On May 29, 2025, the Ontario government introduced Bill 33, the Supporting Children and Students Act. If passed, it would mandate the return of School Resource Officers (SROs)—uniformed police stationed in schools—across all publicly funded school boards. Premier Doug Ford’s Ministers frame the bill as a common-sense safety measure. But to many students, families, and educators—particularly in Black, Indigenous, and racialized communities—it’s something else entirely: a dangerous step backward.
Bill 33 imposes a carceral logic on schools that Ontario communities have spent years resisting and working to reverse. And it does so in a political moment marked by austerity and persistent racial inequality.
Robyn Maynard, Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto, told Spring Magazine, “The presence of police in school programs has been documented to cause egregious harm to Black and Indigenous students, who reported being targeted and surveilled, criminalized for everyday conflicts, and even arrested in their place of learning. This led many students to stop coming to school entirely, and led others to be funnelled into the school-to-prison pipeline.”
Ontario’s pipeline: Where policing meets education
The school-to-prison pipeline describes how policies and practices—especially those targeting Black, Indigenous, disabled, and low-income students—push young people out of school and into the criminal legal system. The pipeline’s roots in Ontario can be traced back to the early 2000s when Mike Harris’s Safe Schools Act established zero-tolerance policies that led to a rise in suspensions and expulsions, especially for Black students.
By 2004, the Ontario Human Rights Commission reported that the Safe Schools Act made Black, Tamil, Indigenous, and Latino students the most vulnerable. Black students in Toronto were suspended at twice the rate of their white peers. These suspensions often led to involvement in the criminal legal system. While zero-tolerance policies didn’t make schools safer, they laid the foundation for the school-to-prison pipeline, which was further entrenched by the introduction of SROs.
In Policing Black Lives, Robyn Maynard notes that a punitive atmosphere intensified in 2008 with the introduction of the School Resource Officer (SRO) program by the Toronto District School Board, which deployed 29 uniformed police officers in schools alongside surveillance and lockdown policies.
The role of SROs in pushing students out
When police began entering Toronto schools, community groups such as Jane and Finch Action Against Poverty (JFAAP) and Educators for Peace and Justice opposed the SRO policy.
With officers inside schools, minor conflicts often led to arrests, but their presence also criminalized routine issues like talking back or skipping class, seen as threats to safety. Some students avoided school, fearing profiling, following, or searches.
In 2017, after years of community organizing by teachers, parents, and students, the TDSB ended its SRO program. Consultations revealed that students, especially Black students, felt unsafe and over-policed. Reviews in Peel, Ottawa-Carleton, Waterloo, and other boards reported similar issues. Some issued apologies; others linked removing SROs to racial equity commitments.
Maynard affirms, “School boards across Ontario and the country have listened to their students and removed these programs, in an important step toward racial progress. The return of these programs endangers Black and all children: we need to invest in more supports for students, instead of exposing them to systemic racism at the hands of the police.”
Bill 33: A return to carceral education
Now, with Bill 33, the Ford government attempts to undo that progress.
Bill 33 also threatens school board autonomy by imposing the reinstatement of police officers in schools over the wishes of school boards, educators, and students. Local consultations, board policies, and the voices of students and families hold little significance for Ford in a context where Ontario schools are under strain.
The province has cut deep into the supports that make schools safer. Mental health services are overstretched, special education resources have been scaled back, and counselling—once a critical line of support for vulnerable students—is increasingly scarce. These are not optional services; they are the infrastructure of real safety. Yet while these programs are being hollowed out, Ford pushes to reintroduce police into schools.
Gita Rao Madan is an educator, researcher, and organizer with Education Not Incarceration. She helped lead the campaign to end policing in Toronto schools in 2017. Madan told Spring Magazine, “After years of chronic underfunding and neglect, the Ford government’s proposal to introduce or reinstate police in Ontario schools is a double injustice for all students, especially the most vulnerable. Classrooms are already buckling under the weight of impossibly large class sizes, staffing shortages, the removal of special education and mental health supports, and crumbling infrastructure.”
What “safety” means—and for whom
The Ontario Human Rights Commission has documented cases where students—often Black, Indigenous, or in crisis—were handcuffed, restrained, or criminally charged for minor incidents. In 2016, a six-year-old Black girl in Pickering was handcuffed by police at school—her wrists and ankles bound for nearly 30 minutes. The incident led to a human rights complaint, and in 2020, the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario ruled that the child’s rights had been violated. Similar patterns have been observed in the treatment of Indigenous students, who also face disproportionate discipline and police intervention in schools. These are not outliers, but outcomes of a system that consistently views Black and Indigenous youth as threats.
The school-to-prison pipeline is not inevitable—it’s the result of policy choices around discipline, funding, and surveillance. Ontario made those choices during the era of zero tolerance. Bill 33 risks repeating that harm.
Madan affirmed that the “proposal would continue to funnel money away from schools and into police budgets, and is a deliberate distraction from the crisis in public education that Ford himself has manufactured. Police don’t belong in schools—many districts recognized this years ago through consultation and review, and rightly removed their SRO programs. Our kids deserve better.”
Please attend the rally and press conference against SROs on Thursday, June 26 at 12pm ET at Queen’s Park. For more information, and to sign onto and endorse the Protect Black and All Students statement, please click here.
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