Our firm has the pleasure of doing extensive work in the Ontario post secondary education sector. As part of this business, we ran a conference entitled Students and the Law – Proactive Strategies for Changing Times for a group of university administrators in early November and a similar session again today for college administrators.

I spoke on students at risk and managing on-campus violence together with my colleague Catherine Peters. Catherine covered the impact of Ontario’s pending workplace health and safety legislation (Bill 168) on campus safety programs as well as the (tricky!) interplay between disciplinary and non-disciplinary management. I also dealt with Bill 168 in discussing mandatory and discretionary disclosures of personal information for the purpose of managing risk. The slides are below, and for a copy of my speaking notes click here.

I then did a short “hot issues” in student information and privacy presentation, with a brief note on the tort of invasion of privacy, a fun segment about students who take other students’ pictures and a note about processing the “I want all my e-mails” access to personal information request. The slides are below, and for my speaking notes click here.

Here are some recent and relevant resources that we noted in our discussion:

• Bill 168, An Act to amend the Occupational Health and Safety Act with respect to violence and harassment in the workplace and other matters
• Practice Tool for Exercising Discretion: Emergency Disclosure of Personal Information by Universities, Colleges and other Educational Institutions (Information and Privacy Commissioner/Ontario and Office of the Information & Privacy Commissioner for British Columbia)
• Overview of the Virginia Tech Tragedy and Implications for Campus Safety: The IACLEA Blueprint for Safer Campuses (IACLEA Special Review Task Force)
• Campus Safety in Focus: Advances and Ongoing Challenges One Year later (UChannel Podcast)
• Campus Violence Prevention and Response: Best Practices for Massachusetts Higher Education (Applied Risk Management)
• Managing Violent and Other Troubling Students: The Role of Threat Assessment Teams on Campus (John Dunkle et al)

I’d like to thank Gene Deisinger, who has recently begun duties as Deputy Chief of Police & Director of Threat Management Services at Virginia Tech, for identifying some of these resources. Gene and colleague Marisa Randazzo do an excellent podcast on threat assessment that’s linked from the fourth bullet above.

I hope this material is of use!

Dan