Student protest of sex-ed rollback snowballs with thousands expected to join walkout, including in Peterborough//
Thousands of students to protest sex-ed rollback
Rayne Fisher-Quann used to be a teen whose activism largely amounted to tweeting from the comfort of her couch.
Now, the 17-year-old is a driving force behind the provincewide high school walkouts scheduled for Friday to protest the repeal of the 2015 sex-ed curriculum and demand better Indigenous education.
“What we really want is to open up a conversation,” said the Grade 12 student from North York. “We want to talk and we want to have our voices heard.”
About 75 schools — an estimated 38,000 students — in cities such as Toronto, Ottawa, London, Kitchener and Peterborough have said they will participate in the walkout, making it among the largest student actions in recent years. Some elementary schools are also taking part.
Although the main day of action is on Friday, some students walked out Thursday because it conflicted with school events, or a professional activity day.
“We are students fighting for our human right to proper education, especially for younger students,” said Notre Dame student Flora Nwakobi, 16. “At the end of the day, what affects one student affects us all.”
At Queen’s Park, Education Minister Lisa Thompson said she hopes students become engaged with the public consultations that the government will begin rolling out next week, on a new sexual education curriculum and other issues.
“I hope on Friday they’re talking about and looking forward to the consultation that we are embarking on, because we want to make sure every student in Ontario has an opportunity to put their best foot forward,” said Thompson.
“And I encourage all of them to exercise their voice in the consultation as well.”
Liberal MPP and former education minister Mitzie Hunter said the walkouts are being staged because students “deserve to have the best curriculum available to them, and it’s irresponsible of this government to deny them that.”
Rayne said that as the daughter of educators — her father is a Grade 1 teacher and her mother is a college professor of early childhood education — she was always encouraged to think critically.
By the time she started high school, she had an understanding of “systemic oppression,” recalls English teacher David Regan, who was the staff adviser for the school newspaper, where Rayne wrote about violence against women and rape culture.
And she was part of an ad hoc committee to change the school’s dress code, which it argued was racist and sexist because it prohibited wearing hair picks and clothing that was strapless or exposed the midriff.
“She has a really sophisticated grasp of systemic oppression,” said Regan. “She has the capacity to articulate that understanding clearly, passionately and reasonably.”
Rayne said she has long engaged in “casual activism,” describing herself as “the kind of person who attends rallies and protests, and tweets about the issues from my couch, but never really does anything.”
That changed this summer, when news broke that the Progressive Conservatives were repealing the 2015 health and physical education curriculum for elementary students, and replacing it with material used between 1998 and 2014 that doesn’t specifically address issues such as gender identity, consent and same-sex relationships.
Although high school students continue to learn the updated 2015 curriculum Rayne felt compelled to do something because “everyone should have a stake in this.”
Her resolve deepened later that day when a man on the street catcalled her and she remembered how difficult it was for her younger sister when she came out as gay in middle school.
“I looked through Facebook and nobody else was doing anything … I jumped right in.”
Rayne says she’s standing up for this issue because scrapping the modern curriculum could be “a matter of life and death.”