C. W. Jefferys Collegiate is just an ordinary suburban high school. Built in the utilitarian style of the 1950s and ’60s, it has a scruffy field out back, a parking lot off to the side and an indoor pool that doubles as a city-run facility. With about 900 students, it’s an average size school, a mingling of kids from a broad catchment area in North York that includes the predominantly black public housing complexes around Jane and Finch, the immigrant and working-class apartments off Keele Street, and the tidy middle-class neighbourhoods north of Sheppard.

Until recently, it enjoyed a solid reputation in the northwest corner of the city and considered itself more athletically, artistically and academically successful than tougher neighbouring schools, such as Emery, Downsview and Westview Centennial. C. W. Jefferys scores well on provincial tests. Almost 40 per cent of Grade 12s apply to university or college (comparable to rates across the board), and most are accepted. It’s a place with plenty of school pride, of the sort teens wear on their sleeves.

To an outsider, the only evidence that anything is amiss lies in a display case in the main foyer: the small memorial contains a wreath, some drawings and poems, and a simple inscription that reads, “One bullet wounds many.” On May 23, 2007, 30 minutes before school was to be let out, Jordan Manners, a 15-year-old boy in Grade 9, was shot dead in a hallway only a few steps away. That afternoon, a nightmarish whirlwind ensued: the lockdown, screaming ambulances, frightened students, and that wrenching televised scene of his mother wilting into a heap upon learning that her youngest—a kid from the housing complex a few kilometres west—had died.

As school administrators are legally considered to act in loco parentis, such a crime represents a massive institutional failure. Jordan Manners’ death was the first fatal shooting inside a Toronto school—evi­dence that guns had passed through the school’s portals unnoticed, with devastating consequences. Depending on your perspective, the crime was rooted in the insidious encroachment of youth violence, the scourge of drugs and gangs, racism, unemployment, social disintegration or the corrosive influence of penny-pinching bureau­crats on communities struggling with poverty. The question remains: Was Manners’ death an isolated incident or a symptom of something more widespread?

Many students, whose initial shock soon gave way to a very adolescent sense of worldly defiance, were adamant that there’s the potential for deadly violence in every high school. They bristled at the way their school was singled out. “The media take everything and make it seem like we’re the worst school ever,” one Grade 12 student told me. “It’s not right. I hate it.”

Within days of the shooting, the police arrested two suspects—both students, one of whom was said to be Jordan’s friend—and charged them with first-degree murder. The cops have never offered up a motive, and some people who know the suspects believe it was an accident. But then, over the summer, revelations emerged about another serious crime that took place in the school. C. W. Jefferys administrators failed to inform police about the alleged sexual assault of a female student in a washroom in October 2006, even though it had been reported to staff. (Since then, six students have been charged, and the principal and two vice-principals were placed on home assignment with pay.)

What’s become glaringly apparent is that both incidents stemmed from a steady breakdown of discipline within C. W. Jefferys. But a little-known Toronto District School Board procedure for shuffling juvenile delinquents between schools may have played a part in setting the stage for the tragedy. According to several sources, the suspects in the Manners shooting, both Grade 12 students, had been moved to C. W. Jefferys from Westview Centennial. (The board will not comment.) The boys were known, in the TDSB’s boundless capacity for bureaucratic euphemism, as “safe schools transfers,” students who’ve been suspended or expelled so often—for serious and sometimes criminal transgressions involving weapons, drugs and assaults—that officials discreetly relocate them to give them and their victims a fresh start. However, these kids don’t necessarily receive adequate counselling before they’re transferred. The teachers at the receiving school aren’t officially informed about their case histories, nor are they equipped to handle them. In recent years, our society has come up with a pat label for such kids: at-risk youth. But it begs the question: Who’s really at risk?