NORTHERN SECONDARY STUDENTS protested the mandated Student Resource Officer (SRO) program on Oct. 22, and are bent on challenging the placement of a police officer on their property. The protest was held across the street from Northern, near Eglinton Avenue and and Mt. Pleasant Road, and organized by a handful of students who don’t want a police officer monitoring their hallways.
The program started in Sept. 2008 assigns an officer to a school in their division to promote a safe environment. The arrest of a student at Northern by an SRO on Oct. 2, was a catalyst for the protest. The incident was caught on students’ cellphone cameras and later broadcast on YouTube.
Harrison Jordan, a Grade 12 student and one of the protest organizers, thinks it’s an arbitrary strategy.
“Students need to maintain relationships with police but this is not the way to do it,” Jordan said. Trustee Josh Matlow believes the arrest was an isolated incident and said that the SRO program is not a reflection of that.
“Northern wasn’t chosen because it is a safe or unsafe school,” Matlow said, “but as part of a program created by the Toronto Police Service to develop relationships between students and police.” Matlow wants to ensure students that a SRO is not there to be a hall monitor.
“Their job is not to stand at the door and act as a security guard,” he said. “The whole mandate of the program is to demonstrate to youth that there is a person behind the uniform.”
Former Toronto mayor John Sewell attended the protest. “I generally have a number of questions about it,” he said. “Northern is the only downtown school with police. If anybody was told there was going to be a police officer in their workplace, I think there should be some discussion about it.”
