Education Minister Stephen Lecce of Peel School District, the second-largest in Ontario, Canada, had a crisis on his hands.
The Black parents and children of Ontario’s “unholy mess” of controversy had suffered long enough, and now it was time for a very heated reckoning.
After parents and community activists - fed up with the system’s deep racism and disturbing incompetence of leadership - stormed a November 2019 Peel School Board session ready to fight, the humiliated Minister Leece launched an investigation.
From page one to forty-two, this is what the final report confirmed.
Black students were “grossly over-represented in suspensions… leading to [unnecessary in-school] ARRESTS and stigmatization” of children as young as FOUR years old.
Teachers and guidance counselors unquestioningly perceived them as troublesome, lacking in academic potential, and deserving of harsher punishment.
Even the academic advisement given directly to Black parents involved blatant discrimination as preferential treatment and resources went to white families.
The Star newspaper columnist Royson James said it best: “[Leece] could not have anticipated the breadth, depth and malignancy of the rot.”
Now that the truth is out, these vindicated parents are pushing to IMMEDIATELY dismantle the systems that allowed such despicable anti-Black sentiments to flourish in an educational environment.
These are the kinds of urgent clashes we need to protect our children and their future.