The president of the Yukon Teacher's Association wants every school in the territory to have at least one full-time counsellor.

It would go a long way to addressing aggressive behaviours in schools, Katherine Mackwood said Monday.

Anecdotally, Mackwood said the incidents of violent or aggressive behaviour directed at teachers are rising, but it's hard to know for sure because the association isn't getting statistics from the Department of Education.

At the association's annual general meeting at the end of April the members passed a motion to investigate what happens after a teacher files an incident report following a violent or aggressive incident.

"Teachers have been punched, they've been spit on, they have been threatened, their life has been threatened,” Mackwood said.

"Before it was an abnormal situation; now it's not so abnormal.”

Albert Trask, the department's assistant deputy minister of public schools, said Monday that when an incident report is filed, the principal meets with his violent risk assessment team to determine how and at what level it should be addressed.

Those teams received training last fall and will receive more this spring.

The department also collects data related to those incidents for monitoring.

"The limitation right now is that we cannot get into trend data comparison to see if there's an increase or a decrease because we only started collecting that data last fall,” said Trask.

But he noted that the department meets regularly with the teachers' association and does discuss those incidents in broad terms, without mentioning students' names, etc.

Mackwood suggested that increasing the number of qualified counsellors working in Yukon schools could go a long way to addressing aggressive behaviours.

"We need to take a look at what is the underlying cause of these aggressions and there's a multitude of reasons,” she said.

"Counsellors are trained to deal with that sort of thing and might be able to take the angst down at a younger age if we had the appropriate staffing in the schools with the appropriate expertise, not putting somebody that took two courses of counselling like psych 101, we need to have trained individuals so they know what they're looking at when they see it.”

Mackwood said she'd like to a see at least one full-time counsellor in every school.

Trask said it's "overly simplistic and reductionist” to suppose that one person could be the solution to challenging and complex issues like the increased challenges faced by students today.

Mackwood did say allocating one trained counsellor is just a start, and as better data become available, issues and solutions can be explored further.

As it stands, principals are responsible for staffing decisions at their schools. The department allocates a certain number of full-time positions for each school and principals decide how to fill them.

Ryan Sikkes, the principal of Vanier Catholic Secondary School, was able to allocate a full-time position and a part-time position to trained counsellors for this school year.

"It's driven by the need of students, and at the secondary level especially, we have more social and emotional issues that impact kids' abilities to learn than we've ever had,” he told the Star this morning.

"It was a goal of mine to maximize the counselling time that I had available, and I was lucky enough to be able to find a half-time trained clinical counsellor who was interested and happy to work part-time; I think that was sheer luck.”

Vanier's staffing allocation has been reduced for the next school year though, so Sikkes isn't sure yet whether he'll be able to maintain the part-time counselling position, but at least one full-time counsellor will remain.

"At a secondary school like our school, we could never function effectively with less than one counsellor; we wouldn't even begin to be able to meet the needs of many of our students,” he said.

He doesn't think any principal would turn away a full-time counsellor if he or she could have one.

Sikkes isn't sure whether aggressive behaviour is rising in schools, but said the social and emotional needs of students and the level of intervention expected from schools certainly are.

It could be that the stigma of seeing the school counsellor and of seeking help for social, emotional, and mental health issues is generally diminishing, he suggested, noting there's still a long way to go before that stigma is eliminated completely.

But it's difficult for some schools to allocate positions for full-time counsellors when that means taking a full-time teaching position out of the mix.

At Watson Lake Secondary School, principal Jean MacLean has had to limit her counselling allocation to a part-time position.

For the past three years, she's had a full-time fine arts teacher for the first half of the year and a full-time counsellor for the second half.

She explained it's difficult to find a trained counsellor willing to move to Watson Lake to only work half-days.

For next year, she and Ruth Lawrence, the principal of Johnson Elementary School, are looking to share a counsellor allocating a part-time position at each school, so both schools can have a counsellor in the building for the whole year, even if it's just half-days at each school.

"We're dealing with the same community and the same kids across the schools, so it's a really logical piece,” said MacLean.

If it doesn't work out that Johnson Elementary can find a way to offer a part-time counseling position, MacLean said, she will try to find a part-time counsellor who's willing to work part-time for the whole year, perhaps substitute teaching during his or her off-days.

"It's very important for us to have a face-to-face counsellor for our kids as much as we can,” she said.