient funding for support staff including educational assistants, social workers, and psychologists.
In Ontario, students requiring special education support now comprise 16 per cent of the total enrolment, according to the provincial Auditor-General. This represents a seven per cent increase since 2014, outpacing the four per cent growth in overall student numbers. Yet school boards are already spending beyond their allocations. Forty-six of Ontario’s 72 boards collectively exceeded their special education funding by nearly $398 million in the 2023-24 academic year.
Kate Dudley-Logue, vice-president of the Ontario Autism Coalition, frames the issue starkly. “We used to talk about whether students with disabilities were able to access curriculum properly. But we are at a point now where that’s really not even the story any more. The story is: Are schools even safe?”
Wait times for diagnosis compound the problem. Children referred to the Ontario Autism Program currently wait more than five years for assessment. Psychoeducational evaluations, which identify necessary classroom supports, take approximately two years.
“When disabled children receive insufficient support or accommodation, they’re more likely to become distressed,” said Anna Geeroms, chair of BCEdAccess, a non-profit advocating for students with disabilities. “We know there’s not enough EAs in the classroom. We know there’s not enough school psychologists. We know there’s not enough counsellors.”
The professional cost is substantial. A survey of 5,000 teachers released by the Canadian Teachers’ Federation found 45 per cent had considered leaving the profession within the past year, with classroom safety and class size cited as primary concerns.
One veteran special education teacher with the Toronto District School Board, who requested anonymity as she lacked board approval to speak publicly, described the grim reality: “I have Kevlar hand protectors. We have Kevlar shin guards. We have Kevlar jackets that we wear. I have filled out hundreds of violent incident reports a year.”
Her jaw has been fractured twice on the job. When she began teaching 25 years ago, her classes topped out at six or seven students with special needs, and she had dedicated EA support. Today, the cap stands at ten students, and she shares an EA with multiple classrooms.
Why it Matters
The crisis unfolding in Canadian classrooms represents far more than an occupational hazard for teachers. When a student lashes out in frustration because adequate supports were never provided, when an educational assistant must choose between two children in crisis, when a teacher spends months recovering from a concussion sustained on the job, the entire education system is failing.
Every violent incident ripples through the classroom, traumatising peers who witness these episodes and stealing instructional time from students already struggling to keep pace. The rising number of educators on disability leave represents an exodus of experienced professionals the system cannot afford to lose.
Current proposals—adding police officers to school hallways, implementing punitive measures—address symptoms rather than causes. The evidence points toward prevention: smaller class sizes, more support staff trained to recognise escalating distress, earlier intervention for students with complex needs, and funding that matches the actual requirements of inclusive education.
Ontario’s major education unions have indicated classroom violence will feature prominently in upcoming contract negotiations. What emerges from those discussions—and whether governments respond with meaningful investment or performative measures—will determine whether this generation of students receives the support they desperately need, or whether we continue treating the most vulnerable children as problems to be managed rather than individuals to be nurtured.
For Bridget Healy, now working as a supply teacher in Halifax and set to return to permanent positions this autumn, the solution remains straightforward. “If there weren’t so many students in my classrooms, then so many of these problems could be avoided,” she said. The assault still haunts her. But quitting never felt like an option.
“It certainly made me question how long I’m going to be able to survive in this system.”
