Vaughan group leads protests to demand ‘transformational’ change in Ontario schools to address anti-Black racism

Hundreds participate in rally in Toronto

Yorkregion.com
August 5, 2020
Angelyn Francis

Hundreds of parents gathered outside city hall and then marched to Queen’s Park on Monday afternoon, spending Ontario’s Simcoe Day holiday demanding changes to the education system in addressing anti-Black racism.

Kearie Daniel is one of the parents who organized the protest.

“If the government is serious about change for Black and Indigenous students, what we need is transformational change,” she said.

The march was organized by the Vaughan African Canadian Association, in collaboration with Parents of Black Children, of which Daniel is a founding member. She organized it, in part, to let the province’s Ministry of Education know that recently announced school reforms don’t go far enough.

The protesters are making a few main demands:

• an amendment to the Education Act and fully decolonized curriculum, with the experience of Black Canadians woven throughout all curricula from kindergarten to Grade 12;
• the immediate destreaming of all grades; and
• accountability and training on teacher bias and racism.

As a Black parent with young children, Daniel has had experience with microaggressions emanating from deep-rooted systemic racism within the education system.

Several times she’s been called at the York Region Catholic elementary school her son attends over minor complaints from a teacher -- for instance, that her son wasn’t standing in line properly; he was telling a funny story in class, which led the teacher to believe there was something wrong; he was being aggressive and had to be sent outside the class to “cool off.”

“This is a child who we had never had any behavioural problems with before,” said Daniel, 39. She said that such incidents eventually piled up and caused her son anxiety. “So he went from a child that loves school to a child that didn’t want to go to school.”

Last month, Ontario announced plans to scrap the streaming system for Grade 9 students, which had long been denounced as unfairly affecting Black and low-income kids and further lowering their chances of continuing on to post-secondary education.

The same announcement -- touted by Education Minister Stephen Lecce as an effort to give all the students “a fair chance at success” -- also put a stop to the practice of suspending kids from kindergarten to Grade 3, which disproportionately affect students from Black and low-income families.

Black youth in the Toronto District School Board make up 11 per cent of the student population, but account for 33 per cent of suspensions and expulsions. That trend has been similar for a long time in Peel and York school boards.

But parents like Daniel say the new changes are just a drop in an ocean of problems plaguing the education system.

In one incident with her son, Daniel brought her mother to the meeting with the school principal. It was clear to her, Daniel said, that the principal was uncomfortable and not well equipped to properly deal with the issue of racism and equity -- she simply kept saying that “things are better now.”

“My mother was sitting there with her grandchild … and she had done the same thing with me 30 years ago. It’s the same conversation when they wanted to put me in the special education class,” said Daniel.

The group is also echoing recommendations from LAEN (Latinx, Afro-Latin-America, Abya Yala Education Network) that all schools across the province should be police-free and want to see school boards start collecting race-based data on student achievement and discipline, in an effort to hold schools and boards accountable for their commitment to equity.

Protesters would also like to see the lack of Black representation across the Canadian education system addressed and are demanding increased hiring of Black teachers, guidance counsellors and administrative staff across the board.

Claudette Rutherford, another parent who is part of the coalition demanding more change, is also a teacher in the York Region Catholic board and a proponent of ending streaming across the entire system, not just in Grade 9. Her son’s courses were switched from academic to applied, and she was able to catch that and rectify it only because she’s a teacher and was diligent with her son’s selection.

Rutherford said Black students are disproportionately affected by these measures because of subtle language used from an early age in their education journey, which shapes their understanding of what they are capable of accomplishing later in life. Curriculum reform needs to focus on Black and African material, not just in social science classes but in all subjects, she said.

“The conversation needs to include inherent bias, not just the fact that on paper we can’t stream in one grade or one sector,” she said.

The protest, she says, is only part of what’s needed to show Black students across the province that parents and teachers hear their complaints and are there to support them.

“I think the way to build students up is to teach them lessons about themselves and to teach other people about the success of Black people, so we can be seen as intellectual equals in all subject matters,” said Rutherford.