The good news is that two of the loudest voices of the Waterloo Region District School Board (WRDSB) NDP cabal got ousted in Monday night’s school board elections.
Trustees Laurie Tremble, who made the vexatious Code of Conduct complaint against trustee Mike Ramsay, and Jayne Herring, a former WRDSB employee and a shill for the board’s woke ideology, went down to defeat.
Not only did Tremble craft the complaint against the board’s only black trustee but her sister, Dianne Bramble, repeatedly harassed Ramsay on social media from her home in Ottawa.
The great news is that despite a well-orchestrated campaign by the board’s NDP cabal and the whacky education director Jeewan Chanicka to silence him, Ramsay was resoundingly re-elected. Like-minded non-woke trustee Cindy Watson was also returned to office.
Ramsay has indicated he will seek the board’s chairmanship.
The bad news, however, is that the current chairman Scott Piatkowski was reelected — despite being the target of two judicial reviews and a $1.7-million lawsuit by former Waterloo teacher Carolyn Burjoski.
In January of this year, Piatkowski shut down Burjoski four minutes into her presentation about two highly sexualized books in the board’s elementary school libraries.
While Burjoski was silenced and even threatened with criminal charges, Piatkowski happily participated in media interviews, calling her transphobic and insisting her presentation could cause trans people to be attacked.
It was an outrageous abuse of his power, as were his attempts to silence Ramsay with a Code of Conduct complaint using pricey Bay St. lawyers.
By rights, Piatkowski should have stepped aside, or at least apologized. But he did not.
Whether Piatkowski will now attempt to remain as chairman is unclear.
While his cabal has been diminished with the loss of Tremble and Herring, several woke trustees have been elected to replace them, including two retired teachers, Marie Snyder and Maedith Raedlin (the latter appears to be a proponent of divisive anti-black racism education, a buzz word to describe Critical Race Theory).
The other new trustee is a professional candidate and former teacher. Carla Johnson ran for councillor in 2018 and for the Green Party in this year’s provincial election.
I guess three times lucky.
She has already blocked me on Twitter, which suggests that she’s not exactly a proponent of openness and transparency.
The bottom line is that with this mish-mash of candidates and Piatkowski still looming large, along with his chosen education director Chanicka, the next term at the WRDSB is bound to be tumultuous, if not divisive.
It is indeed a godsend to parents that Ramsay decided to run again and that Burjoski has pursued legal means to expose the former board’s abuse of power.
Nonetheless, parents need to remain vigilant and continue to demand transparency about the kind of edicts coming from the board.
Trustees like Piatkowski and the remaining members of his NDP faction count on that not happening.
