Tomorrow the province will hear from students all over, including those in our backyard.
According to Ecole Secondaire Catholique Cite des Jeunes Student Fiona Anderson, Thursday offers students all over Ontario the chance to stand together against what are some extremely unfair decisions recently made by the Ford government.
The Ford government recently announced a new vision for education by proposing an increase to high school class sizes as well as a new sex-ed curriculum that returns to teaching gender identity and consent in schools, all set to begin in the fall of this year.
Included also in these education changes are changes to the hiring process for teachers and the banning of cellphones from classrooms.
Anderson says their protest will be against larger class sizes, fewer teachers, and a requirement to pass four online courses to graduate from high school.
She says students from Cite will be heading out a little earlier than the proposed 1:15pm walkout;
“We’re actually going to be going a little bit earlier, we are going to be going out around quarter to 11 (10:45am) just to accommodate the activities going on in the afternoon.”
Anderson says students at Kapuskasing District High School are also planning to protest as well Thursday, as part of 800 schools and over 5,000 students set to do so across Ontario.
Although seeing the high number of participants excites Anderson, she says it is much more important to small communities such as Kapuskasing that they are fully involved on the day, considering that they are staring down the loss of courses and programs.
She says small communities such as ours will suffer more from these cuts than any Toronto school will.
“We’re probably the ones who are going to suffer the most from this, towns like ours, if you look at Hearst if you look at Cochrane, they don’t have enough students to meet all those quotas, so its very very important that alot of people participate because that’s the only way your going to get heard.”
Anderson also was able to reach out to Mayor Dave Plourde who responded in kind with a letter of support for all of the protesting students and also local MPP Guy Bourgouin’s office, who will be represented by Constituency Assistant at Legislative Assembly of Ontario Emilie Lemieux on Thursday.
If any student protesting would like to share their pictures and videos to social media, Anderson says send them to @cite_saysno which is their official Instagram page.
