On the same day of the controversial TDSB middle school field trip turned Jew hatefest, education director Colleen Russell-Rawlins walked out the door of the board to take vacation days until her official retirement in November.
She left all of the chaos she created behind.
The board is an absolute train wreck.
It is ironic that her woke policies, her obsession with DEI and her lackadaisical approach to policing those teachers and students who adopted her anti-racism, pro-Indigenous view of the world culminated in a “field trip” that clearly crossed the line.
The field trip on September 18th – evidence of an out-of-control board of administrators and trustees without a moral compass – was sold to parents as an excursion to downtown Toronto’s Grange Park to support “Mercury Justice for the Grassy Narrow Community” and Indigenous rights.
Parents were told the students would observe only.
As my former colleague Bryan Passifume has reported, it quickly turned into an anti-Israel hatefest during which students as young as those in Grade 3 were encouraged to march and chant, “From Turtle Island to Palestine, occupation is a crime.”
Students were also asked to wear blue shirts to identify themselves as colonizers.
Jewish students who contended they were uncomfortable were reportedly told to “get over it.”
Some reportedly came home with “Zionism Kills” stickers – a shocking revelation.
A teacher named Anne Marie Longpre – known for her tweets expressing ongoing hatred of the Jewish state – appears to have organized the event, judging from her own comments on her X page.
She was unrepentant about her involvement, claiming parents were not deceived.
She wrote in her X thread that there was “absolutely no deception” and asked why it was “harmful to kids” to hear “From Turtle Island to Palestine, Occupation is a crime.”
The executive of the Toronto Elementary Teachers Federation took part and gladly posted their pictures on X. That included Helen Victoros, a Jew, who is president of the local union.
In a statement, the board itself and acting chairman Marxist Neethan Shan downplayed the “harms” that students may have experienced when the “educational experience” turned into a anti-Semitic hate fest.
Never mind that the board’s administrators misled parents. Never mind that teachers have no business pulling students—particularly ones so young — out of class to engage in social justice.
It is worthwhile to note that in early September, I predicted that the board was in an accident waiting to happen, given that it was rudderless.
Besides the education director’s early departure, the board’s mostly woke trustees were left without a chairman when Rachel Chernos Lin took leave to try to better her political fortunes – running for an open seat on Toronto city council.
The last thing City Hall needs is another sure vote for our socialist mayor.
Only trustee Weidong Pei anticipated, quite correctly, that the Israel-Hamas conflict and rampant anti-Semitism would rear its ugly head again this fall.
In the last six months, Pei has tried to move a motion banning divisive geopolitics in board schools and the use of board property to promote a particular point of view (in other words, a pro-Palestinian point of view).
He was defeated twice by a majority of the board’s trustees, who have enabled the out-of-control protests by ignorant woke teachers like those who marched last week and their unions.
He says he intends to try for a third time at next month’s board meeting.
A spokesman for the advocacy group, Save our Schools TDSB says, that the years of neglecting good governance, lack of transparency and meaningful consultation have finally caught up with the board’s top brass.
Because the senior leadership and trustees have put aside parental concerns that don’t align with their progressive vision for schools, “it is no coincidence that some teachers in the TDSB see this as a ‘green light’ to take children and introduce dangerous geo-political themes in class and on the streets of Toronto,” the spokesman says.
As the SOSTDSB spokesman says, the public outcry has shown that parents have lost confidence in the leadership of the TDSB.
That notwithstanding, something has to be done about this train wreck of a school board, especially now that Russell-Rawlins has left the building.
I am pleased to see the new education minister, Jill Dunlop, is paying attention.
Dunlop needs to take drastic action.
Those teachers involved in the protest should be placed on leave and disciplined or fired for cause, starting with Longpre.
Since the majority of trustees can’t be trusted to do the right thing, or to pick a suitable new director, It is time for a board takeover. A provincial supervisor needs to be brought in, and not one whose sole obsession is anti-black racism and DEI ideologies.
Students should not be used as pawns in a dangerous woke science experiment.
What the teachers who organized the protest and the union executives did by participating last week was tantamount to child abuse.
