Parent’s Farewell Letter to Ottawa Public School

And evidence for the Ottawa-Carleton District School Board's abject failure to uphold parental rights.

Photo by Jan Tinneberg on Unsplash

Hi [school principal],

I hope all is well.

I am sending out this email, as a belated farewell note, in which I highlight the reasons we elected to change schools for our child during the middle of the school year.

It started when our Grade 4 teacher planned to present a lesson from https://www.glsen.org/. In the lesson, grade 4 students are told to "reflect on their own gender" and that "all children can decide for themselves what they like and what they want to be when they grow up". The lesson also talks about allyship, cis-privilege and activism among other things. I was also aware some schools are starting to survey students about their sexual identities, and in some cases presenting students with highly inappropriate and borderline sexually explicit material in the form of books.

As the parents, we sent you a letter asking to exempt our child from gender ideology, sexual surveys, and the like.

You refused.

We clarified the scope of our exemption request. We made it clear that it concerns material that falls outside of the Ontario Grade 4 curriculum.

You refused.

We asked that you point us to where lessons like these are mentioned in the Ontario grade 4 curriculum.

We received no answer.

We requested you, or the teacher, to inform us prior to administering such material in the classroom, so we may opt to not send our child to school that day.

You refused to work with us on this.

We raised our concerns with the Superintendent. 

All your stances were upheld and we were told that such lessons are "woven into the curriculum" and there is nothing that can be done for us.

It was frustrating for us parents to not see the slightest gesture of goodwill and understanding on your side. You did not make any compromises, and you were hell bent on having it your way. Not even a willingness to be transparent with us about what is being taught to our child in your school, which we fund through our tax dollars. We have the right to know; this is a non-debatable parental right. The right of parents to direct, and to be fully informed about, all aspects of their children’s education is entrenched in international law, Canadian constitutional law and provincial law. See references [1] [2] [3].

Your insistence on excluding us, the parents who care the most about the child, was quite astonishing. This has quickly eroded trust in you and in the institution that you represent. You simply cannot educate if you deliberately exclude parents and don't respect their beliefs. 

You (and institution) incessantly sloganeer about inclusivity, but have failed to respect the faith and values of those who disagree with you, even when the requests are objectively moderate and represent no undue hardship on your side. I have yet to see a molecule of inclusiveness and tolerance on your end, because all I have seen so far points to the lack thereof. You quite disrespected our Islamic faith and tradition when you plan on teaching such highly questionable and inappropriate material without our explicit consent. 

You even refused to exempt our child from sexual identity surveys. Did you really think I was going to let you probe if my 9 year old child is into boys or girls?! Could it be possible that you are proactively planting seeds of doubt and confusion in innocent children whose parents have entrusted you with them, in hope of them breaking out of social norms? This is a genuine and honest question by the way; no sarcasm.

The way we have been treated left no room for an equilibrium, as our hands were tied and we were not listened to. I know parents, from that very classroom and from other schools as well, who are in similar situations and they're not sure how to handle it. I hear stories about families who recently left the country and others who are contemplating. The last one I met was an Uber driver, who told me it was his last 3 weeks in Canada. He's moving back to Egypt for the sake of his kids. I have a good friend of mine, originally not from Canada, who made the hard decision to send his kids back home for elementary education. Everyone is trying to save their children from school like yours. Given Canada's history with children, one would think a public servant nowadays would exercise the utmost level of transparency and caution when it comes to the education of children that do not belong to them.

Our last request to you lowered the bar to the bare minimum. All you literally had to do is be transparent with us. Just inform us! That I guess was antithetical to your unstated mission statement.

Allow me to borrow your institution's lexicon for a moment. 

You are the white and we are the non-whites. 

You are the majority and we are the visible minority. 

You are the resident, and we are the landed immigrants. 

Would you say the way you treated us is coherent with the liberal and progressive values that your institution proclaims? OCDSB has no shortage of material on understanding, inclusivity, anti-racism and anti-oppression. Or is that conditioned on having carbon-copy opinions?

I shall reiterate that we respect everyone, and we teach our child to do the same. We are dedicated and firm pluralists: we believe that people with different and even contradicting views can peacefully coexist and live in harmony in the same society/neighborhoods/institutions.

That is what multicultural Canada stands for. It means we respect and even defend your right to hold your own values and live by them. It means not we shall abandon our values and adopt yours because you think yours are superior. It means not you are free to program our child with your morals during our absence. We did not choose to live in this country so that a bureaucrat and employee of the state gets to indoctrinate our children, into degeneracy, against our will.

Our child is now in a Catholic school, where so far our Islamic faith is respected, and we, the parents, are listened to.

References

[1] | The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, G.A. Res. 217 A (III), U.N. Doc. A/810 (1948) states in Article 26(3):

Parents have a prior right to choose the kind of education that shall be given to their children.

[2] | The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, 999 U.N.T.S. 171, to which Canada is a signatory, states in Article 18(4):

The States Parties to the present Covenant undertake to have respect for the liberty of parents and, when applicable, legal guardians to ensure the religious and moral education of their children in conformity with their own convictions.

[3] | The Supreme Court of Canada in Loyola High School v. Quebec (Attorney General), 2015 SCC 12(paragraph 65):
It affirmed that Article 18(4) of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights is applicable in Canada. Parents, religious or otherwise, have the constitutional right under s. 2(a) of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms to determine all aspects of their children’s education, including the moral education of their children. Like all rights, parental rights are subject to reasonable limits. For example, parents do not enjoy a constitutional right to require the public school curriculum to align with the cultural, moral, and religious values they desire to pass down to their children.2 Rather, the right to determine all aspects of a child’s education manifests itself in the right to school choice and the right to be informed.

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Thanks for reading. For more letters from parents to woke schools read, School Stonewalls Parent Concerned with Gender Ideology

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