School board’s ban on travel to U.S. is nonsense
He r e’s something you might expect to be bigger news: in a remarkable number of Ontario schools and daycares, the drinking water exceeds the provincial standard for lead of 10 parts per billion ( PPB). Some schools, like Thunder Bay’s St. Vincent Catholic Elementary, have mind- boggling levels: on Sept. 16, 2016, it tested at 153 parts per billion; a month earlier, at 348. Others, like Glen Ames Senior Public School in Toronto’s Beaches neighbourhood, are just over the limit at 15 PPB.
It’s an obvious cause for concern. The World Health Organization warns of “profound and permanent adverse health effects” for children, “particularly affecting the development of the brain and nervous system.” And when Colin King and some fellow Glen Ames students in the 7th and 8th grades did their own tests, they found lead levels double what had been officially reported.
The official solution, for now, is decidedly low tech: run the taps every now and again to flush the standing water from the schools’ ancient pipes. It doesn’t always work: “Of the roughly 350 schools and daycares that failed lead tests in 2016, about 100 failed the test after flushing,” the Toronto Star reported last year. And when it does work, it tends to waste a ton of water.
Enter the robotics team at Glen Ames, of which King is captain. It calls itself The Walking Lead — a reference to the vaguely zombielike effects of lead exposure. And it came up with a simple but ingenious solution: The Royal Flush. Attached to a faucet or plumbing line, it automatically flushes the system in the morning to record the coldest temperature of the clean water coming in from the mains, then tests throughout the day and flushes the system if the water gets too warm, suggesting a buildup of standing water.
“All across our research it didn’t really say how long to flush,” ex- plains team member Arion Harinarain, “so we wanted to create a device that would take out human error.”
The team claims remarkable results from its single- faucet installation at Glen Ames: a reduction from 30 PPB before school starts and five PPB at lunchtime to very nearly zero. The prototype cost around $ 500 to make, but the team thinks they can get that down to $100 using different hardware. Based on their understanding of Glen Ames’ plumbing, they think five devices would cover the whole school.
The team’s invention finished second at an Ontario First Lego League competition last month, earning an invitation to an international t ournament in t he spring, in either Detroit or San Diego. ( This isn’t regular Lego, obviously; it’s a software/ hardware robotics platform called Lego Mindstorm.) There they hope to repeat or improve on what their coach, Luke Martin, calls a “legendary season” last year: they finished second at the California tournament with a ridiculously high-tech automatic pet-feeder.
“That experience was absolutely incredible,” says Elsa Bienenstock, one of five returning members of the team. “It has helped ( to) shape the people that we are today. We call this team our second family.”
All of this would be a great story were it not for the Toronto District School Board’s ban on travel to the United States, which was implemented in March 2017 in response to President Donald Trump’s own ban. Coming up on a year later, groups are launching petitions for exemptions, including high school students hoping to attend DECA, an international competition for entrepreneurs and business ideas, and the annual International Leadership Conference of HOSA, an organization for aspiring health professionals.
“Not being able to have that opportunity, and going to the next level — the final stage of the competition — is unbelievable,” TDSB student Maisha Fahmida told CBC, describing her DECA disappointment. The Walking Lead’s petition cites the need to promote STEM disciplines i n Canada, among other factors.
On Wednesday, the TDSB will consider an amendment to the ban that would exempt “school trips related to secondary school student competitions.” The Glen Ames team obviously hopes elementary students can catch a break too, and it’s tough to see why they shouldn’t.
Mind you, it’s tough to see why the ban exists at all. “We strongly believe that our students should not be placed into ... situations of potentially being turned away at the border,” TDSB director of education John Malloy wrote in a statement explaining the new policy. School trips must comply with “essential principles” of “fairness, equity, and inclusion.”
And then they allowed already-planned trips to go ahead.
Sorry, but you can’t declare an iron- clad principle and then delay its implementation until such time as it won’t cost you any money. The motion before the TDSB on Wednesday even has the temerity to suggest exempting staff from travelling to the U. S. for professional development, leaving elementary students alone to take it on the chin even as Canada’s political and business leaders — and students from private schools and other boards — carry on in Trump’s America just as before.
Not every TDSB students had an iron- clad right to enter the United States before Trump came along: many non- citizens would always have had to apply for visas. There are only 658 TDSB students out of 246,000 — 0.3 per cent — who might be affected, according to the board. And if “fairness, equity and inclusion” are integral to all school trips, surely the TDSB has much bigger fish to fry: what percentage of their parents could hope to send their kids to a robotics competition in California?
“If everyone on the team can go, then I don’t think we’re leaving anyone out,” says team member Megan Farrow. Well, no kidding. Another, Parker Staite, questions the logic of the TDSB implementing a travel ban in response to Donald Trump implementing a travel ban. I don’t know what to tell you, kid.
Basically what we have here is a bunch of grown- ups who can’t even arrange lead- free drinking water for the children in their care denying said children important life experiences in deference to a policy that never made any sense in the first place except as political exhibitionism. It’s garbage, and it ought to be taken to the curb.