Manitoba's rules need change, woman says after teacher faced no consequences for inappropriate relationship
'It's just unbelievable that children have to be assaulted physically' before action taken, 18-year-old says
A year after graduating from a Winnipeg high school, Olivia Wilson says she's still shocked that there was no way for the school division to hold her music teacher accountable for his inappropriate relationship with her.
She says while adults who investigated the matter agreed that the teacher's actions were "obviously wrong," school officials repeatedly told her their hands were tied because there was no physical act.
Olivia Wilson (not her real name) says she believes her teacher was grooming her, and said she feels as though the message she got was that she simply reported bad behaviour too early.
"It's just unbelievable that children have to be assaulted physically for them to say, 'OK, now, this is enough.… Now we're going to take action,'" she said.
While she has agreed to share her account, CBC is not using her real name, since the incidents occurred when she was a minor.
Despite the absence of physical marks, Wilson says the relationship left scars.
Though she's been playing guitar since she was about 11, she has avoided it since October 2020. Her love for music, including plans to study it at university, paused after "everything blew up," she says.
"I kind of stopped singing.… It was very hard for me for a long time to kind of experience music without connecting it to a bad experience," Wilson said.
Now 18, she says from when she was in Grade 10 at a school in the Winnipeg School Division until the beginning of Grade 12, her music teacher cultivated a relationship with her that was so intimate that it left her "very confused" and emotionally dependent on him.
A desperate place
An 80-page transcript captures a year of their exchanges via text message.
Wilson provided a copy of the transcript to CBC.
The content of the messages — sent using Remind, a communication app used in educational settings — varies, but is predominantly personal.
In one message, the teacher encouraged her to think of the positives in her life and lists them as "music, a job, me lol."
She responded, "I'll miss you so much. I already do."
He immediately responded, "I miss you too."
In another exchange, he told her he would ride his bicycle to meet her at her summer job. After the meet-up, they texted.
"It was really nice to see you today," he said.
"The days have really been dragging on without you lol… I miss you so much, all the time," she replied.
In another message, she wrote "I love you." The teacher replied, "I love you too."
Olivia also talked about self-harm.
"I lost a two month streak of being clean from self harm," she said in one message.
In another, she wrote, "I'm just gonna be honest… I want to die."
Wilson says she was having trouble at home, struggling with being queer and "going through a lot of challenges with [her] mental health."
As she was crying in his classroom one day, the teacher hugged her and offered to talk.
She says almost daily, she would stay after class to have "deeper chats" with him.
In those conversations, "he would talk a lot about his own life and the challenges that he was going through at home," Wilson said, and they would "support each other."
Eventually, Wilson says she was so confused about the relationship that she made two of her friends read her texts. They told her, "this is not OK.… You should not be having this kind of communication with your teacher," she said.
'I felt like I had nothing'
Wilson says when she confronted the teacher, he tried to "cut [her] off."
That was just six days after he texted her "I love you too," according to the transcript of messages.
The effect was overwhelming, Wilson says.
"I felt like I had nothing, nobody that would help me. So I got to a point where I was very desperate and tried to end my life," Wilson said.
Her father says that night, when he was at the hospital with his daughter following her attempted suicide, was the first time he heard from the teacher.
He says the teacher called apologizing about something, but he didn't understand what, until later, when he read the transcript of the messages.
"I think the guilt got to him" and he decided to do "what he was supposed to do all along — letting a parent know something is wrong," said Daniel Wilson (not his real name).
"I think that's why he decided [to apologize] at that moment, which was way too late."
Multiple investigations
Daniel says he contacted the school, which called in the Child and Family All Nations Coordinated Response Network (ANCR) — the agency that is generally the first point of contact with the child welfare system in Manitoba — to investigate.
After it finished, the Winnipeg School Division did its own investigation. Both the division and the ANCR repeated their investigations, according to Daniel Wilson, for a total of four investigations.
At the end of each, Olivia and Daniel say they were told nothing could be done.
"It all feels very condescending to hear the same things over and over about how sorry people are that this happened, or that my daughter had to experience this. And then there being no result," Daniel Wilson said.
ANCR said in a statement that under the Child and Family Services Act, it cannot confirm whether it investigated the matter.
CBC News contacted the Winnipeg School Division with a series of questions about Olivia Wilson's allegations, including asking the division to confirm whether or not it investigated.
A one-line statement from a spokesperson did not directly answer that question, but said the division "takes all allegations against staff very seriously and investigates them at multiple levels, involving third party investigation when necessary."
Clear 'boundary transgressions'
At least one expert agrees that Olivia's case demanded more action.
Noni Classen, director of education at the Canadian Centre for Child Protection, reviewed the transcript of the text messages.
She says the texts by themselves aren't evidence of a crime, but they are clearly unprofessional and warranted professional discipline.
Classen said she could "clearly see boundary transgressions" by the teacher, such as "communication for a personal purpose outside of work hours … outside of even a work year and for a personal purpose."
That alone is concerning, she said, and is the sort of thing that would have been dealt with as unprofessional conduct in some other provinces.
A teacher in Alberta, for example, was disciplined by the province's professional body in 2017 for encouraging "a personal nonsexual relationship with the student" through meetings, text messages and emails that "crossed the boundaries of an acceptable teacher–student relationship."
There was no physical contact with the student, but their communication included personal matters and the student expressed an interest in a romantic relationship. The teacher said that couldn't happen and that she was already in a happy relationship, but communicated with the student again after that. The student later attempted suicide.
The teacher pleaded guilty to the Alberta Teachers' Association's charge and was declared ineligible to teach for two years.
Every school for itself
While there are similar examples from Ontario, B.C. and Alberta, Classen says the problem in Manitoba is that actions short of a crime, like texting "I love you" to a student, fall into a grey zone that needs urgent attention.
"How are we dealing with this zone, this grey zone, of where we have inappropriate behaviour … [that] hasn't hit a threshold of a child in need of protection, and hasn't hit a threshold of criminal offence, but it's still not OK?" Classen said.
Classen says the Department of Education needs to take the lead on standardizing a code of conduct for teacher-student interaction.
A spokesperson for the department said all Manitoba schools are "required to have a Code of Conduct under The Public Schools Act that outlines acceptable and unacceptable behaviour and disciplinary consequences for breaches of the Code of Conduct."
But each school deciding its own standard is problematic, Classen says.
Nello Altomare, the Opposition NDP's education critic, says it's important to teach students "what appropriate school relationships look like."
He hopes "the province can work with all stakeholders to establish codes of conduct that are very clear in their expectations."
Grooming in schools
Olivia Wilson says she was recently prompted to come forward after reading a statement put out by the Winnipeg School Division following the arrest of Kelsey McKay, who faces multiple charges related to allegations of sexual abuse of minors while he was a teacher and coach at Churchill High School and Vincent Massey Collegiate.
After five former players came forward with the allegations against McKay, the division issued a statement reassuring parents it was doing everything it could to protect its students.
"It just made me angry to read that and to see the statement that they put out, because I don't feel that that's true," Olivia Wilson says.
Most of the sexual assaults McKay is accused of are alleged to have taken place at his home, after years of the coach grooming student athletes, according to police.
Those allegations demonstrate what could potentially happen "when inappropriate behaviour is ignored," Wilson says.
If the response to those who come forward with allegations of inappropriate behaviour is words without action, Wilson says, "more people are going to have to be actually physically assaulted by their teachers for them to actually change … what's happening in schools."
If you're experiencing suicidal thoughts or having a mental health crisis, there is help out there. Contact the Manitoba Suicide Prevention and Support Line toll-free at 1-877-435-7170 (1-877-HELP170) or the Kids Help Phone at 1-800-668-6868. You can also text CONNECT to 686868 and get immediate support from a crisis responder through the Crisis Text Line, powered by Kids Help Phone.
Or contact Canada Suicide Prevention Service: 1-833-456-4566 (phone) | 45645 (text, 3 p.m. to 11 p.m. CT only) | crisisservicescanada.ca
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