Parents push for professionalism at the Halton school board

While the true colours of HDSB Education Director Curtis Ennis are shining through brightly

Kayla Lemieux (Nick Kozak for NY Post)

By

James Pew

There have been a few important updates to the Halton District School Board (HDSB) file since I last wrote about it. First off, on February 17th the NY Post made the not-so-shocking discovery that the gigantic breasts that have caused an international stir are in fact fake.

Since that revelation, Kayla Lemieux, who told reporters that his gigantic breasts were real in spite of the fact he was photographed walking around without them, looking like a regular dude, has been placed on administrative leave.

Dude looks nothing like a lady! (Nick Kozak for NY Post)

On February 28, in a promising development, a joint statement was released by three local MPPs: Stephen Crawford, Natalie Pierre and Effie Triantafilopoulos who have chosen to stand with students, parents and teachers in demanding professional standards and better leadership from the Halton District School Board. Read the full letter here. 

And on March 1st, HDSB had a meeting where parents and some trustees reiterated their concerns and asked for clarification on the board's proposed professionalism policy. The remainder of today’s post deals with that meeting.

A Director with no direction

The inability of HDSB Education Director, Curtis Ennis, to deal effectively with the situation that should have been handled with one conversation back in September, has taken on new dimensions of the unacceptable and insulting.  As seen on Wednesday at the HDSB’s latest public meeting when the Directors' semi-muted and partially cloaked, giant-sized ego and disdain for parents, became apparent to anyone paying attention.

Ennis’s lack of respect for parents, and his prioritization of his own ego - which could never let those lowly unwashed parents correct him on what he repeatedly reminds them he has decades of experience doing - has for the most part been revealed to parents who have known since the Z-Cup Bandit debacle began, that Ennis does not put students first.  He is a servant to the woke orthodoxy - the thing responsible for his ascendence to the powerful Education Directors chair. His priorities have been made clear.

It is a desecration of Canadian values that this situation has been allowed to drag on for seven months. That Canada has been made into an international joke. And that students have had to endure this outrageous breach of decency which clearly impacted their education in a negative way - how could it not? All of this because of one man, Curtis Ennis - an incompetent idiot with an out-of-control ego. In my last HDSB post, I called Ennis a living example of the Peter Principal, but after Wednesday’s meeting I think it might also be true that Ennis fits the profile of a hapless participant in a Dunning-Kruger experiment who is unaware that everyone knows he is in way over his head. 

Another idiot standing beside Ennis in the Dunning-Kruger test for most incompetent halfwit, is Education Minister Stephen Lecce. Just like Ennis, Lecce has had since September to step in and fix the problem - the way a strong and capable leader would. I’m not entirely sure why, but it seems that the identity-obsessed policies around Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion attract weaklings and dummies. At best they are “company men,” apparatchiks, unthinking cogs within a bloated administrative machinery, and utterly ineffective fools.

However, parents are kicking ass! Parents groups, like the HDSB group Students First Ontario, seem to have seized partial control of the battlefield. I say this because the HDSB is now reacting to the demands of parents. When parent groups organize, and their voices become unified under a common purpose, the Director and the board have no choice but to respond to them. For now, this is one of the goals across the country - get these woke school boards responding and reacting to parents.

The woke have controlled the scenario for too long. When parents form cohesive units and exert pressure on boards, it reminds those boards who they are working for. That so many school administrators, trustees, and directors of education can barely contain their hatred for parents has inspired the organized scrutiny and pushback against school boards even more.

Woke Watch Canada’s School Board Investigation initiative is another mechanism whereby boards are being examined, scrutinized and exposed. We are deliberately sending a message to trustees, administrators, and directors of education, that we are watching them. We will jump on and expose every little misstep these woke bureaucrats make. In doing this we are helping to turn the table from one where no one paid attention to woke actors inside school boards who were free to operationalize as much wokeism into the school system as they wished, to a situation where new woke shenanigans will be exposed and blocked, and older policies will be exposed and challenged as the ideological Trojan Horses they are.

But Woke Watch Canada - as much as we all love and support it - is just one organization. There is ample woke push back coming from many different places - the Canadian anti-woke movement is growing rapidly! Over the coming days and weeks I will be examining some of the things that parents groups are doing to oppose wokeism in K-12 schools. 

Students First Ontario is professional, neutral and diplomatic in their approach. They don’t use the word “woke” anywhere in their correspondence to parents and the community. They are not extreme, or polarizing. They are reasonable, like most Canadians. In order to unite as many parents as possible, they keep their message both simple and universally appealing. They put students first and engage loudly and deliberately in the democratic process to ensure student need and safety is indeed put first.

On March 2nd I received an email from Students First Ontario regarding the previous evenings unexceptional board meeting - where parents concerns were yet again, inadequately addressed:

“The Board spent almost an hour circling the topic of professionalism policy last night!

Several Trustees attempted to define the root of the issue to understand exactly what barriers were preventing immediate implementation - but to no avail.

Between Director Curtis Ennis and Superintendent of HR, Sari Taha the Board found itself caught in a web of conflicting and confusing policies, statutory freezes, objectives, directives and companion procedures.

The evening ended with no additional clarity on next steps or timing of when a detailed procedure would be in place.”

Yesterday, in the National Post,  Adrian Humphrey reported on the HDSB meeting. From that report:

“Questions from several trustees to Curtis Ennis, director of education, and Sari Taha, superintendent of education, revealed they share the frustration.

Trustee Naveed Ahmed questioned the effectiveness of the draft policy and the community’s support for it or the survey the board put in place to receive feedback.

‘We have overwhelming evidence that the community, or the stakeholders, are not supporting the survey, or the professional policy draft as it is circulated,’ Ahmed said.

‘So right now, the community sees us as not being up to the job, just dragging our feet. Are we doing anything to address this?’”

The shocking level of tone-deafness and conceit shown by Director Ennis in his response to Trustee Naveed Ahmed is hard to stomach. Superintendent Sari Taha is no better.  View the video at your own discretion. The frustrating HDSB professionalism policy discussion can be seen here. 

Thankfully, other trustees also pressed Ennis. From the National Post:

“Trustee Carole Baxter asked if the policy will ‘impose requirements on staff that are not already in the existing policies and procedures that are referenced in the draft policy?’

Taha said ‘it is possible … and possible it may not’.”

Trustee Xin Yi Zhang read a section of the Education Act dealing with “students, parents or guardians, teachers, staff and community members (who) have the right to be safe and feel safe, in their school community.” And Board vice-chair Tanya Rocha asked: “What are we currently doing today, or what can be done, to address situation where staff members are unprofessional?”

Lynn Petruskavich is one of the parents who delegated to the board on Wednesday. In an interview with Greg Brady yesterday on 640 Toronto AM, she described the meeting as having some positive aspects that she associated with the democratic process. Most notably was that for the first time some trustees began speaking out and questioning Ennis on the details of the proposed professionalism policy.

Commenting on the ordeal that students and parents have endured since September, Lynn explained that it still is not clear why the board seems to have taken the position that the situation involving Lemieux is somehow a victory for human rights, and that this teacher's gender expression should somehow be celebrated through inclusion.

Generously, Lynn expresses sympathy for the shop teacher who she feels has also been exploited by the board in their ideological quest for social justice.

Lynn commenting on the boards apparent confusion over rights, regulations,  policies and procedures:

“That is what we saw in the meeting last night, a sort of incoherent circular reasoning. We need a new policy but we have an old policy…we need new procedures, but wait, we don’t. You know, it was watching an incoherence of word salad where it doesn’t seem like there is any logic following, and I think that  creates the frustration for people because you are not getting anywhere…we keep going around and around in circles. If you felt dizzy while watching that meeting, that would explain why.”

The efforts of parent delegates and the parents group Students First Ontario seem to have won over some support of a few trustees. When Ennis is put in a position where he must explain himself, both to parents and then trustees, we know the tables are turning. Ennis is being reminded that he must answer to the community - although he remains oblivious, perhaps deliberately, even while other trustees begin to hear parents loud and clear. 

It is fascinating, albeit frustrating, to watch this process of “parent awakening” unfold. It is long. It is filled with boring meetings and minutiae intrinsic to the artifacts of bureaucracy. But we have all learned that it is bureaucracy and those boring processes (which until recently very few parents wanted anything to do with) that are at the heart of our vulnerability. The illiberal subversion of  Canada’s education system - the history of radical activists who over decades slowly captured the education ministry, education schools, and the school boards/administration - will no longer proceed without opposition. Blocking, slowing down, and reversing the damage done by decades of activist agitators who worked in the shadows and gained entrance to the bureaucracies of our public institutions is now a big part of the ongoing counter struggle.

In spite of our gains, we must remain vigilant. We must never again take our eyes off the woke activists. We must no longer give any ground…not one inch.

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Thanks for reading. For more from this author read The term "White Supremacy" is a derogatory reference to Canada's majority population

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