In the early 1990s, the school district in which I was working hired a safety officer. He was the retired sergeant of the local RCMP detachment, an affable but meticulous man who was already familiar with the Occupational Health and Safety Regulations and legal requirements that must be met by all workplaces under the jurisdiction of WorkSafeBC.
Let’s begin with supervision of students. Back in 1978, school districts had been made aware of the consequences of inadequate student supervision after a serious student injury that occurred in a gym class, the legal implications of which had reached up as far as the Supreme Court of Canada. There were at the time of the award, as you can imagine, numerous conferences and presentations that identified liability that could result from previously taken-for-granted student activities like unsupervised wheeling of a TV trolley from one classroom to the next.
What brought this all to mind is the report that, last summer, the Manitoba Department of Workplace Safety and Health added school divisions to its index of “high-risk industries” — a group with significantly higher-than-average employee injury rates. The most common infractions included insufficient personal protective equipment, an absence of tool and machine safeguards, and non-existent or incomplete workplace health and safety committees.
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