What happened?
According to CBC News (28 October 2026), ten students at Horizon high school in Lévis, Quebec, were suspended after images of teachers and school staff, altered with artificial intelligence, were published on Snapchat. The school service centre, the Centre de services scolaire des Navigateurs, said they broke the code of conduct, which bans any "offensive, defamatory, hateful, or violent content or images" and recording or broadcasting people without consent.
- It was other students who alerted staff, because the images made them uncomfortable.
- Administrators and the school's police officer met the students who posted the images and asked them to delete them. They agreed.
- The suspension lasted three days and no criminal charges were laid.
- André Bernier, president of the association of Quebec school administrators, told Radio-Canada that most images were silly or nonsense, but that one reportedly showed a gun held to a teacher's head.
What do the unions, experts and the minister say?
Richard Bergevin, president of the Fédération des syndicats de l'enseignement, said such images can unfairly damage a teacher's reputation and spread widely. He recalled that before Quebec's ban on phones in schools, some students filmed teachers to make them look bad; since the ban, such cases have dropped sharply. AI incidents are rarer, he said, but are a new risk that could become more frequent. In his view schools should sanction students and, when necessary, report incidents to the police.
Bernier added that school staff also need care when posting even harmless images of school activities online, since they can be manipulated; he suggested training on privacy settings. Carolanne Campeau, a lecturer at the University of Sherbrooke who advises a group working on hyperconnectivity, argued that governments should regulate AI platforms and that young children should not have access to AI tools, while teenagers could be introduced to them with a solid digital literacy programme. Quebec's Education Minister, Joël Arseneau, said the school was right to suspend the students, called for zero tolerance and said regulating AI in schools is a government priority.
What can a school head take from this?
- Write it into the code of conduct. Name AI-altered images and recording staff or pupils without consent explicitly, so the rule is clear before a case arises.
- Give pupils a safe way to report. Here it was classmates who raised the alarm. Make sure they know whom to tell and that they will be taken seriously.
- Prepare the response in advance. A short sequence helps: stop the spread, ask for the deletion, meet the pupils, apply a proportionate sanction, and decide when an outside authority must be informed. Decide who does what.
- Review what the school posts. Photos of events, staff and pupils on public pages can be reused. Check privacy settings and who can see and download them.
- Teach the consequences, not only the rule. A short session on what an altered image can do to a person, and what the legal consequences can be, goes further than a notice on the wall.
- Keep a dated record. A written trace of the facts, the meeting and the sanction protects pupils, staff and the school. In ClassMata, the Attendance & Discipline module records suspensions day by day, class by class.