Success: The Toronto School Board takes Sex Workers’ Day off its calendar of significant days for our kids

Every year, the Toronto District School Board publishes a Days of Significance Calendar for students. It includes the holidays of different religions and various UN mandated observances, such as the International Day of Families (May 15). 

The Board also included the International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers on the Calendar.

Sex Workers’ Day is celebrated by prostitutes, strippers, porn actors, dominatrixes and, until this year, by the Toronto District School Board. The day’s purpose is to “advocate for removal of all laws that criminalize sex work” and to remove all negative stigma so that prostitution becomes just one more career path.

Last March, I wrote a letter to the Board suggesting that they might want to rethink their endorsement of this day. After all, a school board must be politically neutral; it shouldn’t be endorsing anyone’s politics – not to mention that a school board really shouldn’t be helping to make prostitution a respectable career for young people.

I followed up with a couple more emails, then a couple phone calls and was at last assured that the appropriate committee would look into it. And then I heard nothing.

Ad campaign by a sex workers organization
to promote prostitution as a career choice

So this fall I started sending emails again. An email to Donna Quan, the new Director of Education, finally produced a two-line reply (not from Ms Quan herself): The sex workers day had been taken off the Days of Significance Calendar, and the Calendar itself had been taken off the public website.

In other words: first, the Board’s noticed it’s not a good idea to endorse prostitution as a career path, and second, annoying parents can no longer check what the Board thinks is worth promoting. Now only teachers and school board staff get to look at the Days of Significance Calendar.

What might be on the Calendar? Well the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) has produced a Days of Significance Calendar for schools. OISE trains our most senior educators and many teachers, and unfortunately, OISE has become a fundamentalist institution that believes the purpose of schools is to indoctrinate kids into far left politics.

OISE thinks kids ought to be taught to observe the birthday of the founder of the Communist Party of Canada, that kids need to celebrate the Quebec students who closed down their schools to protest against tuition fees becoming almost as high as their cell phone bills, and that kids should should learn that Stephen Harper is a war criminal and Che Guevara is a martyr to social justice. 

To promote their political perspective, OISE has created its own Calendar. The Calendar includes many inoffensive  dates such as Tommy Douglas's birthday, but the overall slant is pure lunatic left.

To date, the Elementary Teachers’ Federation of Ontario – the most radical and politicized of our teacher unions – has endorsed this Calendar (see here).

Will the Toronto Board adopt it, too? I doubt it. Many sane people work for the Toronto Board. But who knows? Unless a teacher rats them out, the Board can do all sorts of strange things without parents knowing.

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Read my earlier, more detailed posting about the Board’s promotion of International Sex Workers’ Day here.