Tracking of teachers who abuse students is 'weak' in Canada: advocate

UPDATE: On June 25, 2024, all charges against Amanda Rachelle Sherrett were stayed.

Advocates are calling for a national public registry for teachers who have faced serious disciplinary action, after a former Winnipeg gym teacher was accused this week of grooming and sexually assaulting one of her students.

Amanda Rachelle Sherrett, 41, was charged after allegedly engaging in an inappropriate sexual relationship with a girl who was under 18 years old and a student at Collège Béliveau when the offences began, Winnipeg police said Monday.

The abuse continued after the girl no longer attended the school, police allege.

"It's just heartbreaking. It happens so often," said Anne-Marie Robinson, a co-founder of the advocacy group Stop Educator Child Exploitation.

"I think it's time for governments to wake up and to understand that this problem is much bigger and more serious than they understand."

Robinson, a former federal deputy minister who was 16 years old when her high school music teacher began to abuse her on field trips in the 1970s, has been pushing for a national registry of teachers and staff who have faced disciplinary action for serious misconduct.

Canada's overall system to track child educators who've been found to have committed serious misbehaviour is "quite weak" and "immature," she told CBC in a Tuesday interview.

However, Manitoba will soon join a handful of provinces that make teacher discipline records available to the public to some degree.

An online registry disclosing whether Manitoba teachers have been found guilty of misconduct is expected to be available by January 2025, Education Minister Nello Altomare previously said.

The online registry was proposed under legislation that was passed unanimously last year, before the Progressive Conservative government was defeated by the NDP in October's election.

The legislation will also introduce an independent commissioner to review complaints about educators.

"It's an important accountability piece. People expect this of their public school system and we're going to follow through on it," Altomare told CBC on Tuesday.

He said the province is currently in the process of establishing regulations for the new commission, as well as naming a commissioner.

Manitoba data 'opaque'

A 2022 report from the Canadian Centre for Child Protection called on all provinces to disclose instances of educator misconduct.

The report found that 252 current or former school personnel in K-12 schools in Canada committed or were accused of committing sexual offences against students between 2017 and 2021. Another 38 were charged for offences related to child sexual abuse materials.

Nearly 75 per cent of the offenders were also coaches, according to the report. While not all of the accused were charged or publicly identified, each one faced some form of disciplinary action.

Noni Classen, the CCCP's director of education, says the centre relied heavily on court documents and media reports to count the cases in that report, since there are few other ways to track them.

"Why is this not available to Canadians to see what's going on?" Classen said in a Tuesday interview.

"This should be something that is publicly available, because it's within the public interest to know this, because it's mandatory that kids go to school."

At the time the report was published, Alberta, British Columbia, Ontario, Saskatchewan and New Brunswick were the only provinces that provided public records of teacher discipline in some capacity, it said.

Classen described Manitoba as one of the most "opaque" provinces in the availability of data at the point.

But the new legislation will "modernize this province [by] putting structures in place to make us more accountable and more up to speed with what other provinces — who are ahead and doing much better — already have in place," she said.

While she's hopeful, Classen says the regulations of Manitoba's new commission under the legislation "are going to be key to see ... how effective this act will be in practice."

Numbers 'tip of the iceberg'

The province has engaged with Stop Educator Child Exploitation as it works to establish the commission, but "we did not get everything we wanted or what we think is necessary in the establishment of that commission," said Robinson.

While "it's a huge improvement and it will make things better," she also called it "an incremental step to the development of a body that has more robust powers and that is more independent from government."

The lack of public data highlighted in the 2022 CCCP report shows how surprisingly difficult it is for parents to know whether the situation is getting better or worse, she said.

What's in the report is "the tip of the iceberg, and that should really scare people," said Robinson.

"That's a real wake-up call that we have to do much better on this," she said.

"There should be a national database, because teachers and anyone who abuses children … tend to be mobile. And so, you know, you can leave Manitoba but then get a job in another province."

Teachers who exploit students are "very skilled, typically, at manipulating people around them, and so they can groom not just the child, but they groom their colleagues, and in many cases their superiors, to believe that they could never do something like this," said Robinson.

"That's a huge problem because what it means is, sometimes, if parents of victims complain within the school system, they're not taken seriously."