School of Hard Knocks
Why Cole Harbour District High School still has a lot to learn
BY Colin Oswin
Photograph Republished With Permission From The Halifax Herald Limited
Eight years after a riot at Cole Harbour District High School, in which students fought each other with iron bars, the deep historical divisions between black and white residents in Nova Scotia continue to cause tension at the school. “I call us the Deep South of Canada,” says Doug Sparks, one of two black members on the Halifax Regional School Board.
So when police officers entered the school this past February, students sat locked in their classrooms, expecting another brawl. Two students had fought over a girl the previous Friday. The incident was diffused, but tensions built up over the weekend. By Tuesday, school administrators had received reports of threats against students. Principal Wayne Brothers called the RCMP and Halifax Regional Police and locked down the school.
Brothers refused to comment about the incident, although Doug Hadley, spokesperson for the school board, said in an email that race was not involved. “Cole Harbour received a lot of local attention in the last month because of a fight between two students,” he said in March. “Race was not a factor but many people outside of the school speculated that it could escalate into something similar to what happened [in 1997].”
Some parents say the school administration is doing the best it can. “It’s an ongoing thing over there,” says Leroy Rushton, whose son is in Grade 12 at Cole Harbour, located in Dartmouth, east of Halifax. “The school says they’re doing their best to deal with it. I think they’re trying.”
Sparks, however, says the school is not doing enough. “People just don’t want to deal with it. This last incident, people just dismiss it, saying, ‘Well, you know, it’s just a beef between two guys over a girl.’”
Whatever caused the most recent fight, tensions will continue to erupt unless the school addresses the underlying race problem, says Blye Frank, professor and director of the division of medical education at Dalhousie University. In the aftermath of the 1997 riot, the school board hired Frank to study the situation. He made 75 recommendations, and discovered in a 2001 follow-up that only six had been implemented. “In a time of shrinking and limited resources in school systems, maybe there’s not the political will to do it,” he says.
In response to Frank’s recommendations, the school hired a school improvement facilitator, created two new teaching positions and renewed the security guard’s contract.
However, the school has yet to make any gains on Frank’s recommendation to raise the reading and math skills of all students, and promote computer literacy. He argues that school violence occurs when students let their frustrations boil over—and a lot of that frustration comes from not understanding what they’re taught. In a recent ranking, Cole Harbour placed 67th out of 68 Nova Scotia secondary schools, coming in 49th in math and science and 57th in languages and humanities.
Additionally, Frank said in 1997 that the school should implement a five-year strategy with the goal of hiring a minimum of 10 “racially visible” teachers by 2003. In his 2001 review, he discovered the number of non-white teachers had actually decreased since 1997. “If you want to create a sense of belonging and a sense of attachment for persons to institutions, part of the way to do that is to have people within those institutions who share a similar background or look similar,” he says.
The school has taken no steps to develop joint programs with Auburn Drive High School, site of a racially based brawl, also in 1997. And there has been little communication between Cole Harbour and the board in the past two years.
However, Frank admits in his report that it should not be regarded as a failure that all of the recommendations have yet to be implemented. “The school cannot be expected to in a short period of time address and overcome a history of decades, it’s just a ridiculous kind of notion,” he says. “Now, should the school be attempting to meet the needs of a diverse population more appropriately? Of course. Is the school going to satisfy and collapse the historical marginalization around economics and class situation? I think we’d doubt that.”
