Hundreds join provincial student protest
Curriculum changes by Ford government draw ire of teenagers
The students didn’t have a voice when Premier Doug Ford was elected, or when his Progressive Conservative government rolled back parts of their curriculum by decades.
But Friday, hundreds of Niagara high school students joined thousands more from across the province, speaking with one voice to protest changes to sex education and Indigenous curriculum.
About 250 students from St. Catharines Collegiate, Eden High School, Sir Winston Churchill, and Laura Secord Students joined their peers at more than 100 schools from across Ontario -walking out of class simultaneously at about 1 p.m., protesting the Ministry of Education’s decision to repeal the 2015 health and physical education curriculum and temporarily replaced it with a curriculum first introduced in 1998.
“We didn’t even get to vote, and it’s not fair because they’re going back like 20 years,” said Kayla Cowie, 17, a Grade 12 student at Sir Winston Churchill. “The new curriculum was set in 2015 and it included all of the things that we needed to know about, like consent.”
Under the 2015 curriculum, she said “members of the LGBT-plus community had a voice.”
But Cowie, who organized the walkout of more than 50 students at Sir Winston Churchill, said that voice was lost when the curriculum was replaced with educational materials that do not even mention lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender.
“We just want to make sure that voice doesn’t get lost for generations in the future. The point that they’re taking it away isn’t fair to us,” she said. “We don’t want to have to have a conversation with somebody 10 years in the future that didn’t get the proper education and now they’re in a situation that they don’t know what to do about it.”
Grade 10 student Zachary Chiasson, who organized the protests at St. Catharines Colligiate, said he felt he had to “step up and start a movement” when he learned about the sex-ed curriculum rollback.
About 40 students participated in the walkout at Collegiate.
“The students do not approve of what Doug Ford wants to change,” said Alanna Kerry, a Grade 11 student at Colligiate. “Even though we’re minors, that doesn’t mean that we don’t have a voice.”
Ysabelle Thompson, a 15-yearold First Nations girl, said she joined the protest at Colligiate, concerned that Indigenous education was not included within the curriculum, too.
“Honestly, it’s a sensitive issue that he’s getting rid of pretty much any mention of First Nation’s people and what they went through,” said Thompson, a Grade 10 student.