A new school and a fresh start.

For the teacher accused of sexually abusing his high school students.

For the teacher who told a high school girl her breasts should be “big enough for a handful and small enough for a mouthful.”

For the teacher who sexually assaulted a female co-worker in an elevator at the school they worked at.

Teachers in Ontario can be transferred after their school boards find reason to discipline them, and in some of the province’s largest boards there is no requirement to tell a new principal about the incoming teacher’s past, a Star investigation has found.

Read more: The Star has been investigating abuse in schools since 2001

The Star identified 27 cases heard by the Ontario College of Teachers, the provincial oversight and licensing body, between January 2012 and November 2017. In each case, the teacher had been investigated by their school board, disciplined, and transferred at least once by the time their case made it to a college hearing.

In all of the cases, the college’s disciplinary panel — made up of publicly appointed and teacher-elected college members — substantiated allegations of sexual, physical, psychological, verbal abuse or serious misconduct by those teachers.

In nine of the 27 cases identified, the teachers had re-offended at their new school. Four of these teachers’ new principals knew why they were moved, through what’s called a disciplinary or administrative transfer. But it’s unclear how much the remaining 23 principals knew.

“Teachers should not be allowed to be transferred to another school who have been found guilty of some type of sexual misconduct or indiscretion with students,” said Nick Scarfo, an assistant professor at the University of Toronto’s Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE).

“It bothers me that these individual teachers are allowed to move to another school and start all over again.”

Thirteen of the Star’s 27 cases were from Toronto District School Board. In one case, a teacher was given an interim assignment “outside the school,” but in others, they were simply placed in a new school.

Five of those 13 teachers re-offended, and eight are still employed by Toronto district, including two re-offenders. At least two have retired.

The Star also examined an additional case heard by the college in 2003 that is now before the courts in Brampton. Richard Knill is currently facing criminal charges for sexual assault and sexual exploitation of two female students. The Peel District School Board first became aware of allegations that Knill was sexually abusing his students in 1992.

Over the next 25 years, Peel District transferred him three times.

Knill, now 53, was licensed to teach in 1991 and began working as a science teacher at Meadowvale Secondary School in Mississauga. He also coached wrestling for high school students at several schools in his career.

He was the coach who coordinated donations for one of his high school wrestlers, when the student gave up on fundraising enough money to go to the world championships in Istanbul. After a contentious high school wrestling match in 2009, he told the Star’s David Grossman that “at the end of the day, this is about the kids.”

But in 1992, a 15-year-old student said Knill kissed her while they were alone in his car, according to a 2003 college disciplinary decision. He was interviewed by a police officer “who warned the member with respect to placing himself in circumstances where allegations of inappropriate behaviour may occur,” the decision said.

That fall, the same student said Knill kissed her again, and he was charged. A college disciplinary decision says Knill was found not guilty.

In 1993, he began teaching at Bramalea Secondary School, Peel Regional Police said in a June 2017 press release. According to Peel District School Board, he was permanently placed at Bramalea in 1998 and was also the coach of the girls’ wrestling team.

In 2000, a school sports team, not named in college documents, was helping out with commencement activities at Bramalea Baptist Church.

Knill drove one of the 15-year-old members to the church, and on the way she said he caressed her arm and massaged her neck, according to a college disciplinary decision. He put his hand on her collarbone and asked if she wanted to play, she said, then moved his hand to her breast and rubbed it.

“While the vehicle was stopped at a traffic light, the member then leaned over, pulled down the front of the student’s top and started kissing and licking her left breast,” the college wrote in their disciplinary decision.

The student reported this to another teacher three days later.

He was criminally charged with sexual assault and breach of trust, and again was found not guilty. The college suspended him for two months in 2003 when his case was heard, required him to be assessed by a psychiatrist, and to take a boundaries course.

He taught at Chinguacousy Secondary School from 2002 to 2004, and Turner Fenton Secondary School from 2004 until 2017.

In June, he was criminally charged for the sexual exploitation of a 17-year-old girl, a student at Turner Fenton. After that charge was announced, another woman came forward with allegations after decades of silence.

Knill is now facing additional charges for sexual exploitation and sexual assault related to a 1997 incident during his time at Bramalea Secondary School. Peel police are appealing for any other victims to come forward, as police continue their investigation.

Knill is on an unpaid leave, Peel District School Board said, and is out on bail awaiting his next court appearance in January. His lawyer, Bianca Bell, said her client would not be providing any comment to the Star.

Peel District School Board would not confirm if Knill was transferred between all four schools because of the allegations, “as this is a personnel matter,” said spokesperson Kayla Tishcoff in a statement.

Tishcoff said transfers aren’t a common disciplinary practice at the school board. “Each situation is considered on a case-by-case basis, taking into consideration the nature of the incident we are dealing with,” she wrote.

A number of school boards told the Star that disciplinary transfers were “rare,” or didn’t usually happen in their system.

Scarfo doesn’t think it’s a numbers issue. “It’s really the fact that it should be zero.” These transfers are an open secret in the education world, he said.

“I don’t think there’s anything there that surprised me,” he said. “It is just disappointing.”

Peel District School Board, like most other boards surveyed by the Star, does not have a dedicated policy on how disciplinary transfers are handled. The transferred teacher’s performance would be monitored by a supervisor, who along with the superintendent, would be informed of the teacher’s past, Tishcoff said.

The Star surveyed 20 public and Catholic school boards province-wide about their policies on administrative or disciplinary transfers. Those 20 boards make up over a quarter of the provincial total, and include some of Ontario’s largest education systems.

There was no uniform approach. None had dedicated policies. Some rely on collective agreement language that allows for transfers. Some name transfers as a step in progressive discipline. School boards are either keeping the data on the number of disciplinary transfers a secret or, more commonly, not tracking it.

And the level of disclosure to principals isn’t the same across Ontario. While many boards have the option of telling the principal of a teacher’s new school about their past, only four surveyed actually require it.

“In most cases, our principals would not know why teachers had been transferred,” said Peggy Sweeney, a spokesperson from the Ontario Principals Council, in an email.

Two retired principals spoke to the Star on condition of anonymity, due to potential legal repercussions from their former employers.

One retired principal recalled two instances when his board transferred a teacher to his school and didn’t tell him why.

“My school wasn’t his first stop, believe it or not,” he said of the first case, which involved sexual harassment of colleagues. “I didn’t have a choice in the matter.”

The second teacher had been transferred following allegations of a sexual nature from students. He said that within three months of this teacher’s arrival, he was investigated again. The teacher was subsequently transferred to another school.

“I was totally compromised,” the retired principal said.

“You have these predators that are in the school system, and everybody wants to give them a chance, but nobody says ‘ok, that’s enough.’”

A second Ontario principal who spoke to the Star on condition of anonymity said that administrators will often share what little information they have about a teacher’s past with one another unofficially.

About one third of the cases reviewed by the Star involved allegations of sexual abuse, and roughly the same number of teachers faced allegations of emotional, verbal, or psychological abuse. At least six cases involved some kind of physical abuse, including hitting or rough-handling of students.

Three of the 27 cases involved criminal charges against teachers at least one time, for an incident related to a student, and two teachers faced criminal charges for an incident related to a colleague.

At Toronto District School Board, the country’s largest school board with approximately 246,000 students in 583 schools, safety of students and staff is paramount, according to spokesperson Ryan Bird.

“The board does not have a specific policy in place [for transfers] as each case is unique and is dealt with on a case-by-case basis,” he wrote via email.

The board disciplined Riaz Khamis, a Toronto district teacher, after girls in his school accused him of touching them and making inappropriate comments in 2008.

Khamis was sent home for three days, and then transferred to another school in the same board.

Five years later, he pleaded guilty at the college to allegations of professional misconduct, where an agreed statement of facts included taking non-consensual photographs of his students at the new school, and storing them with downloaded images of naked women on a phone he allowed students to access.

A group of four female students discovered the photos and banded together to report him to their principal. Khamis was reported to the college’s disciplinary committee, who called his case “very disturbing.”

“The committee further takes note and is troubled by the fact that, in 2008, the member had been suspended by his school board and administratively transferred to another school…for similar professional misconduct,” the decision reads.

Khamis was required to take a course on professional boundaries with students and was not given a suspension by the college.

“The case at bar involved very serious misconduct, and appears to be indicative of a pattern,” the college decision read. “The committee struggled with approving the penalty as jointly proposed by the parties, due to the fact that this was the second instance of misconduct.”

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Khamis now teaches at Scarborough’s Woburn Collegiate Institute, still with the Toronto District School Board. Khamis declined to comment on his case when reached by Star reporters at his home.

In Toronto’s Catholic board, Francesco Ciraco sexually assaulted his colleague inside the school elevator in April 2009. When the two were inside, he kissed his colleague, cupped her breast, squeezed her buttock, and began to kiss the exposed portion of her right breast, according to the college disciplinary decision. She pushed him away.

He was sent home for three days and transferred to a new school.

Ciraco was charged criminally and found guilty in court for the assault, the college’s disciplinary decision said. He requested a retrial, where he was found guilty again. But Ciraco received an absolute discharge — a finding of guilt without registering a conviction or giving a criminal record, which may be done in Canada in the best interests of the accused where it’s not contrary to public interest.

Ciraco’s period of probation had been successfully served, the college wrote. With his probation, Ciraco was given a common law peace bond that prohibited direct and indirect contact with his victim.

The college found Ciraco guilty of professional misconduct and he was suspended for six months. He is still employed as a Toronto Catholic teacher at Our Lady of the Assumption in north Toronto, as of this year.

Ciraco did not comment on his case after being reached by Star reporters at his home.

In some of the cases surveyed by the Star, school boards expressed concern for their students with regards to the transferred teachers.

When Anthony John Park of Durham Catholic District School Board was accused of inappropriate interactions with two female students on a field trip in 2004, he was made to take a “psychiatric and sexological evaluation,” by the board. He was also transferred.

“The board hopes that you will take advantage of this opportunity to make a fresh start,” the board’s superintendent of human resources commented to Park at the time, according to the college’s disciplinary decision.

“Although this intention is good, we must, in the interest of students, ensure that your conduct is monitored for the next while,” the board wrote.

Four years later, the disciplinary decision says, he was fired after making continued sexual comments towards his students including telling a young girl he’d warm her up instead of her going to get a sweater, describing plants in class in inappropriate and sexual ways (“A stem is long, sometimes it goes hard, sometimes it’s soft”) and pointing out that he could see a girl’s underwear.

Park declined to comment on his case when reached by the Star.

There is legislation in place to prevent students from being abused by their teachers. Bill 37, or the Protecting Students Act, requires that teachers have their licenses automatically revoked by the college in cases of sexual abuse against their students.

But the terms of the revocation only apply to the most heinous and explicit acts. If the sexual abuse isn’t intercourse, masturbation, child pornography, or any of the following contacts — genital-to-genital, genital-to-oral, anal-to-genital, and oral-to-anal — the province doesn’t require a license to be revoked.

Teachers who are found guilty by the college of other acts they define as sexual abuse, including sexual touching and remarks of a sexual nature, can continue to teach after discipline.

“Something is not aligning,” MPP Peggy Sattler, education critic for the Ontario NDP and a former school board trustee, told the Star.

“I don’t understand how the changes that were made in Bill 37 in particular and the process changes that the Ontario College of Teachers have put in place, how this hasn’t prevented these kinds of issues,” she said.

“This is non-negotiable. You do not want people who have engaged in sexual abuse of students in the classroom. Full stop.”

In some cases, unions will step in to advocate for a teacher accused of the sexual abuse of students. That was the case for Luc Bernard Lemieux, his board — the Conseil scolaire Viamonde in central southwestern Ontario — told the Star via email.

Between 2004 and 2010, at least five students were subject to Lemieux’s sexual abuse, the college wrote in its 2015 disciplinary decision. According to an agreed statement of facts, Lemieux would comment on his students’ breasts, saying “as long as they’re big enough for a handful and small enough for a mouthful,” and suggested to all of the girls on one of the school’s teams “that they wear only sports bras to practice.”

“I would like to think a boy like me would have a chance with a girl like you,” he told one female student, the decision said.

He gave students gifts of silver necklaces and bouquets of roses, offered a girl alcohol at his home, told girls he loved them, asked if they had feelings for him, lent them his debit card and cellphone and sent them numerous personal emails and texts.

Lemieux eventually pleaded no contest to the allegations against him, acknowledging to the college that the alleged conduct constituted sexual abuse. The board told the Star that their union — the Association des Enseignantes et des Enseignants Franco-Ontariens — became involved in their investigation into Lemieux before it reached the college level.

“The board was also involved in an arbitration to respond to a grievance filed by the union,” board spokesperson Claire Francoeur wrote. “Consequently, the board has complied with the arbitrator’s decision which effectively reinstated the teacher.”

Lemieux was transferred to a new Viamonde school in 2011.

“[The board] conducted itself fairly and properly. It relied on the legal advice it received at every step in the process,” Francoeur wrote. “It was also bound by decisions made by the [college] and by an arbitrator.”

The college issued disciplinary orders for Lemieux including a course on “maintaining appropriate boundaries” and supervision of students and an 18-month suspension. By then, Lemieux had already been teaching in his new school for five years, with no recorded incidents to their knowledge.

He is currently a teacher at Windsor’s École secondaire de Lamothe-Cadillac, for students in Grades 7 to 12. Lemieux declined to comment on his case when reached by the Star.

MPP Sattler said she didn’t think unions left administrators with their hands tied. But she was distressed by the cases the Star identified.

Scarfo, the professor from OISE, believes that the solution shouldn’t be to move a problematic teacher.

“One wrong just creates another wrong by transferring. I don’t think the answer is to transfer them, but as I said, to deal with it.”

Ontario Progressive Conservative party leader and education critic Patrick Brown echoed the concern. “A scenario where a repeat offender continues to get access to vulnerable children in the classroom is completely unacceptable,” he said.

The Ministry of Education did not directly address the Star’s questions related to disciplinary transfers. In a written response, ministry spokesperson Heather Irwin said teacher discipline practices were strengthened in the recent Protecting Students Act, which “improves the flow of information and prioritizes student safety.”

“It’s also important to note that school boards in Ontario, as individual employers, are responsible for all aspects of human resources administration,” Irwin said.

The Ontario College of Teachers said if a teacher was going to be transferred for any reason between schools, it was the responsibility of their board to forward any pertinent information to the new school’s administration.

“The college has no jurisdiction with respect to the human resources policies of individual employers,” spokesperson Gabrielle Barkany wrote.

In 1996, the traumatic case of Sault Ste. Marie teacher Kenneth DeLuca shook the provincial government into action. DeLuca pleaded guilty to sexually assaulting 13 female students at five schools over two decades.

“DeLuca easily moved from school to school, leaving behind emotionally wounded victims, with a fresh opportunity to victimize others,” retired Judge Sydney L. Robins wrote, after the Ontario government commissioned him to conduct a review into teacher sexual misconduct because of DeLuca.

Robins proposed 101 strategies to prevent repeat offenders. His solutions, he wrote, would be enhanced by “clear and unequivocal policy statements.”

Scarfo said a provincial policy coming down from the ministry to all Ontario boards would be helpful in allowing them to rethink how they handle administrative transfers, and implement procedures for it.

“How could this abuse have gone unchecked for 20 years?” Robins wrote 20 years ago. “What can be done to ensure that this will not happen again?”

Victoria Gibson can be reached at vgibson@thestar.ca. Vjosa Isai can be reached at visai@thestar.ca.