An Ottawa trustee was bullied, called “racist” and mocked by her woke colleagues at a Tuesday night board meeting for putting forward a proposal to have the board work more closely with police to better respond to schools and staff experiencing a surge in vandalism and attacks.
Ottawa-Carleton District School Board (OCDSB) trustee Donna Blackburn told her colleagues that since the board eliminated the Student Resource Officer (SRO, or police in schools) program a year ago, school administrators, teachers and staff are left to call 9-1-1 or police directly if a concern or crisis arises – and wait sometimes for hours along with everyone else for police to respond.
She said the victims of violence in Ottawa schools are getting “less service” since they eliminated the program.
“We have said the police are not welcome there (on our properties) …this is not working for our students, staff and our communities,,” she told her colleagues, insisting she is speaking for the “silent and silenced” majority.
The Toronto District School Board also eliminated the SRO program in late 2017 following ongoing protests by Desmond Cole and Black Lives Matter activists.
Board officials bowed to pressure even though their own $30,000 survey showed the majority of students, staff and parents found the SROs very helpful. This support came in addition to a long list of school teachers and principals who attended a Police Services Board meeting that year and begged them to keep cops in schools.
At Tuesday’s OCDSB meeting, however, things went quickly off the rails after trustee Catherine Boothby moved to defer Blackburn’s motion indefinitely.
Boothby claimed they’d already set up a process whereby the police, the board and equity-seeking and oppressed groups were supposed to communicate collectively with each other – in alignment with the UN’s International Decade for people of African Descent and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s call to action.
“This motion is doing nothing but causing hurt to this community,” she said.
She did not define what kind of hurt she meant.
OCDSB education director Camille Williams-Taylor – after tripping over her words for several minutes – did admit that conversations with the police hadn’t occurred as quickly as she had hoped. She said that access to the police was “limited” and had resulted in “significant delays” in a police response when it was needed.
“It (911) doesn’t get us the efficiency,” she conceded, indicating they’d been working on how to “reconstitute” the relationship with the police.
Nevertheless, Boothby’s motion set off a ridiculous litany of perceived hurts from the anti-police trustees.
Transgendered trustee Lyra Evans insisted that members of the community have been “hurt” by the police and everytime they reopen the debate, the community relives their “hurts.”
“Why would we knowingly cause pain to our community,” Evans said. “I’m of the opinion we punt this into space and never look back.”
Evans never said what “hurts” or “pain” members of their community are feeling.
Evans’s partner in crime Justine Bell, another radical NDPer, reiterated that the issue of policing “brings pain to the community” every time they discuss it.
Never mind the victims of crime, of course. Bell, too, never indicated what pain the community is experiencing.
Blackburn left the meeting in frustration before the unanimous vote by the out-of-touch, self-satisfied ( and largely boomer) trustees deferred the motion indefinitely.
She said following the meeting that the people of Ottawa-Carleton should be very concerned that the left wing has taken over the OCDSB. She said she felt many of the trustees backed down on her idea after activists called her a racist for even suggesting it.
“Vandalism is not being addressed, and the cops feel so demoralized,” Blackburn said. “Certain (anti-police) trustees don’t acknowledge the violence.”
While she was surprised that her motion was so quickly stalled, I wasn’t. This has become part of a pattern throughout Ontario school boards.
Anti-police, pro-critical-race-theory and gender-ideology trustees – many of them backed by unions – have set about to deliver agendas that have nothing to do with safety or the quality of the educational experience for students.
Ontario school kids have become merely the lab mice in a dangerous social experiment.
