Each month we round up dress code (and dress code-adjacent) stories that we’ve encountered, or that we’ve been thinking about. (Revisit back issues from June, May, and April.) Please send us suggestions!
Give Doug Ford credit: he and his enablers took office here in Ontario at the end of June and have been tirelessly setting fires ever since. Imagine what he could accomplish if someone told him he’s supposed to be a Premier and not a pyromaniac!
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Almost 500 Ontario teachers have pledged to prioritize the safety and well-being of students regardless of what DoFo and co. demand. One of them is Kate Curtis, co-author of our guide to changing dress codes.
Several school boards have also pledged that “important and relevant sex-ed lessons will be included in classrooms regardless of the health and physical-education curriculum in place this fall.” The TDSB’s statement is pretty dope!
Nadine Thornhill will cover the sex-ed component of the 2015 health and physical education curriculum via Youtube. Sabrina Cruz reacts to the proposal that we return to the 1998 version on Youtube. Sidrah Ahmad writes about why skipping sex ed is dangerous. Friend of the EDC collective Rayne Fisher-Quann reads an open letter to D.F. at the March for Our Education she co-organized.
And after all that, Education Minister Lisa Thompson gives an amazingly unintelligible interview about what students will actually be taught come September. Imagine what she could accomplish if someone told her she’s supposed to be a politician and not a performance artist! (Btw, Ms. Thompson doesn’t happen to have a yacht that could, in theory, be set adrift, does she?)
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The Nishnawbe Aski Nation calls the decision to cut summer sessions to develop curriculum on Residential Schools “a step backwards,” and notes that “The new Ontario government signaled that improving relations with Indigenous Peoples is not a priority when it stripped the Ministry of Indigenous Relations and Reconciliation of a dedicated minister in June.”
Librarian Desmond Wong compiled a collection of Indigenous education resources in response to the curriculum development cancellation: “If there is no commitment from our education authorities, we need to take on the commitment to have these conversations, to talk to the people in our families, our children, our nieces and nephews, about Indigenous education.”
Cherie Dimaline, Monique Gray Smith, and Tracey Lindberg donated sets of their books to Ontario classrooms in response to the curriculum development cancellation. Said the latter, “we are going to have to fight ignorance in new ways.”
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Now Doug et al have pointed their flamethrowers at Toronto city council. Of course, it’s not like the city council’s response to recent gun violence was better than the provincial government’s response; the former voted to intensify its attacks on Black people, Indigenous people, and people of colour.
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Give Douglas R. Ford and his cheerleaders credit: they’ve clearly communicated whose province this is. Lombray Ball gets it: “I don’t give a fuck. You don’t tell me what to do in my province… You don’t ask me a fucking question. It’s my fucking province.”
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Dougie and his cronies campaigned on the slogan “For The People,” but “IDGAF It’s My Fucking Province” would have been much more apt. Where does that leave those of us who do give a fuck?
First, let’s keep breathing.
Second, let’s continue to try to show up for each other.
Then, it’s back to stoking fires of our own.
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End Dress Codes 