Toronto schools will be encouraged to steer clear of blunt "zero-tolerance" discipline, under a new deal in which Canada's largest school board agrees to be more sensitive to why students act out. In a landmark settlement with the Ontario Human Rights Commission to be released this week, the Toronto District School Board has agreed to take steps to better understand why students of various backgrounds sometimes break the rules, and to prevent punishments that are unfair. The agreement, signed late last week, follows a four-month investigation of complaints that the board was applying Ontario's new Safe Schools Act more harshly with black students. While there was no finding of bias on the part of the board, the deal spells out that from now on:

• Principals will avoid suspending or expelling a student until they first try less severe penalties such as detentions, peer mediation or transfer to another school.
• Principals will be reminded to consider mitigating factors when meting out discipline - and for the first time, they will be told to examine whether racial harassment helped provoke the misdeed.
• In a bid to quash any hint of a crude zero-tolerance approach to discipline, the settlement stresses "nowhere in Ontario's Safe Schools Act do the words zero tolerance occur."
• The board must begin to collect data starting next fall on the racial background of students who are suspended or expelled.
• When police are called due to a student's misconduct, the school board will ensure parents are called, rather than have them learn later their child has been taken to the police station.
• The board will ensure expelled high school students have the chance to continue to earn credits toward their diploma from home or elsewhere.
• Principals will be urged to ensure students suspended for more than five days have the chance to maintain their school work from home or elsewhere.
• The board will meet with the Ontario Human Rights Commission before Jan. 31 to discuss how it plans to recruit more teachers from visible minorities "in order that there be equitable representation reflective of the Toronto community." "This helps put us back on track and gives us the impetus to make sure we're moving forward with safety while addressing all needs in a multicultural city," said Toronto Trustee Chris Bolton, who has been a leading critic of how the board has applied the Safe Schools Act introduced by the former Conservative government. Bolton chaired a task force last year that held public hearings into suspensions and expulsions, and made recommendations for ensuring discipline is enforced fairly, many of which are echoed in the new deal. Nearly 1,500 people contacted the "Safe and Compassionate Schools Task Force" with examples of how schools seem quicker to suspend black students than white students who break the same rules. "Sometimes a principal's discretion has worked against the rules being applied uniformly. What we're happy to see in this settlement is that principals are being urged to take mitigating factors into account. With this settlement, the Ontario Human Rights Commission is holding the board's feet to the fire to ensure principals enforce the spirit of the law, not just the letter of the law," said Bolton in an interview. The Toronto board has launched a string of programs this year to promote fair treatment to students of all backgrounds, including naming a senior human rights watchdog, looking at gathering race-based statistics, and encouraging diversity when hiring teachers. The board already trains staff in avoiding racial stereotypes and is working to broaden staff's diversity, which it agrees to continue under the settlement. It expects a blue-ribbon task force to report by January on the best way to gather race-based statistics, says Lloyd McKell, the board's new executive officer of student equity.