Trustees of the Toronto District School Board (TDSB) unanimously passed a motion to declare co-operation with the Ontario Ministry of Education’s investigation into the Grassy Narrows River Run Rally field trip that saw students from 15 schools taking part in a downtown protest featuring slogans and signs related to Israel and Palestine.
In a special meeting at the TDSB head office on Sept. 25, trustees voted on a motion asking the ministry to make all findings publicly available—and requests that the provincial investigation be concluded by Dec. 1.
“As a parent and a trustee, I fully understand parents’ outrage,” said Weidong Pei, the school trustee who helped author the motion. “The trust between parents and the board has been broken. For us to start to repair that broken trust, we need to (welcome) a thorough investigation,” he told The Canadian Jewish News.
He added that a transparent assessment of policies and procedures pertaining to school field trips will help prevent future misconduct and keep students safe.
Students attended a Grange Park rally on Sept. 18, which was organized in support of the Grassy Narrows First Nation, an Indigenous community in northwest Ontario which has long suffered from mercury pollution. After the subsequent march to Queen’s Park, videos that circulated on social media showed evidence of adults incorporating international issues indirectly related to the published agenda of the Grassy Narrows River Run Rally.
Clips showed students being encouraged to chant, “From Turtle Island to Palestine, occupation is a crime,” along with other Pro-Palestine slogans. A banner carried by students read “We won’t stop until Palestine is free.”
The TDSB initially launched an internal investigation on Sept. 19., citing “serious concerns about what took place.”
Four days later, the protest scene was condemned by Premier Doug Ford, and Ontario education minister Jill Dunlop announced a provincial investigation.
“It is clear that the TDSB has failed to take swift and decisive action on this matter,” she wrote on Sept. 23. “As such, I have asked my ministry to initiate an investigation into the events that took place at the TDSB last week. Those responsible should be held accountable.”
The day after the provincial investigation was announced, TDSB acting director of education Louise Sirisko addressed a room of trustees, parents and journalists: “We recognize the need for accountability and apologize to students and families who were impacted,” she said.
As a result of the provincial investigation, Sirisko said that the board’s internal probe has been suspended, to avoid simultaneous investigations.
Alexandra Lulka Rotman said the damages of the Sept. 18 demonstration extend beyond Jewish families like her own. “I want to be very clear: It wasn’t just some students who experienced harm,” she told the board. “All students were exposed to political indoctrination. We have failed all of our students.”
Lulka Rotman—a school trustee since 2016—also cited a list of questions, which she hopes the provincial investigation can help answer. Some of these included, “How did it come to be that 15 different schools participated? Was the event accurately portrayed to parents? What was the role of teachers encouraging students to join the demonstration? Is it true that a Jewish student was told to ‘get over it’ after being told to chant anti-Israel slogans? Did TDSB teachers participate in the chanting? If so, what consequences will be taken?”
Shelley Laskin—a long-time school trustee, first elected in 1997, who is also Jewish—pointed out that she had previously written to the Ontario’s Ministry of Education to request their support in addressing rising antisemitism.
“Our data does not lie,” Laskin told fellow trustees. “It is a fact that antisemitism has risen within the walls of the schools of the Toronto District School Board. We need to address it in ways that require mandatory education.”
Laskin also pointed to a climate of trauma since Oct. 7. “I think there’s an experience of trauma that is being felt, that is very hard to articulate,” she told the board. “Everything is elevated when we’ve seen windows of synagogues smashed. When we’ve seen children’s schools targeted. When we’ve seen week after week of protests that hold up signs that are not just calling for the annihilation of the democratic state of Israel but for the annihilation of all Jews.
“As a Jew in Canada, I’ve never had to deal with that before.”
She added that “if Jews don’t feel safe in our public schools, no one is safe.”
Tamara Gottlieb, a founding member of the Jewish Educators and Families Association, told The Canadian Jewish News that simply waiting for the ministry to complete their investigation is not enough.
“The cat’s out of the bag,” she said. “Right now, TDSB, you have a responsibility to keep these kids safe. The teachers, who made the decision to bring these kids into this type of danger and risk and to mislead parents about what it was about, are still in the classrooms, still in the schools. Why are the teachers there now?”
Prior to the special meeting, the board’s trustees had a delegation hearing, which allowed them to listen to testimonies from concerned parents.
One of those parents was Ali Saidatan, who was born in Iran under the Islamic Regime.
“When the revolution happened in 1979 and a small group of very ideological radicals took over the whole country, the entire school system was revised by them,” Saidatan, a father of two young daughters—one of whom was taken to the protest—told the trustees. “It became a place of indoctrination.”
Saidatan recounted a memory from when he was ten years old, which he says he has never shared with anybody privately or publicly. “I came home and said to my mom that I want to go to the front and blow myself up under a tank,” he said.
“We were at war with Iraq, the neighbouring country. This was a religious war. I sounded very euphoric, I sounded very excited. I was very okay with it. When I became an adult, during one of our conversations, my mother told me that was the day she decided to leave the country.”
Saidatan traced this memory to the school system: “We didn’t come from a family that believed in any of those things. No one in my household spoke about that, in fact people were very much against the regime. But it was the school system. That was where the idea was put in my head day after day.”
Saidatan said that, after hearing about the Sept. 18 protest, he felt an urgency to come forward about his story.
“This type of ideological indoctrination may seem benign, it may seem enlightened, it may seem interesting, as concoctive in some university professor’s mind, but I can tell you, as someone who was in the receiving end of it, it took me a lifetime to take these ideas out of myself and to come to a place where I had the maturity and enough knowledge about what was out there in the world to be able to discern for myself where I choose to stand.
“Children in elementary school and junior high are not ready for ideological indoctrination. They are there to be educated and to learn how to live in peace with others.”