Policy against all forms of harassment for students
All forms of harassment are unacceptable and intolerable.
The School Board is committed to ensure that each school provides a learning environment free of all forms of harassment for all its students.
The School Board will not tolerate any form of harassment and considers such behaviour to be a violation of a person's fundamental rights, an attack on individual dignity and a lack of respect for others.
The School Board will make every effort to ensure that each individual (complainant or alleged perpetrator) is treated with equity and that each case is treated in the strictest confidence.
Harassment exists when the action of any person causes another person to be distressed, humiliated, tormented or intimidated. It may be both verbal and nonverbal.
Harassment can be:
Physical: Actions such as hitting, shoving, kicking, wrist or arm grabbing, hair pulling, choking spitting at, or biting.
Verbal: Remarks intended to hurt, insult, slander, threaten, degrade,torment or intimidate an individual or group
Psychological: Repeated behaviour, words, actions, gestures that are hostile, hurtful, and unwelcome that undermine the dignity or psychological integrity of a person for whom the environment becomes hostile.
Sexual: Repeated and unsolicited acts or gestures of a sexual nature that could either undermine the dignity or the physical or psychological integrity of the individual. Includes actions such as persistent or abusive signs of sexual interest, insistent and unsolicited sexual proposals, unwelcome physical advances such as touching, patting, brushing up against, pinching or kissing, repeated or insistent sexual remarks, innuendos, jokes or insults, and implicit or explicit promises of compensation or favoured treatment related to the satisfaction of a sexual request. For an action to be considered to be sexual harassment, it has to be undesired or imposed.
Extortion, intimidation, and taxing: Unacceptable behavior where threats and intimidation are used to obtain money or different goods from another.
Cyber-bullying: The use of an electronic communication device to convey a message in any form (text, image, audio or video) that intends to harm, humiliate, insult another in a deliberate and unwanted manner.
The school principal is responsible for the implementation of the policy.
What to do if you are being harassed: Talk about it with a person you trust. Do not hesitate to contact the school principal for help and information or to file a complaint. He or she has the responsibility of ensuring a learning environment free of any form of harassment.
For more information about this policy, please consult the School Board's web site or contact your school for a copy of our Say "No" to Harassment pamphlet.