Punching, hair pulling, throwing chairs, attempted stabbings with scissors. It’s not the type of behaviour any employee should have to face in the workplace. But the above accounts are directly from teachers at Catholic schools in Ontario, and the culprits were kids.A new province-wide survey conducted by Pollara Strategic Insights for the Ontario English Catholic Teachers Association (OECTA) found 9 in 10 teachers have experienced or witnessed violence or harassment at school, with an average of seven violent incidents reported in a school year.Women also reported higher exposure to acts of violence, especially in Kindergarten and Grades 1 to 3.“I was assaulted by a 10-year-old who kicked me in the stomach, punched me, pulled my hair and slapped the glasses off my face,” one teacher recounted.Another recalled fending off an attempted stabbing at the hands of a young boy.“A six-year-old, Grade 1 student was using a pair of scissors,” the teacher wrote. “He got frustrated with his work and his behaviour began to escalate. He chose to take his scissors and cut the arm of the student sitting next to him … he [then] proceeded to attempt to stab me.”Another said they’ve been “hit, kicked, sworn at, and threatened more times than I can count. I’ve had chairs thrown across the room and objects used as weapons … This is not what teaching was supposed to be. It feels like surviving, not educating.”In a release on Tuesday, the OECTA said once-shocking violence has now become the “new normal” in classrooms, with the survey confirming “that violence against teachers in Ontario schools is no longer rare, isolated, or unexpected. “It has become a daily reality for both school staff and students, and chronic underfunding of the education system plays a big role in making the situation even worse.”René Jansen in de Wal, President of the OECTA, spoke with CityNews on Tuesday about the survey’s stark conclusions.“It isn’t shocking,” he said. “We’ve been seeing this rise in violence over the last few years and we’ve been raising it at the last round of bargaining (that) safety of students and class sizes shouldn’t be a bargaining chip, but the government and the trustees were convinced it wasn’t the case.”“We had to do a survey, a professional survey, to give them data to say ‘No this is real, and it is extensive, it’s system-wide.”He adds that while factors contributing to the rise in violence include the COVID pandemic, along with social media and screen time, one of the main issues is class size.“Put 34 kids in a class and teachers are supposed to be helping all of them at the same time, but you can’t,” he stressed. “You’ve got to look kids in the eye and see that they are struggling in that moment to get ahead of it.”“When we need to support our kids the most, the government has been reducing funding.”CityNews has reached out to the Ministry of Education to address the OECTA’s claims of government underfunding and cuts, but has not received a response. The OECTA represents around 45,000 teachers in Ontario’s publicly funded English Catholic schools, from Kindergarten to Grade 12.The online survey was sent to about 45,000 OECTA members, who teach in publicly funded Catholic schools across Ontario. In total, 2,873 Catholic teachers completed the survey. Results from a sample of this size are considered accurate within a margin of error of ±1.7 percentage points, 19 times out of 20.