Education bill revamped after parents’ complaints
References to Charter, Rights Act removed
Saying that previous versions of a new Education Act included wording that was not “quite the right fit,” the Redford government backed down from language that stoked fears among some home-schooling families that they could be hauled before a human rights tribunal.
On Tuesday, Education Minister Jeff Johnson introduced the third version of a new Education Act to be tabled in the legislature since 2011. The bill removes a reference to the Charter of Rights and Freedoms and the Alberta Human Rights Act included in previous bills, something Liberal education critic Kent Hehr said was pandering to the religious right.
The government changed a section of the act on “diversity and respect” after protests this spring from home-schooling advocates who worried they could face a human rights complaint for teaching their children on issues they deem to be related to morals or faith.
“The more people got exposed to it and the more dialogue we had with it, the more we realized it wasn’t quite the right fit,” Johnson said Tuesday, with representatives from several sectors of the education field standing with him. “I think we found some really good middle ground here that is a compromise for folks.”
Johnson is the third education minister to introduce a new act intended to replace the School Act that has governed the province’s K-12 education system since 1988. Beginning in 2009, the department consulted more than 30,000 interested Albertans.
The first version was tabled by Dave Hancock in the spring of 2011, but was pulled back after the Progressive Conservative leadership race. Thomas Lukaszuk brought the act back a year later with a handful of revisions, but it did not pass before Premier Alison Redford called a spring election, largely because of protests from parents.
The previous two versions included a clause that said all courses or study material used in a school needed to reflect the Alberta’s diversity and respect of others, and had to comply with the Charter of Rights and Alberta’s Human Rights Act.
It was that clause that some parents worried was code for censuring private family conversations.
The bill introduced Tuesday reverts to old wording in the School Act, which requires that programs and course material reflect the “diverse nature and heritage of society in Alberta” and “honour and respect the common values and beliefs of Albertans.”
The change was welcomed Tuesday by both the Wildrose party and Paul van den Bosch, a spokesman for the Alberta Home Education Association, who joined Johnson at the news conference Monday.
Van den Bosch said it appeared Johnson had listened to parents’ concerns.
“We don’t object to human rights,” he said. “Alberta parents, we teach human rights. We just don’t want it mandated you must teach according to one belief system.”
About one per cent of the province’s 600,000 students are home-schooled, Alberta Education says.
Education officials said Tuesday the government had never intended to worry homeschooling families. They noted that Alberta’s proposed education act includes a description of parental responsibilities, recognizing parents as the primary guides and decisionmakers in their children’s education.
Officials also noted that Alberta’s Human Rights Act is a paramount piece of legislation, which means that schools and school boards must still abide even if it is not specifically mentioned, since it trumps other laws. The proposed act also requires school boards to draft codes of conduct for students that forbid discrimination based on prohibited grounds under the Human Rights Act, Johnson said.
Home-schooling is different, they said, because it is not a service that is “publicly available.”
Bill 3 also raises the age that a student can drop out of school from 16 to 17 and gives Albertans two more years to access provincially funded high school programs, raising the cutoff age to 21 from 19.