Roblin teacher stripped of professional licence

WINNIPEG — A Roblin teacher has been stripped of his professional licence after an undercover police investigation found he sent explicit messages to a social media user he believed to be a 15-year-old girl.

Manitoba cancelled Josh Braaksma’s credentials — listed in the province’s online registry under his full name, Joshua William Braaksma — on July 6. His certificate was suspended on an interim basis in the fall.

The misconduct case involving Braaksma, who has taught and coached in the Mountain View School Division over the last decade, is the first to be resolved via a “written hearing.”

“Having regard to the nature, content, and context of (his) communications, the panel finds that the teacher’s conduct renders him unsuitable to be a teacher,” the disciplinary decision states.

The panel sided with Noni Classen, the independent commissioner who oversees Manitoba’s new teacher disciplinary system. The trio agreed that, based on a balance of probabilities, Braaksma committed professional misconduct.

Its findings were released this week, about 14 days after chair Gord Schumacher and two other panelists signed off on them.

The 10-page document indicates it was almost exactly one year ago when Braaksma is alleged to have engaged in “inappropriate electronic communications” with undercover social media accounts run by Minnesota’s Owatonna Police Department.

The teacher is accused of sending messages and photos on Snapchat — including a sexualized image of himself, as well as a request for similar content via suggestive texts and “the use of a cherry emoji” — to an individual he believed was a teenage girl.

A summary of the allegations said Braaksma joined an “#agegapfun” forum on Kik, an online platform for anonymous discussions between strangers, where he exchanged messages with a detective posing as a male teacher on July 23, 2025.

The summary said Braaksma told the detective about a sexual relationship he had with a former student and took the user up on their offer to connect him with a 15-year-old girl via Snapchat.

Braaksma did not participate in the spring proceedings nor did he respond to requests for comment on Wednesday.

After his lawyer advised Classen’s office that he would not attend or otherwise participate in a public hearing, the commissioner requested the case be dealt with via written submissions filed by May 20. The accused did not file any evidence.

The first videoconference hearing, a historic event open to the public to observe in real time, took place on Tuesday.

Classen argued that Braaksma’s teaching certificate should be rescinded based on witness interviews and material obtained by police as part of her office’s investigation.

Minnesota police identified Braaksma using facial recognition technology. He was later linked to social media accounts by multiple sources, including another teacher and his then-superintendent.

“Correspondence from the Manitoba RCMP indicates that (the U.S. authorities’) technology would not, on its own, be sufficient to establish identity in a criminal investigation,” the July 6 hearing decision said.

Mounties did not immediately confirm Wednesday whether local officials have opened a separate investigation.

Cameron Hauseman, an associate professor who trains teacher candidates at the University of Manitoba, described this week’s events as “monumental” for kindergarten-to-Grade 12 schooling in the province.

Hauseman said these public hearings, organized more than a year after the registry launched, were long overdue to improve transparency.

“This is what due process looks like and it’s important because neither the alleged perpetrator, the alleged victims or members of the general public can claim there’s any backroom deals going on,” said the researcher, who is interested in school governance and related topics.

Disciplinary panels must be made up of at least three people — a certified teacher, a non-teacher and a nominee from the Manitoba School Boards Association, which represents teacher employer groups.

Schumacher, executive director of the Manitoba Association of Chiefs of Police, has chaired the first two hearings.

Public school principal Jesse Thomaschewski served as the teacher representative for the written hearing. The third panelist was Elizabeth Mitchell, a senior labour relations consultant.

“Cancellation of the teacher’s teaching certificate is necessary to protect the public and maintain confidence in the teaching profession,” the trio wrote in their decision.

While noting there is no evidence the accused engaged in an inappropriate relationship with an actual minor, they described “a serious breach of the professional boundaries expected of a teacher.”

Mountain View superintendent Suzanne Cottyn confirmed Braaksma was employed by her Dauphin-based board office in September 2015 until last year.

Cottyn said the division took steps ahead of the first day of classes in 2025-26 to ensure he was not working in a classroom when it learned about an external source’s allegations and launched its own investigation.

His employment was terminated “shortly after,” the division leader said in an email in which she touted Mountain View’s commitment to student safety and the supportive nature of both the RCMP and the commissioner’s office.

Division records show Braaksma has worked at Roblin Elementary School and Goose Lake High School, where he coached a girls volleyball team out of the Grade 9-12 building in the same community in western Manitoba.

Classen’s office issued a statement on her behalf that said the historic hearing panel decision demonstrates the important role of the 18-month-old regulatory body she was tapped to oversee in May.

The commissioner, formerly a spokesperson for the Canadian Centre for Child Protection in Winnipeg, said protecting children from sexual exploitation is one of the new system’s “most fundamental responsibilities.”

U of M’s Hauseman said the public hearings reinforce his belief that teachers have nothing to worry about “if they’re not engaged in any nefarious behaviours.”

“I tell my bachelor of education students, ‘This (disciplinary system) is a really good thing when it comes to protecting the profession,’” Hauseman said. “Because teaching is one of those professions where you can’t have a bad apple.”

Before joining Manitoba’s largest faculty of education, he was a classroom teacher in Ontario. The Ontario College of Teachers was established 30 years ago to license, govern and regulate the profession in that province.

The Owatonna Police Department, located about 100 kilometres south of Minneapolis, did not respond to calls about its July 2025 investigation.

» Winnipeg Free Press