Violence directed at Winnipeg School Division support staff surges, union reports

Kicking, biting and other types of student aggression toward educational assistants in Winnipeg has surged 118 per cent since 2022-23.

On Friday, the Manitoba Government and General Employees’ Union released a breakdown of violent incidents involving support staff in the Winnipeg School Division, the province’s largest.

“You don’t need to teach math to see the numbers are going the wrong way,” MGEU president Kyle Ross said in a news release.

The data shows a surge in “student-related aggression” involving both children with additional needs and other students between 2022-23 and 2025-26.

During the 2022-23 school year, there were 884 reports of a non-teaching employee in the WSD being bitten, kicked or subjected to related behaviour. There were 1,925 incidents last year.

MGEU represents more than 1,900 division support staff, including educational assistants, administrative clerks, secretaries and library technicians in public schools across inner-city and central Winnipeg.

Ross told the Free Press the union obtained the figures through a freedom of information request in response to anecdotal concerns that came from the workforce.

“It was really eye-opening for me to see this (data) and see it continue to grow over the last couple of years. It’s not a good situation for the students, the teachers, the support staff,” he said Friday.

The overwhelming majority of aggression incidents — 99 per cent of them, year over year — are reported by EAs.

Hitting was the most common type of aggression in both 2024-25 and 2025-26.

A student hit a staff member at least 855 times between September 2025 and June, an increase of 224 from the previous school year.

MGEU is calling for more training in de-escalation tactics and for new hires so that WSD staff can spend quality time developing relationships with individual children they are assigned to support.

The union has also identified concerns that its members are being hired into lower-level EA positions and asked to complete tasks beyond their pay grade once they’re on the front lines.

While noting the union is appreciative of the division’s efforts to bolster training to help staff better support students who are neurodivergent, Ross said more needs to be done because the incident tally is “far too high.”

He said violence affects staff morale and work-life balance and makes recruitment and retention more difficult.

“It’s not fair to the workers to say, ‘That’s part of the job,’” he said. “No one should accept being injured on the job — it’s not OK.”

The Manitoba Teachers’ Society has been raising concerns in recent years about an increase in violent outbursts in all corners of the province.

“It’s a significant and concerning problem not only in public education, but also in health care and in other circumstances where social services are being delivered and we take it very seriously,” said Alan Campbell, executive director of the Manitoba School Boards Association.

“But at the end of the day, the question around safe learning spaces and safe work spaces for staff comes down to the same conversation around adequate provincial government support.”

Campbell called funding for students with intellectual and physical disabilities, as well as public dollars available for mental-health resources, “20 years behind what it should be” in Manitoba.

maggie.macintosh@freepress.mb.ca