TORONTO – The TCDSB Student Achievement and Well being, Catholic Education and Human Resources Committee received some annual reports “for the information of the Board of Trustees,” Thursday evening at 7:00 PM. The Committee’s title is a mouthful. The reports, not so much. They are reminiscent of a textbook critique and criticism of Ontario’s failing “progressive” educational system (woke of the era) from three generations ago: So Little for the Mind, 1953, by Hilda Neatby. 

The second of those reports, Communication and Community Engagement, should cause trustees concern. This is an election year; and this is a Catholic school board. To make things clear, the Board attracts about $1.5 billion annually because the Constitution guarantees to Catholics their own ‘publicly funded’ educational system.

For further clarity, that initially meant Catholic municipal ratepayers could “direct their [residential property] taxes” to pay for their own education. Unless a property owner specifically asked to do so, those taxes by default automatically went to the “Public” system.

A qualified (baptized, certified) Catholic may choose to subscribe to the Catholic system and everything that it represents. Nothing compels Catholics to do so, if they do not want the Catholic education for their children. If they are indifferent, or opposed, to Catholic values, they indicate a “redirect” of their taxes to the other board. It cannot happen in a reverse situation, if a parent is not a Catholic – he/she already enjoys the alternative.

The reasons are as legal as they are logical. As a Catholic, one may exercise Constitutional denominational rights. There is no additional cost to the Dissident or non-Catholic. Freedom of religion in the Constitutional framework carries no additional financial burden.

For Catholic school trustees, administrators and teachers, the burden is the fulfilment of the obligation to maintain and promote the Catholicity of the system. For Catholic parents, they enjoy the right to re-enforce the trilogy of school-home-church that underpins the ethics and values peculiar to their faith – right or wrong.

Imagine the validity of a Communications and Community Engagement strategy of the Board if it were to exclude one of the other two partners. This one does. Of the 75 Learning Opportunities and Cultural Events listed in the Appendix A, not a single one involved a parish, local pastor or the Diocese. TCDSB is Catholic school board.

Yet, thirty-five of the seventy-five engagements (47%), directly or indirectly, involved three groups: African Canadian, Aboriginal First Nations and Equity. The report does not say how many participated. Nor does it indicate how any of the 75 brought, or enhanced, value to the system. Nor indeed was there an indication of a monitoring process to ensure “registrants” stayed until the end. How will the trustees on the Committee judge efficacy?

Taken together, as a collective, personnel and students at the TCDSB hover around the 100,000-person mark – not including parents. It cannot be too much to ask.

The Report is “more forthcoming” with numbers in comparing social media impressions and likes to illustrate the Communications Department’s efforts in enhancing TCDSB’ reputation etc. They have a long way to go. It is more of a tawdry exercise in fatuous self-indulgence. For instance, without identifying a starting point, they crow about the 52% increase in positive comments in the press and media regarding the Secretary Director, and the 30 stories they spun (only half were apparently timely enough to be covered) to the media.

Obviously, they avoid reading the Corriere Canadese, the only lay media/press critic whose followers are Catholic.

Maybe with good reason. We do not see value in disseminating hate-filled images or spouting the following pontification in their workshops for educators: “…the current social, economic and political system have been grounded in systemic and institutionalized racism […] the system works to target Blacks and particularly Black males for differentiated and unequal treatment in the education system, the labour market, the criminal justice system, housing and the media (the web of anti-Black racism) to name a few.”

Naively perhaps, we thought Catholicism, in its essence and through its rites, aims at precisely the elimination of such barriers. How can the ‘system’ survive if trustees and administrators leave out a foundational element of the trilogy, even as they erode the right of parents and family, another of the three partners?

It is an election year. Woke administrators and trustees exclude catholics in their own institutions.