Teachers registry needs to be more than bare bones

There’s a popular — and accurate — saying that justice delayed is justice denied.

It’s a simple enough concept: when too much time passes between when someone is charged and when they have their day in court, memories fade, records can be lost, and the opportunity for the accused to get a fair trial can vanish.

There should be another saying that describes the work of government when it frustrates the public’s right to know: incomplete information is often not all that much better than no information at all.

And that brings us to the province’s new teacher’s registry.

You can search the web-based registry to find out when a teacher was certified, and if they have suspended or cancelled teaching certificates. But you can’t find out why that action was taken.

You can check a “disciplinary outcomes” webpage to see if your child’s teacher has been disciplined, but you can’t see any information about why that discipline may have occurred. (And, practically speaking, a disciplined teacher wouldn’t be in the classroom anyway.)

It’s unfair to parents, students, and even, you can argue, some of the teachers whose licences have been suspended or cancelled. Why? Because all a parent can find is the suspension: they are left to use their imaginations to fill in the blanks.

The claim being made now by the provincial government that the new system “is better than it was” is a little like having a system that tells you that there’s been an improvement because your well isn’t as polluted as it was last year.

Your well is still polluted, and you still don’t know with what.

By cross-referencing reams of publicly available data, the Free Press was able to establish that “at least 50 teachers have been charged and convicted of sex crimes against minors: 23 for sexual assault; 11 for child pornography-related charges; 15 for sexual interference and/or sexual exploitation; and four for luring.”

Education Minister Tracy Schmidt says that’s “horrifying.”

“Pick the strongest word in your vocabulary. It’s more than unacceptable,” she told the Free Press. “It’s something that we need to do better on. Not just better; it’s something that we need to make sure can never happen again.”

But multi-source tracking down information on just what kind of actions has let to licence suspensions and cancellations is not something that parents should have to do: the fact is that the point of having a registry in the first place is to better inform the public. And failing to supply current, complete information is not informing the public.

The simple fact is that the Manitoba systems should have the benefits that Ontario students and parents already have: a system that clearly identifies when teachers have suspended or cancelled certificates, along with detailed information about just how serious their behaviour was, including what was found to have occurred, when it occurred, and what remedial actions or educational programs were undertaken, if any, to address the teacher’s behaviour.

We should be aiming for the best possible system to protect students from teachers with a recognized violations of acceptable conduct, not simply making incremental improvements and arguing that such small steps are worthy of a pat on the back.

The province should be providing the information that parents need, and that the victims of teacher misconduct deserve, to have publicly available.

Making sure that violations don’t happen again includes making sure that those who break the rules aren’t dealt with solely behind closed doors, protected from the personal impact of their own actions by the simple expedient of administrative hiding detail from view.

Transparency about teacher misconduct is what was promised by government: full transparency isn’t the bare administrative bones — it’s the whole unpleasant animal.