Naudia Braun should be enjoying her first days of high school, meeting new friends, taking in new classes. (Greg Henkenhaf/Sun Media)

Naudia Braun should be enjoying her first days of high school, meeting new friends, taking in new classes.

Instead, during this "Safe and Caring Schools" start to the academic year, the 14-year-old remains at home, with nowhere to turn because a bureaucratic 30 metres are all that separate her from a safe education.

Naudia was supposed to start Grade 9 at East York Collegiate, but her mother Cheryl refuses to send her there -- and she agrees.

MEAN GIRLS

She underwent two years of absolute hell in her middle school at the hands of a pack of mean girls who were a year older -- and now they're lying in wait for her at East York.

So last March, her mother asked the Toronto District School Board to allow her daughter to attend SATEC @ W. A. Porter Collegiate this fall, just 1.3 km away from her home. They turned her down, even though she had been told there were spots open for transfers, because Naudia lives just outside the district. The Brauns' home is on the west side of Victoria Park -- if they lived just 30 metres across the road, she would have been able to go.

"Why should my daughter have to suffer because of jurisdictional silliness?" her mother asks. "We're just across the street."

Instead, they've been told Naudia can attend Marc Garneau Collegiate, which is three TTC buses away, or take her chances at East York. But Braun doesn't believe either is a solution for her daughter, not after all she's been through.

It began in Grade 6 when Naudia made the naive mistake of telling an older girl that her Jamaican accent was "cool." From that innocent remark, Naudia was branded a racist and tormented for the next two years: During swim classes, her dry clothes were used to wipe up puddles in the change room so she would have to go home soaking wet; she was grabbed by the hair on the TTC and prevented from getting off at her stop; her coat was ripped off and thrown on the street where it was run over and torn; at school, batteries were hurled at her head, she was slammed into lockers, called a racist and because of her German background, a Nazi. On the Internet, her photo was posted on the body of a bear.

"She cried every night," her mom recalls. "She lost a lot of weight, she's still not back to where she was. She was miserable. Every day she would beg me not to have to go to school."

In the face of such unrelenting abuse, the pretty young teen grew suicidal.

One day, she took a thumb tack off the classroom wall and began carving at her wrists in the bathroom. "I thought, 'Fine, if they don't want me around, I won't be around,'' " she recalls.

The school called Braun and told her to come get her daughter, that she needed counselling.

But what she really needed, her mom argues, was for the school to have taken the bullying problem seriously. Instead, after each time she complained, the girls would get a little lecture. A short time later, their torture resumed as before.

TORMENTERS MOVED ON

"It just got worse," Naudia interjects. "They started calling me a snitch."

"They don't listen," Braun says of school officials. "You get 'Kids will be kids.' "

Last year, her tormentors moved on to high school and Naudia began to heal. "We got our daughter back," her mother says with relief. "She is a happy, well-adjusted teen. She has gained back the 26 pounds she lost during those couple of years of constant harassment, her confidence is back, her self esteem is back."

So Braun isn't willing to see her daughter relapse by attending East York. One of the bullies stopped by Naudia's house over the Labour Day weekend and warned that she'd be beaten up if she showed her face at their high school.

"We're adamant that she's not going back to where those girls are," Braun insists. "If nothing was done when they were 11 and 12, it's only going to be worse now."

TDSB superintendent Rauda Dickinson, who only learned of Braun's request this week, says 400 students applied to transfer into SATEC this fall and there was room for just 160. There is no more space for Naudia.

"We treat every request seriously and there are lots of them," says Dickinson. "We're considering everything we can to help this girl."

In the meantime, she sits at home.

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