Children ‘strike’ over new sex-ed curriculum
Parents’ campaign targets Thorncliffe school
TORON TO • The playground at Toronto’s Thorncliffe Park Public School was empty and the front grounds almost deserted when school let out around 3:30 p.m. Monday. It was not, in other words, a typical day.
The school, in an area of the city that is densely populated by new Canadians, usually holds 1,350 students.
Only 130 of them were present on Monday.
The remaining 1,220 were absent, many of them kept home by their parents on the first day of a “Parents & Students on Strike: One Week No School” campaign to protest Ontario’s 2015 sexual education curriculum. The “strike” is expected to last for the rest of the week.
While not the only school to experience a spike in absences, Thorncliffe Park was perhaps the most stark example of the campaign’s impact.
Shivani Ravla’s two sons in Grades 1 and 5 were among the few in attendance. She said she is not opposed to the curriculum. “It would be tough for me to go ahead and teach it at home,” she said.
“School will teach them the proper facts and jargon and we’ll go though it in a different fashion at home when the children bring up the topic.”
Although Ravla thinks her children may still be “too young,” she believes the schools will do an effective job of educating them on these topics.
Her opinion appeared to be in the minority at Thorncliffe.
The day began with hundreds of parents gathered in front of the school holding signs with such slogans as “Let kids be kids,” and “Respect cultural and religious values.” Some were accompanied by their children.
They continued their protest at Premier Kathleen Wynne’s constituency office a short distance away before heading to the provincial legislature at Queen’s Park.
Under the curriculum changes, Grade 3 students will learn about same-sex relationships; youngsters in Grades 4 and up will learn more about the dangers of online bullying; and the perils of sexting will be covered in Grade 7.
Lessons about puberty will move from Grade 5 to Grade 4, while masturbation and “gender expression” are mentioned in the Grade 6 curriculum. Anal sex is part of the Grade 7 curriculum, in the context of choosing to abstain from or delay certain activities in order to avoid sexually transmitted infections. The curriculum had not been updated since 1998.
Some opponents of the curriculum say the material is not age-appropriate, while others insist children should not be taught about same-sex relationships and different gender identities at all, while still others wrote on the Fa- cebook group’s page that the curriculum is full of “deviant sexual practices” and amounts to “child abuse.”
The Facebook group organizing the strike offers a letter template for parents to give to their children’s respective schools that states the curriculum contains “age-inappropriate content” that does not align with the “principles and beliefs” of families. The letter also states that parents be- lieve it is their responsibility to teach these values to their children, in addition to having complete control over when the topic is first introduced.
Education Minister Liz Sandals said she was disappointed that some parents have pulled their children out of school, but vowed the curriculum would be in place by September.