Backed into a corner and clearly worried about a ministry takeover, the Toronto District School Board’s woke trustees agreed this past week to endorse a review by the education ministry into a recent field trip that went horribly wrong, ending up being an anti-Israel hate fest.
They really had no choice.
The motion — brought forward by their colleague Weidong Pei — ensures that the review is fully transparent, with clear deadlines for completion (Dec. 1 of this year) and that the incident is not swept under the rug, as the board has so adeptly done up to now.
The alleged review of the circumstances leading up to the tragic suicide of principal Richard Bilkzsto a year ago, announced by the retiring director Colleen Russell-Rawlins, comes to mind. She skipped out the door last week, having never delivered a report.
Still the trustees — in an act of woke defiance — came to the meeting or appeared online in orange Truth and Reconciliation t-shirts, a remarkably tone deaf move considering the special meeting was called to deal with the student field trips to protests/rallies and marches and the board’s focus on politics over academics.
The Sept. 18 field trip was sold to parents as an excursion to downtown Toronto’s Grange Park to support a rally bringing to light the mercury poisoning on the Grassy Narrows community in northwestern Ontario.
School board officials confirmed 15 schools participated.
Parents were led to believe students were to observe only.
But it quickly turned into an anti-Israel hatefest where students as young as eight years old were pressured to march and chant, “From Turtle Island to Palestine, occupation is a crime.”
Some students came home with “Zionism Kills” stickers.
The teachers behind the protest, one of them Anne-Marie Longpre, have been absolutely unapologetic about what they did. The Elementary Teachers Federation issued a statement denying any culpability whatsoever, not even for co-opting young minds.
Pictures and video from the protest gone wrong shows unionists from the Toronto Teachers Federation and CUPE’s Fred Hahn gleefully marching along.
The bureaucrats at the TDSB and the trustees claim they knew nothing about the excursion.
That suggests any of these possibilities: That they feigned ignorance to cover their butts; that they knew but miscalculated the controversy that would ensue or they really didn’t know.
None of these options are acceptable.
What it shows is that under the now departed Russell-Rawlins, procedures and policies were rarely followed—most especially the board’s social media policy — and the radical element in the board was enabled to inflict their poison on students.
Acting director Louise Sirisko said they’ve issued directions to teachers and administrators not to organize or take part in any protests or rallies while the Ministry investigation is ongoing – a little like closing the barn door after the chickens have escaped.
“We made it clear …that if policies and procedures were not followed, we would take action including disciplinary action,” she said.
Trustee Shelley Laskin suddenly discovered — after years of ignoring the fact and especially the last 11 months — that anti-Semitism pervades the board.
”I think there’s an experience of trauma that sees everything elevated,” she said, referring to the vandalism of synagogues and the violent protests on the streets, among other things.
”As a Jew in Canada I’ve never had to deal with that before … if Jews don’t feel safe in our public schools no one is safe.”
With the greatest of respect to Laskin, she and her partner in crime, Rachel Chernos-Lin, were in denial about the escalating anti-Semitism.
The two of them mocked Pei each time in the past six months whenever he tried to introduce a motion to ban geo-political protests from TDSB classrooms.
Now that Chernos-Lin has ruined the school board, she is running for the vacant seat on council.
The trustees spent at least 30 minutes arguing about what policies were relevant for the ministry to review, suggesting to me that they’re concerned about what skeletons might come out of the TDSB closet.
Clearly this rally turned protest was the final straw for many parents.
It also shows how closely aligned the union is with the majority of the board’s trustees. That’s because they work overtime to put them in place and expect them to turn a blind eye to the abuses.
The conflicts are tremendous and the lines of good judgement and ethics are regularly crossed.
I hope that education minister Jill Dunlop and Premier Doug Ford mean what they say about a thorough investigation.
If they need to take over the board, let it happen.
It’s not just for the sake of the education of students in the public system.
But it will set an example for the rest of the woke boards in Ontario to toe the line.
