By Ruby Pratka
Local Journalism Initiative
Education Minister Bernard Drainville announced a new plan to improve school safety and the working environment in schools on May 1. Under the plan, students in public and private schools in the youth sector will no longer be allowed to use cell phones, headphones or other personal mobile devices on school property as of September 2025. Students will be required to call teachers “sir” and “miss,” use the formal vous when addressing them in French, and use “marks of politeness” with classmates and school staff. Language on gender equality will also be added to the updated codes of conduct in schools, which will be in force as of January 2026. Students who violate the code of conduct may be required to take “reparatory” action, such as writing an apology letter or doing chores around school.
Additionally, Drainville said the ministry plans to have “SWAT teams,” mainly made up of retired educators, on call to help schools address systemic behavioural or cultural issues.
“As minister of education, and as a father, I have the responsibility to act so that our kids and the adults who accompany them have the right to an environment where they feel safe,” he said at a press conference at École secondaire de Rochebelle in Quebec City.
He said the plan was part of the government’s ongoing response to violence in schools and to cyberbullying, a “preventive” anti-bullying strategy which will contribute to “creating a culture of respect and civility.” He noted that several of the proposals in the strategy had been put forward by the recent parliamentary commission on the impact of screens on youth or by the Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ) youth commission. He mentioned that as many as 400 schools in Quebec have some form of a cell phone ban in place.
Drainville said the ministry intended to “leave latitude” to individual schools to enforce the code in ways that worked for them, to enforce the phone ban, ensure students could communicate with their parents in an emergency, manage exceptions for those who need their phones for medical, pedagogical or family reasons, and promote the plan to parents. “Parents need to actively collaborate with school staff to support the application of the code of conduct,” he said.
Sophie Veilleux is a longtime teacher who is now president of the Syndicat d’enseignement de la Haute-Yamaska (SEHY), which represents teachers at French-language schools in the Centre des services scolaire de Val-des-Cerfs (CSSVDC) service area. She said that as far as she knew, teachers had not been consulted while the policy was being developed. “What I deplore is that this kind of thing should be discussed in schools, not imposed,” she told the BCN. “Yes, there are incivility issues and bullying issues, but a lot of students who act out are calling for help, so why don’t we put our energy into providing services [for those children]?”
Eastern Townships School Board (ETSB) board chair Michael Murray said the minister’s strategy was “not an ideal approach.”
“It downloads all of the responsibility onto the schools,” he said. “We can’t frisk the students coming into school, and we don’t want to be like some schools in New York City where they have metal detectors at the entrance,” he said. “We expect parents will object, because they like to stay in touch with their students during the day.”
Murray said he was concerned that enforcing the policy to the letter would place an additional burden on school staff. “Who is going to supervise a student who has been told to clean up litter – do we have to have an employee following the student?” He also expressed skepticism over the minister’s “SWAT team” proposal, pointing out that a call for retirees to fill teaching jobs during the COVID-19 pandemic “didn’t receive a great response.”
“These are musings by someone who is unfamiliar with the school system – well-meaning, but ultimately impractical,” he concluded.
Government boosts francisation funding
In a separate announcement last week, Drainville said the government would invest $119.3 million to fund subsidized French language courses for adults, known as francisation, offered by school boards and service centres over the course of the 2025-26 school year. The previous year’s francisation budget was $114.4 million, including $10 million in emergency top-up funding added in December.
Last year, several boards and service centres around the province, including the ETSB and CSSVDC, were forced to shut down their entire adult francisation programs after government funding – pro-rated according to student numbers from three years prior – turned out to be insufficient to meet vastly increased demand. The ETSB’s adult education division heavily promoted the program ahead of the 2024-2025 school year, only to have to shut it down in late November.
Murray said the ETSB expected to be able to reopen some classes with increased funding from the education ministry – “not on the scale of what we had before.” He said it was too early to tell how many classes would open and where they would be located, although the board is actively recruiting teachers. “The location will depend on funding and where the students are. Adult education is year round, so we start the classes as soon as we have the mechanics together – the budget, the teachers and the students – and we continue until we run out of either funding or students,” he said.