Disgraced Former Associate Director Files $7.5 Million Suit Against the Peel District School Board
This would be on top of the over $400 000 she has already received
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By Igor Stravinsky (Teacher, commentator)
Poleen Grewal was appointed as an Associate Director with the Peel District School Board in August 2017. In 2019, John McNair, of McKenzie Lake Lawyers, was hired by then PDSB Director of Education Peter Joshua to conduct an investigation into Grewal after a teacher accused her of using her position at the board to help her son secure credits at a Peel high school. She was found guilty.
“We found that Grewal engaged in conduct which amounted to a conflict of interest by using her position and influence as a member of the board’s senior administration to secure benefits for her son in the PLAR process,” the report said.
The McNair report says that at Grewal’s request, her son’s assessments were done by teachers who didn’t normally conduct them. The assessments were also processed outside the normal schedule — in the case of the first two in advance and in the case of the third with an extended deadline.
“These arrangements allowed (her son) to bypass the regular PLAR process and amounted to Grewal taking advantage of her position and influence as associate director to gain personal benefit for her son,” the report said.
To get this kind of credit, a student has to “challenge” for it, said Debbie L. Kasman, an education analyst and researcher who spoke generally about the process and is not affiliated with the school board.
She said it involves a written exam and assignments to prove knowledge in the subject area. She said the process is “quite rigorous” and there aren’t many students who challenge for them.
The McNair Report concludes with this statement:
“In the result, we concluded that the whistleblower’s complaint of wrongdoing was substantiated, inasmuch as the respondent engaged in conduct that contravened the Board’s Conflict of Interest Policy and the parallel provisions of the Code of Conduct prohibiting the use of a Board position to procure personal gain for her family member, without disclosure of such conflict”.
Joshua received the report on October 3rd, 2019, and planned to dismiss her, but the whole situation was complicated.
You see, in March 2019, Grewal had taken the board and Joshua to the Human Rights Tribunal, accusing them of racism, harassment, and silencing and diminishing her equity work. During this time, Grewal was in charge of the PDSB’s anti-discrimination work, and was also the Associate Director of Instructional and Equity Support Services.
So, Joshua and Grewal had been butting heads for some time.
Back then, there was a well-organized group of activists who had been disrupting Board meetings and making allegations that the Board was systemically racist. Grewal, ever the opportunist, threw her lot in with the activists and began trying to put their “anti-racist” ideology into practice in the Board.
Joshua, a traditional liberal, pushed back, and the activists put a target on his back. His days were numbered, and Grewal’s Human Rights Case hit the pause button on her termination. Joshua, along with a few other senior administrators, were ousted in July 2020 (Joshua reportedly received $500 000 in hush money) and replaced with new director Colleen Russel-Rawlins, who was a big fan of the brand of anti-racism the activists were peddling and, initially, took no action against Grewal.
But if Russel-Rawlins was hoping the Grewal situation would just go away, she was disappointed. You see Poleen Grewal was a ruthless tyrant who wanted to ride the wave of discontent being promoted by the anti-racist activists all the way to the director’s office, where, once installed, she could run the Board as her own private fiefdom. To advance that goal, Grewal had made life a living hell for anyone who did not fall in line with her plan to make the PDSB into a bastion of critical theory bent on the destruction of “white supremacy and colonialism”. She had basically purged the board of any underling who was not 100% loyal, and replaced them with people who were. Those replacements were usually not, however, well qualified to do their jobs.
Only Grewal herself knows if she really believed in the anti-racist ideology, promoted by Ibram X. Kendi, Robin DiAngelo, Ta Nehisi Coates, et. al. which conceives of society as a hierarchy of race-based identity groups which must be dismantled by whatever means necessary. My suspicion is that she never gave a damn about any of it but could see an opportunity to grab power and took it. But I do think her often-expressed hatred of White people was probably sincere.
Under intense pressure, Russell-Rawlins put Grewal on a paid two-year leave (at a cost of over $200 000 per year) figuring she (R-R) would be gone by the time that ran out. Russell-Rawlins had her eye on the Toronto District School Board Job and did not plan to stick around Peel long. That all worked out for her as she left the PDSB for Toronto on August 5th 2021.
So now that Gewal has collected her $400 000+ in salary for doing nothing, she has filed a $7.5 million suit against the PDSB for wrongful dismissal. My guess is that this will be settled out of court for an undisclosed amount. The Board will simply do the calculation as to what the cost to litigate the case will be, then offer Grewal a similar amount. They will probably also issue a statement commending the work Grewal did in her capacity as Associate Director. The Board is still captured by Critical Theory after all.
The total amount of harm Poleen Grewal will have done to students, staff, and administrators in the PDSB is really hard to calculate. It far exceeds the dollar value associated with her leave of absence and this court case. She personally gutted the Board of a legion of veteran and experienced administrators and replaced them with inexperienced, ideologically-inspired lackeys who have run the Board into the ground.
Who is ultimately responsible for the whole fiasco that the public school system in Ontario has become? While there is plenty of blame to go around, it is ultimately at the desk of the Provincial Government where the buck stops. Doug Ford and his Education Ministry have known all this time that activists were pulling all the strings in the system and they made the crass political calculation to just let them.
So far that has worked. Ford has been elected three times.
Thanks for reading. For more on this author, read “Inclusive Education” Seems Like a No-Brainer
AND, a longform essay that examines the PDSB including the situation involving Poleen Grewal and Peter Joshua, James Pew’s essay The Peel District School Board and White Supremacy
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Thanks for update. Smart of Grewal to go through Human Rights Tribunal - a guaranteed win. Seems wherever these DEI assigned hires turn up they always leave a trail of destruction: Peel, Toronto, Waterloo, York. Remember a lot of this occurred under the watch of Stephen Lecce AND the Trustees who hire them.
The Ontario Human Rights tribunal as Jordan Peterson has said is a" hot bed of sedition". I doubt they will be helpful with any issue that differs from their woke ideology. They, like the school boards in this province are 100% woke.