Thursday, April 13, 2017

Another investigation reveals another school board gone very, very wrong

Ontario Education Minister Mitzie Hunter
“School boards are really important political entities,” Osgoode Hall law professor Patrick Case told reporters at Queen’s Park on Tuesday. “For a lot of people who come to Canada, this is their first connection with this sort of governance in their lives. … They’re tremendously important to get right.”

Wise words. Alas, school boards have a notorious habit of going very, very wrong. Case, along with veteran public servant Suzanne Herbert, were at the legislature to present their review of the York Region District School Board, which Education Minister Mitzie Hunter requested in January after a festival of bad press. Most notably there was dodgy spending on “jurisdictional learning” (edu-speak for “almost certainly pointless international travel”), and there was now-former trustee Nancy Elgie, who refused to resign for months despite being caught on tape calling a student’s mother the N-word (she claimed a head injury had turned her into a racist; we were to assume she would soon recover).

It is, in a word, withering. Based on their discussions with trustees, Case and Herbert sensed “little appreciation for (trustees’) individual and collective responsibility for the circumstances that … led to this review.” Somehow, in this ultrasensitive era and with York Region’s hugely diverse constituency of students and parents, they evinced no “appreciation of their obligation to take a strong and unequivocal stand against racism and intolerance.” None even launched a code of conduct complaint against Elgie — though in another case a “racialized trustee” was forced “to make an apology for the use of the term ‘white privilege’.” Case and Herbert found code of conduct complaints “are generally used selectively and as an intimidation tactic,” and described a “culture of fear” among more well-meaning trustees.  (more...)


More coverage:


Now, watch the diversion to gender ideology -- standard operating procedure for Cultural Marxists, courtesy of the OISE mafia.

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