POWR Take in 20

We interviewed Ishan Acharya, a remarkable Grade 10 student at what used to be called Sir John A. Macdonald Secondary School (affectionately known as “S-JAM”). In 2022, the Waterloo Region District School Board (WRDSB) renamed the school to align with its “ commitment to Truth and Reconciliation and ensuring inclusive learning environments where all students feel safe, welcomed and respected. ” Er...

Joanna Williams is a British author and public intellectual. She began her career teaching high school English prior to an academic career that included directorship of the Centre for the Study of Higher Education. We reached out to speak with Joanna about her recent essay, “ How progressive education paves the way for the politicisation of schooling ”, which reflects work on her upcoming book We...

An education analyst with four decades of experience in public education, Debbie Kasman has a vision for reforming Ontario’s public education system. In her view, the system is in crisis and needs a firm hand to restore order. She believes that replacing Boards of Trustees with a single boss—the Minister of Education—to whom Directors of Education are directly accountable, will calm the system. De...

Alexandra (Sasha) Lysova is a mother of children in public school and a professor of criminology at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia. She immigrated to Canada to escape authoritarianism in Russia, and is alarmed by similar patterns emerging in Canada. Sasha has long been outspoken at her university about equity, diversity, and inclusion ideology. She has more recently been noticing simi...

Waterloo Region District School Board (WRDSB) quietly passed an anti-racism policy this fall. The Board claimed parent consultation via the Parent Involvement Committee (PIC) but didn’t mention that at least three of six parents opposed the policy. We describe this stealth policymaking, which includes not publicly disclosing draft policies, isolating parents in small groups, and not responding to...

Last week, we each attended a ‘town hall’ about the WRDSB strategic plan. Here we compare notes and conclude that many parents are hungry for a town hall, which these events did not even remotely resemble. Instead, parents were directed to unattended stations where they could silently read a placard and place written comments in a suggestion box. Usefully, staff and trustees were on hand and avail...

As parent members of Waterloo Region District School Board (WRDSB) Parent Involvement Council (PIC), we discuss the November 25 PIC meeting. Specifically, we (i) adopted a new code of conduct that self-imposes even more restrictions than the Board already places on parent volunteers, and (ii) modified by-laws that further restrict access of PIC members to Board staff and establish the PIC Chair as...

In this episode, Cristina and Geoff springboard off the Mia Hughes interview to get deep into the weeds about linguistic inversions versus expansions. Is “trans woman” the same as “gay marriage” or not? Is one an inversion and the other an expansion, or are they both inversions or both expansions? We go down a few rabbit holes about God’s plan for marriage, family, homosexuality, and having deep c...

In part II, we continue our discussion with journalist Mia Hughes about the impacts of gender identity ideology in schools. This includes the Waterloo Region District School Board (WRDSB) procedure AP1235 and the Safe Caring and Inclusive Schools (SCIS) survey . 1:52 The incoherent SCIS definition of gender identity: “ Gender identity is a person’s sense of being a boy/man, a girl/woman, both, nei...

Journalist Mia Hughes joins us to recap the Laurier HxA ‘debate’ with Morgane Oger on “ Gender Identity: Evidence & Impacts .” Mia wrote an excellent article summarizing her side of the debate for MLI Inside Policy . 2:34 General impressions. 4:36 The invention of gender identity. 8:00 What is a woman ? 10:14 The stealth introduction of the concept of gender identity through the law. 14:20 The lin...

In the first of many 20-minute takes, Cristina and Geoff introduce themselves and unpack a few brief but critical moments from the September 29th Waterloo Region District School Board (WRDSB) meeting . The Chair opened with a lengthy statement affirming the Board’s commitment to reconciliation, orange shirts, and Indigenous sovereignty, referring to everyone else as ‘ settlers on Turtle Island ’....