College students seek tuition refund
KITCHENER — An online petition seeking refunds for college tuition topped 68,000 signatures on Tuesday.
It seeks a refund — $30 a day for full-time students and $20 a day for part-time students — for the half million Ontario college students shut out of classes for the second day of a provincewide faculty strike.
Twenty-four colleges, including Conestoga, stand on one side of the labour dispute. About 12,000 faculty represented by the Ontario Public Service Employees Union are digging in on picket lines on the other side.
The students — including 14,000 full-time and 32,000 continuing education students at Conestoga — are stuck in the middle. The petition, started by two Humber College students, allows them all to vent.
“I think it’s wonderful that students are using their own voice and trying to come up with their own solutions and not kind of being lost in the din of the back-and-forth between the two big parties,” said Conestoga student union president Aimee Calma, a recent graduate of the college’s business administration program.
“As for the logistics of the petition itself, it’ll be interesting to see how that plays out.”
The students behind the petition aim to present it to both sides in the dispute and Deputy Premier Deb Matthews.
Jessica Towriss, a journalism student at Conestoga, posted a link to the petition on her Twitter account. The petition listed her as a signee.
“Get back to negotiations so I can go back to class! I paid to be educated. I didn’t pay to teach myself !” an early Tuesday post on the Towriss account said after talks stalled.
Calma said students are feeling stressed now that the strike has become reality. The student union, Conestoga Students Inc., is fielding a lot of difficult questions from students about the strike and its impact on them.
On Tuesday morning, police were called to Doon Valley Drive for an incident on the picket line at Conestoga’s Kitchener campus.
Police received a report that a vehicle tried to pass through a Doon Campus picket line just after 11. It’s alleged that an object, possibly a pylon, hit a vehicle. No one was injured, but police are investigating.