Urban Terror

Parents send their children to school so that the young may absorb lessons in an academic setting suitable to their age and adaptability. Accredited teaching staff has the task of coping with children who learn at varying rates, reflecting their inherent ability to learn and their adaptive resourcefulness. Some of the children are disruptive in nature and must be mildly disciplined to ensure that classrooms remain areas of quiet conducive to stimulating education.

Children learn to become socialized through the process, as well as learning to do things together, and they all hope that their efforts will be recognized through marks reflective of their efforts. Some children require special encouragement to initiate that effort, while others are more self-motivated, eager to learn and aspiring to become more knowledgeable about the world around them.

Some children come from families that encourage the learning process, and parents who expose their children to discovery, to learning opportunities and experiences, while other children languish, left behind because their family settings are removed from education, disinterested in the process. The school experience, particularly in these more socially sensitive times, should be a levelling one for children, helping them to adapt to the educational opportunities available to them.

The variations in home situations and familial emphasis on education for the young is fairly reflective of society at large, particularly one comprised largely of an immigrant population with various cultural and ethnically-inspired backgrounds placing values differently, in reflection of various types of priorities. Eventually, the differences become smoothed out, and a greater acceptance of social and cultural values reflecting those of the prevailing culture are accepted, generation after generation.

Still, there's not much that would seem to account for a situation such as that occurring recently at Perth Avenue Public School in Toronto, where the school administration received alarmingly threatening notes from what purported to be disgruntled parental sources. And which were later revealed, through a thorough investigation by police, to be unhappy parents, angry over the manner in which they felt their child was being handled at the school. Parents anxious that their child succeed at school, interested in seeing their child's abilities recognized.

"We have placed a bomb in Perth Avenue Public School and anytime we will activate it if [certain staff members] still are working there", said one of the notes. "We will terminate them in any possible way. Students are not a concern to us." Angry parents, upset over the presumed mistreatment of their own child, to the extent that they avow that the safety and well-being of children of other parents is of no concern to them as a result of physical danger they are prepared to submit them to?

Three women were arrested, charged with multiple incidents of threatening death and intimidation in July of this year. Toronto police, during a press conference, revealed that what they called a minor incident relating to a child attending the school was the cause of the threats. One of the women involved claimed that she and her husband sought a report card review from the school administration which request had been refused. She felt, it would appear, that her child was being discriminated against.

Then a death threat was found on school grounds. Two successive threatening notes followed. An investigation concluded that it was the mother of the child who had requested a report card review, along with two other women who were involved in the coercive plot. The first note that had been posted by them read: "[Staff member], our group know where you live. Don't go to Perth Avenue Public school after January 14, 2009 or we will shoot you and [staff member] to death. We mean it."

All three women charged in the incident claim innocence. The threatening notes obviously came from some source. Obviously a strenuously aggrieved one, determined to see that those individuals whom they felt had short-changed this particular child would be eliminated from the school. And all evidence appears to conclude that it was the women named by the police. The case will go to trial, but it will languish for a year, before it can be heard, although an initial court date has been set for September.

It's inconceivable that people could be so oblivious to the dire substance of the threats they appear casually to have unleashed in an effort to display their anger, and to have staff members whom they feel have been unfair to a child, removed. Threatening someone's life, and by extension threatening to also harm children should their threats not be taken seriously is a criminal offence, an inexcusable breach of the universal social contract.

There is a price to pay for that type of urban terror. It would be extremely difficult to explain away the clearly defined violence and intent to harm, though no doubt lawyers will do their very best. Parents whose children attend that school have very reason to be alarmed and fearful. We, as a society, have every right to expect that this kind of dangerously anti-social behaviour will not persist.