Students protest rollback to sex-ed
KITCHENER — A Kitchener high school joined thousands of Ontario students Friday calling on Doug Ford’s government to modernize the sex-ed curriculum and enhance Indigenous education.
Sierra Tehkummah, a Grade 10 student at Eastwood Collegiate Institute, stood at the microphone and told the 150 students gathered in the school’s football field during their lunch hour to stand up and demand change.
Somewhere, a Grade 3 boy is crying in his room, she told the crowd.
“He just found out he is gay,” said the 14-year-old teen. “No one has told him it’s OK. It’s OK to be who he is.”
The student-led protest, organized by Eastwood students Chesley Davidson and Hannah Blair, was the second one in Waterloo Region. Waterloo Collegiate Institute held a protest last week, and Cameron Heights Collegiate is planning a similar protest next week.
“We did it purposely this week. We want to make it clear it’s not going away,” said Davidson.
Last week, nearly 38,000 students walked out of class across the province demanding change to Ontario’s sex-ed curriculum.
The Ford government rolled back the 2015 health and physical education curriculum for elementary students, suggesting some of it was not age appropriate.
It was replaced with the curriculum used between 1998 and 2014, but issues such as consent, samesex relationships and gender identity are not specifically addressed.
There are also concerns that Indigenous history is not adequately taught.
Tehkummah, who is part Indigenous, said she and other students are not being taught their heritage.
“We are here. We exist,” she said. “We are alive.”
In the crowd, some students draped the Pride flag over their shoulders and others held handwritten posters reading “Sex Ed Saves Lives,” “Consent Matters” and “Our Minds Our Bodies Our Choice Our Education.”
Grade 12 student Payton DayeFraser, who identifies as pansexual, said at an all-girls elementary school in Calgary she got very little education about LGBTQ+ issues.
“I had no clue,” said the teen who runs the school’s gaystraight alliance club.
When she was teased and called “gay,” she didn’t know what it meant.
“I learned that it was an awful thing,” she said. “I was very homophobic towards myself.”
Daye-Fraser said a curriculum that doesn’t address sexual orientation and identity is breeding hate.
“Our society is working hard towards being as acceptable as possible,” she said. “We can’t make progress if we don’t teach about LGBTQ.”
Anissa Milner, 18, said that as a child growing up in Kitchener her family didn’t speak about their Indigenous heritage.
“The stigma around being Indigenous is very negative,” she said.
It wasn’t until high school that she studied Indigenous history.
“If you can’t talk about history, it will repeat itself,” she said.