Renaming schools in Ontario—a waste of time and money

From the Fraser Institute

It appears that Toronto District School Board (TDSB) trustees have too much time on their hands. That’s the only logical explanation for their bizarre plan to rename three TDSB schools, which bear the names of Canada’s first prime minister, Sir John A. Macdonald, British politician Henry Dundas and Egerton Ryerson, founder of public education in Ontario.

According to a new TDSB report, the schools must be renamed because of the “potential impact that these names may have on students and staff based on colonial history, anti-indigenous racism, and their connection to systems of oppression.”

Now, it’s true that each of these men did things that fall short of 21st century standards (as did most 19th century politicians). However, they also made many positive contributions. Canada probably wouldn’t exist if John A. Macdonald hadn’t been involved in the constitutional conferences that led to Confederation. More than anyone else, he skillfully bridged the divide between British Protestants and French Catholics. But for a variety of assigned sins typical to a politician of his era, he must be cancelled.

Henry Dundas supported William Wilberforce’s efforts to abolish slavery throughout the British Empire, but believed a more moderate approach had a higher chance of success. As a result, he added the word “gradual” to Wilberforce’s abolition motion—an unforgivable offense according to today’s critics—even though the motion passed with a vote of 230-85 in the British House of Commons.

Egerton Ryerson played a key role in the founding of Ontario’s public education system and strongly pushed for free schools. He recognized the importance of providing an education to students from disadvantaged backgrounds, something that was unlikely to happen if parents couldn’t afford to send their children to school. And while Ryerson was not directly involved in creating Canada’s residential school system, his advocacy for a school system for Indigenous students has drawn the wrath of critics today.

Knowing these facts from centuries ago, it strains credulity that these three names would so traumatize students and staff that they must be scrubbed from school buildings. Despite their flaws, Macdonald, Dundas and Ryerson have achievements worth remembering. Instead of trying to erase Canadian history, the TDSB should educate students about it.

Unfortunately, that’s hard to do when Ontario teachers are given vague and confusing curriculum guides with limited Canadian history content. Instead of a content-rich approach that builds knowledge sequentially from year-to-year, Ontario’s curriculum guides focus on broad themes such as “cooperation and conflict” and jump from one historical era to another. No wonder there is such widespread ignorance about Canadian history.

On a more practical level, renaming schools costs money. Officials with the nearby Thames Valley District School Board, which is undergoing its own renaming process, estimate it costs at least $30,000 to $40,000 to rename a school. This is money that could be spent better on buying textbooks and providing other academic resources to students. And this price tag excludes the huge opportunity cost of the renaming process. It takes considerable staff time to create naming committees, conduct historical research, survey public opinion and write reports. Time spent on the school renaming process is time not being spent on more important educational initiatives.

Interestingly, the TDSB report that recommends renaming these three schools has six authors (all TDSB employees) with job titles ranging from “Associate Director, Learning Transformation and Equity” to “Associate Director, Modernization and Strategic Resource Alignment.” The word salad in these job titles tells us everything we need to know about the make-work nature of these positions. One wonders how many “Learning Transformation and Equity” directors the TDSB would need if it dropped its obsession with woke ideology and focused instead on academic basics. Given the significant decline in Ontario’s reading and math scores over the last 20 years, TDSB trustees—and trustees in other Ontario school boards—would do well to reexamine their priorities.

Egerton Ryerson probably never dreamed that the public school system he helped create would veer so far from its original course. Before rushing to scrub the names of Ryerson and his colleagues from school buildings, TDSB trustees should take a close look at what’s happening inside those buildings.

In the end, the quality of education students receive inside a school is much more important than the name on the building. Too bad TDSB trustees don’t realize that.

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Alberta poll shows strong resistance to pornographic material in school libraries

Published on June 23, 2025

Todayville

From LifeSiteNews

By Clare Marie Merkowsky

A government survey revealed strong public support, particularly among parents, for restricting or banning sexually explicit books.

Albertans are largely opposed to their children viewing pornography in school libraries, according to government polling.

In a June 20 press release, the Government of Alberta announced that their public engagement survey, launched after the discovery of sexually explicit books in school libraries, found that Albertans strongly support removing or limiting such content.

“Parents, educators and Albertans in general want action to ensure children don’t have access to age-inappropriate materials in school libraries,” Demetrios Nicolaides, Minister of Education and Childcare, said.

“We will use this valuable input to guide the creation of a province-wide standard to ensure the policy reflects the priorities and values of Albertans,” he continued.

READ: Support for traditional family values surges in Alberta

The survey, conducted between May 28 to June 6, received nearly 80,000 responses, revealing a widespread interest in the issue.

While 61 percent of respondents said that they had never previously been concerned about children viewing sexually explicit content in libraries, most were opposed to young children viewing it. 34 percent said children should never be able to access sexually explicit content in school libraries, while 23 percent believed it should be restricted to those aged 15 and up.

Similarly, 44 percent of parents of school-aged children were supportive of government regulations to control content in school libraries. Additionally, 62 percent of respondents either agreed or strongly agreed that “parents and guardians should play a role in reporting or challenging the availability of materials with sexually explicit content in school libraries.”

READ: Alberta Conservatives seeking to ban sexually graphic books from school libraries

At the time, Nicolaides revealed that it was “extremely concerning” to discover that sexually explicit books were available in school libraries.

The books in question, found at multiple school locations, are Gender Queer, a graphic novel by Maia Kobabe; Flamer, a graphic novel by Mike Curato; Blankets, a graphic novel by Craig Thompson; and Fun Home, a graphic novel by Alison Bechdel.

David Clinton

Why Are Ontario’s Public Schools So Violent?

Published on June 19, 2025

Todayville

David Clinton

Ontario’s Auditor General just released a performance audit on the Toronto District School Board. I’m sure it’ll surprise exactly no one that “financial and capital resources are not consistently allocated in the most cost-effective or efficient way” or that “The effective management of operations was not always being measured and assessed for internal decision-making”.

And there was plenty of institutional chaos:

“Between 2017/18 and 2022/23…about 38% of TDSB schools did not report conducting the minimum number of fire drills required by the Ontario Fire Code annually, and about 31% of TDSB schools did not report conducting the minimum number of lockdown drills required by TDSB policy annually. The TDSB does not have an effective process to ensure the required number of drills are performed by each school, each year, or that they are performed in accordance with TDSB policy when performed.”

What else would you expect from a massive government bureaucracy that employs 40,000 people, spends $3.6 billion annually and – based on many of the highlighted items on their website – is laser-focused on pretty much anything besides education?

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What you might not have seen coming was that around half of the report centered on in-school violence. To be sure, we’re told that there were only 407 violent events reported to the board during the 2022/2023 school year – which is a rate of around 17 events for every 10,000 students. 17:10,000 doesn’t exactly sound like an environment that’s spiraling out of control.

There was a caveat:

“Due to input errors by principals, the TDSB underreported the number of violent incidents that occurred between 2017/18 to 2021/22 to the Ministry by about 9%.”

Ok. But we’re still nowhere near Mad Max levels of violence. So what’s attracting so much of the auditor’s attention? Perhaps it’s got something to do with a couple of recent surveys whose results don’t quite match the board’s own records. Here’s how the audit describes the first of those:

“The 2022/23 TDSB Student and Parent Census was responded to by over 138,000 students, parents, guardians and caregivers. It showed that 23% of students in Grades 4 to 12 that responded to the survey said they were physically bullied (e.g., grabbed, shoved, punched, kicked, tripped, spat at), and about 71% stated they were verbally bullied (e.g., sworn at, threatened, insulted, teased, put down, called names, made fun of). Further, about 14% of student respondents indicated they had been cyberbullied. TDSB’s central tracking of all bullying incidents is much lower than this, suggesting that they are not centrally capturing a large number of bullying incidents that are occurring.”

“23% of students in Grades 4 to 12 that responded to the survey said they were physically bullied”. That’s not a great fit with that 17:10,000 ratio, even if you add the 9 percent of underreported incidents. And bear in mind that these students and their families were willing to discuss their experiences in a survey run by the school board itself, so it’s not like they’re hard to find.

But that’s not the worst of it. The Elementary Teachers’ Federation of Ontario (ETFO) ran their own survey in 2023. They wanted to hear about their members’ experiences with workplace violence. Here, quoting from the audit report, is what TDSB respondents told them:

42% had experienced physical force against themselves in 2022/23;
18% had experienced more than 10 of these physical force incidents in 2022/23;
81% indicated the number of violent incidents increased since they started working;
about 77% responded that violence was a growing problem at their school;
about 29% indicated they had suffered a physical injury;
57% had suffered a psychological injury/illness (such as mental stress, psychological or emotional harm) as a result of workplace violence against them; and
about 85% indicated that violence at their school made teaching and working with students more difficult.

29 percent of teachers suffered a physical injury due to workplace violence. That’s elementary school teachers we’re talking about.

For perspective, even accounting for the 9 percent underreporting, the TDSB was aware of events impacting less than a quarter of a percentage point of their students (and apparently didn’t report any violence against teachers). But by their own accounts, 23 percent of all students and 42 percent of elementary teachers have suffered attacks. Are board officials willfully ignoring this stuff?

And if only there was some way to address violence and other criminal activities on school property. Perhaps – and I’m just spitballing here – there could even be people working in schools whose job it would be to (what’s the word I’m looking for?) police crime.

On a completely unrelated note, back in November, 2017, the Toronto District School Board voted 18-3 to permanently end their School Resource Officer (SRO) program. Since then, police officers have been unwelcome on board property.

To be sure, the TDSB has “accepted” all 18 of the report’s recommendations. But talk is cheap. Who’s to say that commitment won’t play out the same way we’ve seen with their fire drill compliance.

Can you spell “class action lawsuit”?

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