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Salluit student threatens classmate with BB gun

"It was a very bad joke on the part of a student"

JANE GEORGE

Tiny Salluit, population 1100, continues to face violence in its school. (FILE PHOTO)

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Is school back to normal in Salluit? That depends on who is answering the question.

The Kativik School Board says it's "business as usual" now in Salluit even though two violent incidents occurred within the past six weeks.

Those two incidents are a shooting-suicide at the Quannaq Continuing Education Centre that left a teacher severely injured and one student dead, and another incident only two weeks later that saw a Secondary 1 (Grade 7) student wander around Ikusik School with a BB gun and thrust it into the face of a classmate who is the son of a teacher.

Following the shooting-suicide on Feb. 25 and demands from teachers in Salluit for better security, the KSB agreed to reinstate a principal and a vice-principal on a full-time basis, hire a secretary to receive calls during emergencies, and place hall monitors in the schools.

But on March 10, violence again entered the school and closed it down for a day.

In an interview from Salluit, principal Normand Sylvestre, who, at the KSB's request, returned from retirement to lead Salluit's elementary and secondary schools, called the student's gun-brandishing a "prank."

"It was a very bad joke on the part of a student," Sylvestre said. "Afterwards we understood that's what it was."

Sylvestre said, despite that incident, the atmosphere in school has greatly improved.

A series of meetings with the municipal leaders in Salluit has also led to the hiring of hall monitors in the school as well as more measures to improve the storage of guns.

But the union that represents teachers in Salluit and throughout Nunavik and the Cree territory - l'Association de l'Enseignement du Nouveau-Québec - isn't convinced the situation in Salluit has improved.

And teacher Josée Savard, who taught the latest student in Salluit who brought a gun to school and served as a union rep, took an upaid leave of absence after the most recent incident. She's not sure if she'll return to Nunavik.

"A lot of teachers leave the North and never want to return to teaching," Savard said, in an earlier interview about the impact of violence on teachers.

To support teachers in Nunavik, Quebec's teachers' union, the Fédération des sydicats de l'enseignement, passed a resolution last month in support of the demands of the Northern Quebec Teachers Association and teachers in Salluit and Kangiqsujuaq, where a school principal was badly beaten in January by an expelled student.

The union says there should be "concrete solutions" to prevent more violence in the schools.

Its resolution says the KSB must supply teachers with the basic materials and resources they require to teach and that the school board should carry out more activities designed to prevent violence in its schools.

And the resolution says the KSB must stop all efforts to prevent news about these events from circulating publicly.

According to Patrick d'Astous, the president of the NQTA, the school board doesn't want bad news to scare potential teachers away from Nunavik.

But D'Astous said the best thing the school board could do is face up to the violence problems in Nunavik schools and communities and prepare teachers for the challenge.

"They need to understand that their philosophy is a Catch-22. The more information that's repressed, the more they'll have to recruit and education will suffer because the turnover will be higher," said D'Astous. "It's a vicious circle."

After Micheline Matte, a former French teacher at the Nunavimmi Pigursavik technical and vocational school in Inukjuak, went public with her concerns about violence with the school and community, she was fired: Matte has since filed a grievance against the KSB.

"In the school residence, some students sell their body for drugs and alcohol," Matte was quoted as saying in a 2003 magazine article published in the "Gazette des femmes," entitled the "Forgotten of the forgetten" (Les Oubliées des Oubliés).

Matte, who had previously headed a shelter for battered women in Portneuf, Quebec, describes horrific instances of violence at Nunavimmi Pigiursavik.

These included the brutal beating of a brilliant young woman who never regained her motivation following an attack by her spouse, and the gang-rape of a 20-year-old female student in 2002 who was dragged behind a snowmobile by a chain.

According to information from the article by Claire Gagnon, an effort to impose a curfew on students in the wake of the gang-rape failed because "one of the aggressors was the cousin of one of the school's top management."

D'Astous said the union is looking at its various options if the KSB doesn't respond to the rising level of violence in Nunavik's schools.

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