Ontario Premier Doug Ford is calling on the Toronto District School Board (TDSB) to urgently conduct an investigation into a field trip that saw students attend a rally where pro-Palestinian slogans were being chanted.
The province’s largest school board has been fielding heavy criticism since students attending an event in support of the Grassy Narrows First Nation last week were encouraged to chant “From Turtle Island to Palestine, occupation is a crime.”
Ford criticized the school board at an unrelated press conference in Cobourg, Ont., Sept. 23, calling the decision to take students on the trip “disgraceful.”
“You’re trying to indoctrinate our kids. They should be in the classroom learning about reading, writing, spelling, arithmetic, the whole shebang,” Ford said. “But instead, the TDSB and these teachers want to bring them down to a rally, a Palestinian rally, and it’s ridiculous.”
The Sept. 18 field trip was meant to be an “educational experience,” during which students would hear from the indigenous people of Grassy Narrows about how their community was impacted by mercury poisoning, the school board said in a Sept. 20 statement.
Videos circulating on social media and YouTube showed the children taking part in a march where some signs referenced Palestine. Another video showed a large group of students being told to repeat a pro-Palestinian chant.
“We’re going to try that one more time,” a woman said, when the children failed to repeat the slogan loudly. “You guys are just going to repeat after me.”
“From Turtle Island to Palestine,” she shouted and was echoed by the students. “From Turtle Island to Palestine. Occupation is a crime. Occupation is a crime.”
“No justice, no racists,” she yelled, to which the crowd responded “no peace.”
“Big round of applause for yourselves,” she said to claps and cheers. It is not known if the woman speaking was a rally organizer or affiliated with one of the schools.
Province ‘All Over This’
The premier said the province would be “all over this” to make sure those responsible for taking students to the rally are “held accountable.”“I’ve said this about indoctrination for years. And I don’t want to paint a broad brush for all the teachers because it’s not all teachers, it’s a minority [of] teachers,” he said.
“They [need to] think twice about bringing young, little kids without the parents permission on these school trips. It’s disgusting.”
Education Minister Jill Dunlop weighed in on the issue prior to the premier’s comments this week, saying she was “deeply disappointed” by the incident.
“Compromising the security and safety of students is unacceptable,” she said in a Sept. 19 X post. “I expect TDSB to conduct a thorough review of the situation and ensure accountability with parents and students to prevent future incidents.”
The school board did not say how many schools or students attended the rally, but it issued an apology to parents last week, saying that students should not have been participating in organized protests as part of a field trip.
“We apologize for the harm that some students may have experienced as a result,” Acting Director of Education Louise Sirisko said in a statement. “We take these concerns very seriously and will prioritize our investigation into the matter.”
Sirisko promised the board would take “appropriate action” if school board policies, procedures or professional standards were not followed. Those actions could include discipline and changes to its field trip processes, she said.
It is not yet known when the investigation into the incident will be complete, school board spokesperson Zoya McGroarty told The Epoch Times in an email.
“As the investigation has just begun, a timeline for completion is not available at this time,” McGroarty said.
The Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs (CIJA) has started a petition to ask the Toronto school board to take geopolitics out of its schools.“In the current climate, where rallies regularly descend into hateful rhetoric, faculty should have appropriately vetted the program and understood they were putting students in harm’s way,” the CIJA said in a post explaining its petition.
“While we all support the rights of all groups to protest their cause peacefully, educators, schools, and school boards must keep students safe from exposure to toxic ideologies meant to incite hate.”
The Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center was also critical of the field trip and called on the Toronto District School Board to hold its staff accountable.
“Students ended up in an anti-Israel demonstration during a field trip,” the organization said in a social media post. “We are outraged over this egregious violation of parental trust and the harm caused to students.”
The school board’s McGroarty said “feedback from parents will be considered” on all future field trips.
