After removing police officers from its schools, the Greater Victoria School District has submitted a trio of proposed safety plans to the province in time for a Jan. 6 deadline demanded by the province’s education minister.
The move comes after Education Minister Lisa Beare rejected a previous plan in December, which the province had ordered in September.
The district scrapped its school police liaison officer program in 2023 over concerns police on school grounds were having a negative impact on Black and Indigenous students. The province subsequently demanded the safety plan, raising concerns about growing gang activity in schools and deteriorating relations with police.
In December, Beare appointed a special advisor to rework the district’s safety plan, and suggested the board could be replaced by a trustee if the safety plan was inadequate.
A draft plan spearheaded by the advisor, former Abbotsford School District superintendent Kevin Godden, is among the three plans put forward, but the board said Monday it would prefer the province choose one of the two alternate plans it authored itself.
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In a memorandum, the board disputed the ministry’s jurisdiction to demand the safety plan but said it was complying with Beare’s order to avoid dismissal.
Under the board’s preferred plan, Victoria-area police would be able to assign officers to each school in the district.
Those officers would be required to “work with a trauma-informed lens to work with vulnerable and or high-risk youth populations,” and support and participate in cultural sensitivity, restorative practice and trauma-informed training.
If the province rejects Plan A, the board asks the province to approve a Plan B, which would only see officers on school grounds in non-emergency situations when invited “to present school-wide on a relevant topic, such as gang recruitment, cyber/social media online safety and exploitation” or to assist families by providing resources.
In the event the province rejects both plans, the board asks it to approve Plan C, the plan authored by the special advisor and the district.
This plan would also see police working with a trauma-informed lens deployed to schools in non-emergency situations.
However, in its memorandum, the district argued the advisor’s plan was “problematic in a number of respects,” including that it was “less detailed” than the district’s own November plan, failed to include input from educational partners, and didn’t meet some of the requirements of the ministry’s own order.
The district also pushed back on the province’s claims of a lack of coordination with police and of increasing gang activity in schools, saying “no empirical data was cited or provided to support” the assertion.
In a statement, Beare said she had received the trio of safety plans and the ministry was “working through reviewing them.”
“My priority continues to be student safety, and I’ll have more to share when our reviews are complete,” Beare wrote.
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