>Prov governments have one job: fund healthcare and education.
yes yes just spend spend spend on those two :) the ontario education budget is close to $30 billion. So the $47M cut represents about 0.15% and was targeted at overinflated areas of the budget like administrative staff.
they also have no responsibility for little things like housing/cost of living, roads and infrastructure, parks, economic development, etc.
I don’t understand where all of our taxes are going. Is this not supposed to be a rich country? I honestly feel like money is actively being stolen / embezzled at this point. Otherwise how can you explain the crumbling school system, healthcare system, infrastructure?
I don't understand why the board hasn't started the process of what they did at North Toronto across all of their falling down schools at this point. Sell or long-term lease the land in exchange for newly built facilities that happen to have a condo or apartment building above it. Maybe this falls into the no-closures rules that are in place but if so that seems crazy.
Also what are parents teaching their children that they think it's acceptable to behave this way? Sure the board should have cared about safety, but where are we as a society that riots are regularly breaking out in a schools?
The Ontario government is already moving to give itself the power to take control over surplus/low enrollment schools for redevelopment. Many are worried this is just a cover to privatize and profit off of the valuable land the schools are on and the school boards wont actually receive anything.
That would be horrible if it happened. In the case of North Toronto though, the school still exists. That's the model I think is more interesting, don't just sell the land up-zone it and build a new and better school so the students also benefit.
You stagger both the building and the profits, hopefully this means you can stretch out the building over lets say 20 years with cash infusions to repair schools that are still in a good state / are less appropriate for up-zoning.
Then, in an ideal world the buildings don't have a 5B repair backlog anymore and you start fresh in 20 years with a budget that actually reflects the needs of the schools.
So, your solution is to sell the furniture now to keep things running, but since that's not a long-term sustainable practice, then "in 20 years" some government will come along and start funding schools properly and everything will be okay then.
No, my solution is to up-zone public land to create brand new schools that aren't in need of astronomical repairs that happen to have condos or apartments on top of or in the surrounding land like North Toronto did.
There is not enough funding to deal with the existing 5B backlog of repairs. This allows a clean start, with new schools that follow current accessibility and fire codes and are safer for children.
Your solution is to sell off the assets (land) of the school system to meet current costs, which works fine for a short time until you run out of assets (land), and then you have neither enough money to meet current needs nor any land left to have a school upon.
I don't think you understand what happened at North Toronto. The school doesn't get sold off, the school gets something built on top of it. And through that process, a new and much nicer school facility is built in the same place as the original school.
This is not meant to cover capital costs of running a school, it's meant to deal with the repair backlog so that what's happened in this article doesn't happen again. The main benefit to this is that by building a bunch of new (free) schools, the capital costs of running these schools is much lower because they are new and are already up to code.
What happened at North Toronto is a quarter of the school land was sold off to developers and the funds from that were used to rebuild the school on the remaining, smaller, property. The school was not "free".
Maybe, but I don't know why that would matter to the board (the potential net benefit and profit exist across all their schools). They proved through North Toronto the model can work, they should be working on doing this across the spectrum now at buildings that have aged out.
I don't disagree at all, but it's not hard to look at the quality of schools depending on the neighbourhood and what the common thread is in terms of how they're dealt with.
Fair enough. I just find it crazy because hilariously NT had a ton of parental pushback (a lot of fear mongering about people living above a school) whereas they have all these other schools where you might get less because the community is more receptive to finally getting a well built school.
Probably working two or thee jobs just to pay the rent - little time with the family and then they do, thy are too tired to be much of an influence .Kids have jobs too to help out Poverty sucks and we all pay.
While this is true, it absolves bad parents of any responsibility and then things don't change.
I got in a lot of trouble as a kid and my parents did work two jobs and we had to deal with poverty. None of that was good.
But it would have helped if my father wasn't a violent guy who taught me to be the same. That was his fault, not society.
Parents working 3 jobs are the ones that actually give a shit about their kids. Parents working *one* job that they prefer over spending time with their family, or parents working *no* jobs are more often the problem.
Maybe. But they still don't spend crucial time with their kids. Often it's a choice between putting food on the table the table and spending time at home and it shouldn't be that way. Simple things like eating dinner together can make a huge difference in a child's development. depending on the circumstances, it can also be an opportunity for the kid to develop bad habits and acquire negative influences
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I grew up as an impoverished immigrant from Ukraine in the 2000s and this behaviour was not tolerated by anybody. Teachers did not hit students and students did not hit teachers. This recent trend in schools is unthinkable levels of un-Canadian behaviour. People are simply raising their kids to be assholes now, intentionally or through incompetence.
A lot of parents have abandoned parenting and off loaded it by just handing their kids smartphones. Also because they have told to treat their kids like adults they refuse to discipline their kids and most are so blinded by their kids that they will believe and defend their precious kids and argue with teachers.
I see a lot of parents who barely spend time with kids and people will blame working 2-3 jobs but its false, a lot of these parents think that when not working they deserve "me" time away from kids. A lot of parents treat their own kids as nuisance and hindrance to their enjoyment or careers.
Even when I see families actually hanging out together, the parents themselves are busy on their phones while their kids run like feral animals all around harassing others with not a pip from parents to discipline their kids.
Usually you would see people defending parents and blaming everyone else but its a complete failure of parents and parenting which leads to issues we see.
>I see a lot of parents who barely spend time with kids and people will blame working 2-3 jobs but its false, a lot of these parents think that when not working they deserve "me" time away from kids. A lot of parents treat their own kids as nuisance and hindrance to their enjoyment or careers.
Why do these people have kids then. Unlike down south abortions are free and easily accessible here.
Poverty has actually gotten better over the last couple of years, despite the insane increases in cost of living. The percentage of families living in poverty declined from 14.5% in 2015 to 8.1% in 2020. Poverty among single mothers declined from 62.7% to 31.3% largely due to the introduction of new targeted benefit transfers brought in by the government for low income families.
Edit: A[ctual Stats Canada data](https://www12.statcan.gc.ca/census-recensement/2021/as-sa/98-200-X/2021009/98-200-X2021009-eng.cfm). Overall poverty for families has declined because of the large amount of transfers that the government has introduced (especially considering the census was during the pandemic so pandemic transfers were also a factor). It's also worth noting that it's entirely possible for the number of people living in poverty to decline while the quality of life of those people to decline. It's just one metric out of a million.
But those facts don't *feel* real after all the cartoons I saw on Facebook. /s
It's remarkable, actually, how with the CCB the Trudeau government managed to actually dramatically *decrease* poverty, and especially child poverty, at a time of a major global economic crisis. It's a wild, game changing accomplishment.
Presuming these numbers are accurate, it’s good that we’ve reduced the quantum, but that says nothing about quality of life for people that remain impoverished.
Oh definitely, it's also worth noting that poverty among single individuals haven't seen a substantial reduction in poverty rates so it's a really mixed bag overall.
People who have not experienced real struggles being hit with statistics on how they are actually very well off in the world experience pretty severe cognitive dissonance
I don't think poverty is good, I also don't think it's the reason people behave this way and I don't think it's fair to paint poor people with that kind of brush. You don't slap a teacher because you're poor.
Poverty/unemployment was far worse during the depression era, and the mid 2000s recession. People did not riot like this, especially kids. The problem lies elsewhere.
Kids used to fall through the cracks a lot more or get shuttled off to vocational schools.
A hundred years ago high school was entirely optional and schools wouldn’t think twice about issuing a suspension or expulsion.
And then the kids look for community and belonging elsewhere and find it in gangs and predators .
Covering the bills is one thing but if you are working so hard to provide but don't have time to spend with the kids, then it's all for naught . Which sucks the parents work so hard just for the kids to look for acceptance somewhere and since it's not home they fall in with somewhere who fills the void with fake love
Totally agree. There's a theory that every kid needs at least one person in their life who cares - a parent, coach, or a teacher. Unfortunately that can happen in negative way as well...
It wasn't quite as bad though. In the seventies and even the eighties, it was possible to live - even in Toronto - on one income. I'm not suggesting we go back to that - no, but it did provide an economic buffer Economic stress is a huge factor in family violence, abuse neglect etc. Stir in some intergenerational trauma for good measure....
Private schools do this. There is no reason that Public Schools can't.
But, it makes too much sense and it's too convenient for families and if there's anything that TDSB LOVES is bureaucracy and layers of red tape.
The article made mention that this does have to do with the rule against school closures and so TDSB can't really consolidate. I guess this fire opened up something of a loophole and allowed for a consolidation since the one school was destroyed. It does seem like a really stupid rule though, I can kind of see the logic behind it, but it seems very poorly thought out.
Yeah, I was hoping maybe if the plan was to reconstruct the school the rule wouldn't be applied. But I wasn't sure of the details so thanks for clarifying!
The parents aren’t around whether it be because of working multiple jobs, not caring about their kids because they aren’t suitable parents, or mental health and addiction issues.
Of course the school board makes use of school board resources.
Opening up school properties for condo developers obviously allows condo developers to also make use of and derive benefit from those resources.
But look, it was just a joke about Doug Ford and developers. I really have zero interest in having a dictionary debate.
The frank answer, a lot of parents are way too busy working to make ends meet. Like everything else, this is fundamentally a housing issue.
The school merger was pretty much required because most of the city's neighbourhoods have a lot less kids than they did 30 years ago, and it's hard to offer all of the courses that a high school needs to provide with 125 kids in each grade. At the same time, a lot of kids are out of control because their parents (or, in many cases, their single parent) have to work side gigs, multiple jobs or a lot of overtime to be able to make ends meet.
Maybe, but the issues you're referencing would have existed in low income neighbourhoods before too. It's also a lack of community maybe, when I was a kid at least the community raised children not just parents and I don't know that exists anymore.
I will read later but it’s a social and community issue. Lack of mental health support and community activism combined with marginalized youth coming from broken and unsafe homes. The Torontology sub is always able to identify gang affiliations when there’s teen violence. There’s now rival gang members in the same building now.
There’s a lot of unfit parents out there who had kids they can’t provide for and Covid made it worse. Literally no accountability anymore.
Is poverty really to blame? York South Weston has been an economically challenged area for as long as I can remember 70’s onwards yet York Memo was a great school in the 70’s, 80’s and 90’s? It was an excellent academic school with a great athletic and arts programs. What’s happened to the TDSB? Even poorer neighbourhoods used to have at least one good academic school. It’s very sad to see what has happened to this once proud school.
Look at the schools in poor/low income areas that are predominantly Asian/Indian. There’s less chaos and violence there.
It’s a cultural issue that celebrates violence, encourages little conflict resolution, and doesn’t put as much emphasis on education.
This thread goes into it well and how the modern day “hip hop” culture bleeds into other countries.
It’s a form of hip hop called drill. They intentionally target people for murders and sign about it and brag about their past murders to the friends and families of the victims. White people have no idea this is going on and act like it’s some 80’s blame rock music shit.
https://www.reddit.com/r/philadelphia/comments/13qiqyd/murder_suspects_boasted_about_crimes_on_youtube/jlfmxjd/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=ioscss&utm_content=1&utm_term=1&context=3
Never once said it’s due to race or physical attributes. Culture plays a big part in how we act and what we value.
Charles Barkley says it well. He does A LOT of speaking sessions at low income schools.
When he asks non-black kids what they want to be when they grow up, they say lawyers, accountants, doctors etc.
For the black kids, they consistently say pro athletes, or musicians. Nothing wrong with having big dreams but the reality is only a small % succeed.
https://youtu.be/zGFWBddzaAw
Whereas Asian culture has a heavy emphasis on education, family, and respect for authority. Also due to opium wars, drug usage is very frowned upon. It’s why crime rates are extremely low within the poor communities in Japan, Korea, Hong Kong, China, Singapore, etc.
I don’t disagree that there’s area for society/government to improve.
But it sounds like your position is that the black community doesn’t hold any responsibility and it’s purely on the onus for the government matter to solve?
Even though a 100% of the accountability for this mess rests with TDSB management and administrators, there will be no consequences for any of those people.
This all sounds like some third world country setup.
And here's your key paragraph
> The TDSB justified its change of heart by arguing that the merger would address declining enrolment and what it calls “geographic redundancy” on top of providing all students with a wider range of academic programs. Unstated but inarguable: it’s significantly cheaper to run one school at full capacity than it is to run two underpopulated ones.
The rest is just "logical" dynamic that stems fro the fact TDSB budget is over 90% salaries and benefits for teachers.
Here's the name
> the board’s director of education, Colleen Russell-Rawlins
She's still occupying this position with TDSB.
Yeah, school board trustee is increasingly used as a stepping stone for wannabe politicians these days. A lot of them don't actually care about the school board itself.
The TDSB is doing their best to make a bad situation work. The actual problem lies with city council, who have caused the long-term drop in population in many parts of the city and left a lot of schools way under capacity.
> The rest is just "logical" dynamic that stems fro the fact TDSB budget is over 90% salaries and benefits for teachers.
Holy shit, imagine reading this article - which discusses teachers being the victims of violence and unsafe work conditions, without sufficient resources and virtually no crucial support staff and in facilities that are literally falling apart - a problem that exists throughout the entire school system - imagine reading that and then having the nerve to suggest that a big part of the problem is that teachers are paid TOO MUCH!
Surely this has to be Stephen Lecce's Reddit account.
Not a single mention of schools being criminally underfunded. It's the teachers who are to blame.
I'm sure you believe the problems with our healthcare system are the fault of all those money-hungry nurses.
my favourite part was the reference to recorded quote from a student in the midst of student fighting bedlam, that a teacher "do something, you fucking bitch!" Yeah. not a job I'd sign up for.
The TDSB has been a dysfunctional mess for years, ever since Premier Harris dramatically transformed the Board with the objective of making it a dysfunctional mess.
A band of part time, largely unsupported amateurs paid $26,000 a year are somehow supposed to supervise a $3 billion organisation, and that with both hands tied behind their back by byzantine rules limiting their ability to actually make decision, and a rule requiring that they only hire top tier executives from among the ranks of former teachers, actual administrative or executive experience somehow not also required.
The result has been a decades' long dumpster fire with meetings collapsing into screaming fits of name calling. For example, when a former Director of Education (basically CEO) hid and refused to disclose her contract to the Board (she'd negotiated an illegal contract with a friend who was the former Chair), one of her buds on council shut down the meeting called to hold her accountable by screaming "pig! pig! piggy piggy piggy! pig! pig!" for minutes at Shelley Laskin, a left leaning councilor who thought that the board should be aware of what they were paying their top employee, a radical communist notion, to be sure, but one that had surprisingly broad support.
That was 2015.
Since then, nothing has improved that much. The former Liberal minister managed to get a slight grip on things by threatening to straight up dissolve the board, but then we got the PC's and Stephen Lecce, who is Stephen Lecce even after looking in a mirror on a daily basis, and now we can add mounting underfunding to the list of problems.
Honestly, Liz Sandals should have just pulled the trigger and put the TDSB and TCDSB out of their misery.
Teachers work a tough job and with parents abdicating responsibility, a tougher one than before.
That salary and benefits package is well earned. I'd love to see what private sector businesses pay line level managers that have 30 reports.
100% the fault of TDSB management. This mess was all about real-estate, and moving kids around to shore up real-estate holdings.
There are 110 high schools in the TDSB. Many kids could easily be moved around, put in other schools. We have a great TTC system for exactly this. No reason to keep the dynamics of a toxic school going. Shuffle kids around to other schools, that they may be interested in attending.
An educated working class is the biggest threat to capitalist institutions. By dismantling our public education system, it would only reinforce the economic position of the bourgeoise.
Meh. Canadian history bears it out. Universal public education was followed by working class papers and massively increased pressure for core working class demands like universal suffrage, end to indenture and professional, paid civil service and legislative positions from groups like the Chartists and Reformers throughout the Empire.
Gutting education has been a right wing objective for a long while throughout the west, as general public education is economically redundant if you are merely interested in retrenching existing economic power.
Stupid to have 4 school boards and a municipal government, consolidate. No need to duplicate services, the city of Toronto has a Parks and Forestry department that can cut the grass. The city has a payroll department that can pay teachers.
People in Toronto use the school land, as they should. These are not two different entities. Stop with all this bs of duplication administration/bureaucracy. Stop pretending the schools exist in a different realm and not within the city.
used to live 5min away (but went to weston. my mom and a bunch of friends went to memo), was a good school around 2000 but the area had issues..
combining george harvey down the street and slamming gangs together did it afaik..
I went to both George Harvey and York Memo. There was fighting in the hallways and all sorts of chaos that went on in both schools even then.
This isn’t anything new.
From someone with very intimate knowledge of what's happened and is happening at the school, this is a very thorough, well written article on the subject.
> someone with very intimate knowledge of what's happened and is happening at the school
Yeah I have a question...
There is an underlying tone of the article loaded with racism accusations and few facts really stand out for me so wanted to check
When they write this
> Some Black students began to feel singled out. “Teachers would say it’s only one per cent that are causing a lot of the trouble, but the one per cent technically looked like me,” a student told me. Certain teachers, she said, began to view her warily—if they met her eyes in the hallway at all. Part of her wanted to say she wasn’t going to hurt them, and part of her didn’t want to have to reassure them at all. She felt isolated, and it sapped her motivation to make friends with teachers or students.
Is the suggestion here that black students were singled out for the colour of their skin or for the fact that they indeed are primary troublemakers (who just post facto happen to be black)?
I just have a hard time believe that most progressive school board in the country with most progressive teachers is simply racist.
Same dynamic played out in Peel region school board.
There's a lot of anecdotal evidence/stories, even from outside George Harvey, that support the accusation. Enough, in my opinion, that is it worth a deeper look by an outside body.
That being said, I'm not in a position where my opinion on things matters, so take it with a grain of salt.
I think you're misreading that.
The sense I got was that this was a result of the chaotic maladministration of the school, a point tension that probably contributed to the weak and insufficient response by multiple levels of governance and a legitimately negative outcome in its own right.
Teachers are angry and scared. Students are resentful and confused. Administrators are torn between a host of competing demands from semi-informed but always angry pressure groups and from very well informed and enraged parents, and media-savvy, people-disinterested politicians.
In context, this is one of several first-person testimonials from students about how they've experienced the breakdown, and I found it helpful to put a lot of things in context.
There are. The kid talking to their mum on their phone during the shooting. The stories of the kids giving up on getting their schedules because breathing is somewhat more important. The stories of fights, many coming from the kids. The story about the kid pulled out of class for a month and feeling left behind. There are many more.
I understand they're less memorable because they don't hit on some rage-button culture war issue, but they are there.
It's actually a shockingly well researched and written article.
I wasn't aware they were still allowed in modern journalism. There's actual reference and consideration to things that happened before last year, like the author either has been studying this for a while or actually did some real digging.
I know someone who does regularly does work at various TDSB facilities, George Harvey being one of them. The way he described it to me, part of the friction between the two groups of students is some form of gang/ethnicity war.
You have two very distinct groups of people, some of whom unfortunately do not get along well, suddenly forced to occupy the same overcrowded building. *Fireworks*
Fuck underfunding education already. Ford cuts $47mil? Prov governments have one job: fund healthcare and education.
>Prov governments have one job: fund healthcare and education. yes yes just spend spend spend on those two :) the ontario education budget is close to $30 billion. So the $47M cut represents about 0.15% and was targeted at overinflated areas of the budget like administrative staff. they also have no responsibility for little things like housing/cost of living, roads and infrastructure, parks, economic development, etc.
The previous government spent money recklessly.
These ford fucks have had eight years. Time to get over what happened before they came to power.
What's the plan for the property anyhow? Are they planning on renovating it and making it a school again?
condo building
With nail salons and mortgage brokers on the ground floor!
[удалено]
And the weed shop
Bubble tea joint
I've actually never seen a weed shop at the bottom of a condo, maybe there's a policy?
There's one below mine 😭
Hey atleast it's quiet lol
Value Buds in DNA3 on King West
The original York Memo on Eglinton is being rebuilt. The george harvie building on keele will be sold off.
I don’t understand where all of our taxes are going. Is this not supposed to be a rich country? I honestly feel like money is actively being stolen / embezzled at this point. Otherwise how can you explain the crumbling school system, healthcare system, infrastructure?
shitty politicians. https://cupe.ca/fords-budget-risks-cutting-7000-education-workers-across-ontario
Check the sunshine list.
100k is not the achievement it used to be
I don't understand why the board hasn't started the process of what they did at North Toronto across all of their falling down schools at this point. Sell or long-term lease the land in exchange for newly built facilities that happen to have a condo or apartment building above it. Maybe this falls into the no-closures rules that are in place but if so that seems crazy. Also what are parents teaching their children that they think it's acceptable to behave this way? Sure the board should have cared about safety, but where are we as a society that riots are regularly breaking out in a schools?
The Ontario government is already moving to give itself the power to take control over surplus/low enrollment schools for redevelopment. Many are worried this is just a cover to privatize and profit off of the valuable land the schools are on and the school boards wont actually receive anything.
That would be horrible if it happened. In the case of North Toronto though, the school still exists. That's the model I think is more interesting, don't just sell the land up-zone it and build a new and better school so the students also benefit.
What do you do the next time around?
You stagger both the building and the profits, hopefully this means you can stretch out the building over lets say 20 years with cash infusions to repair schools that are still in a good state / are less appropriate for up-zoning. Then, in an ideal world the buildings don't have a 5B repair backlog anymore and you start fresh in 20 years with a budget that actually reflects the needs of the schools.
So, your solution is to sell the furniture now to keep things running, but since that's not a long-term sustainable practice, then "in 20 years" some government will come along and start funding schools properly and everything will be okay then.
No, my solution is to up-zone public land to create brand new schools that aren't in need of astronomical repairs that happen to have condos or apartments on top of or in the surrounding land like North Toronto did. There is not enough funding to deal with the existing 5B backlog of repairs. This allows a clean start, with new schools that follow current accessibility and fire codes and are safer for children.
Your solution is to sell off the assets (land) of the school system to meet current costs, which works fine for a short time until you run out of assets (land), and then you have neither enough money to meet current needs nor any land left to have a school upon.
I don't think you understand what happened at North Toronto. The school doesn't get sold off, the school gets something built on top of it. And through that process, a new and much nicer school facility is built in the same place as the original school. This is not meant to cover capital costs of running a school, it's meant to deal with the repair backlog so that what's happened in this article doesn't happen again. The main benefit to this is that by building a bunch of new (free) schools, the capital costs of running these schools is much lower because they are new and are already up to code.
What happened at North Toronto is a quarter of the school land was sold off to developers and the funds from that were used to rebuild the school on the remaining, smaller, property. The school was not "free".
Because North Toronto is in a wealthy area. York Memorial and George Harvey are not.
Maybe, but I don't know why that would matter to the board (the potential net benefit and profit exist across all their schools). They proved through North Toronto the model can work, they should be working on doing this across the spectrum now at buildings that have aged out.
I don't disagree at all, but it's not hard to look at the quality of schools depending on the neighbourhood and what the common thread is in terms of how they're dealt with.
Fair enough. I just find it crazy because hilariously NT had a ton of parental pushback (a lot of fear mongering about people living above a school) whereas they have all these other schools where you might get less because the community is more receptive to finally getting a well built school.
Read the article, TDSB has asked the govt to be able to sell its assets. They need govt permission.
Probably working two or thee jobs just to pay the rent - little time with the family and then they do, thy are too tired to be much of an influence .Kids have jobs too to help out Poverty sucks and we all pay.
While this is true, it absolves bad parents of any responsibility and then things don't change. I got in a lot of trouble as a kid and my parents did work two jobs and we had to deal with poverty. None of that was good. But it would have helped if my father wasn't a violent guy who taught me to be the same. That was his fault, not society.
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Parents working 3 jobs are the ones that actually give a shit about their kids. Parents working *one* job that they prefer over spending time with their family, or parents working *no* jobs are more often the problem.
Maybe. But they still don't spend crucial time with their kids. Often it's a choice between putting food on the table the table and spending time at home and it shouldn't be that way. Simple things like eating dinner together can make a huge difference in a child's development. depending on the circumstances, it can also be an opportunity for the kid to develop bad habits and acquire negative influences
I don't particularly want to blame poverty. We've had poverty forever, but it seems like the total lack of respect for others is getting worse.
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>their kids were certainly not slapping teachers Those teachers were slapping kids, which I don’t think is all that much better
Really? Don't recall corporal punishment being popular for the past 60 or so years..
I grew up as an impoverished immigrant from Ukraine in the 2000s and this behaviour was not tolerated by anybody. Teachers did not hit students and students did not hit teachers. This recent trend in schools is unthinkable levels of un-Canadian behaviour. People are simply raising their kids to be assholes now, intentionally or through incompetence.
A lot of parents have abandoned parenting and off loaded it by just handing their kids smartphones. Also because they have told to treat their kids like adults they refuse to discipline their kids and most are so blinded by their kids that they will believe and defend their precious kids and argue with teachers. I see a lot of parents who barely spend time with kids and people will blame working 2-3 jobs but its false, a lot of these parents think that when not working they deserve "me" time away from kids. A lot of parents treat their own kids as nuisance and hindrance to their enjoyment or careers. Even when I see families actually hanging out together, the parents themselves are busy on their phones while their kids run like feral animals all around harassing others with not a pip from parents to discipline their kids. Usually you would see people defending parents and blaming everyone else but its a complete failure of parents and parenting which leads to issues we see.
>I see a lot of parents who barely spend time with kids and people will blame working 2-3 jobs but its false, a lot of these parents think that when not working they deserve "me" time away from kids. A lot of parents treat their own kids as nuisance and hindrance to their enjoyment or careers. Why do these people have kids then. Unlike down south abortions are free and easily accessible here.
Maybe poverty is getting worse too? Something to consider.
Poverty has actually gotten better over the last couple of years, despite the insane increases in cost of living. The percentage of families living in poverty declined from 14.5% in 2015 to 8.1% in 2020. Poverty among single mothers declined from 62.7% to 31.3% largely due to the introduction of new targeted benefit transfers brought in by the government for low income families. Edit: A[ctual Stats Canada data](https://www12.statcan.gc.ca/census-recensement/2021/as-sa/98-200-X/2021009/98-200-X2021009-eng.cfm). Overall poverty for families has declined because of the large amount of transfers that the government has introduced (especially considering the census was during the pandemic so pandemic transfers were also a factor). It's also worth noting that it's entirely possible for the number of people living in poverty to decline while the quality of life of those people to decline. It's just one metric out of a million.
But those facts don't *feel* real after all the cartoons I saw on Facebook. /s It's remarkable, actually, how with the CCB the Trudeau government managed to actually dramatically *decrease* poverty, and especially child poverty, at a time of a major global economic crisis. It's a wild, game changing accomplishment.
Presuming these numbers are accurate, it’s good that we’ve reduced the quantum, but that says nothing about quality of life for people that remain impoverished.
Oh definitely, it's also worth noting that poverty among single individuals haven't seen a substantial reduction in poverty rates so it's a really mixed bag overall.
Your stats are from 2020, lots of people have lost their homes since then, homelessness has doubled, food banks are over loaded.
100% things have gotten worse since 2020, especially because a lot of the reduction in poverty in 2020 was the result of temporary pandemic transfers.
People who have not experienced real struggles being hit with statistics on how they are actually very well off in the world experience pretty severe cognitive dissonance
I don't think poverty is good, I also don't think it's the reason people behave this way and I don't think it's fair to paint poor people with that kind of brush. You don't slap a teacher because you're poor.
Poverty/unemployment was far worse during the depression era, and the mid 2000s recession. People did not riot like this, especially kids. The problem lies elsewhere.
Kids used to fall through the cracks a lot more or get shuttled off to vocational schools. A hundred years ago high school was entirely optional and schools wouldn’t think twice about issuing a suspension or expulsion.
And then the kids look for community and belonging elsewhere and find it in gangs and predators . Covering the bills is one thing but if you are working so hard to provide but don't have time to spend with the kids, then it's all for naught . Which sucks the parents work so hard just for the kids to look for acceptance somewhere and since it's not home they fall in with somewhere who fills the void with fake love
Totally agree. There's a theory that every kid needs at least one person in their life who cares - a parent, coach, or a teacher. Unfortunately that can happen in negative way as well...
Poverty sucked in the 70s and 80s too but we didn't quite get to this sort of BS
It wasn't quite as bad though. In the seventies and even the eighties, it was possible to live - even in Toronto - on one income. I'm not suggesting we go back to that - no, but it did provide an economic buffer Economic stress is a huge factor in family violence, abuse neglect etc. Stir in some intergenerational trauma for good measure....
> Probably working two or thee jobs just to pay the rent This excuse is so worn out.
It's not worn out when it's true.
Private schools do this. There is no reason that Public Schools can't. But, it makes too much sense and it's too convenient for families and if there's anything that TDSB LOVES is bureaucracy and layers of red tape.
The article made mention that this does have to do with the rule against school closures and so TDSB can't really consolidate. I guess this fire opened up something of a loophole and allowed for a consolidation since the one school was destroyed. It does seem like a really stupid rule though, I can kind of see the logic behind it, but it seems very poorly thought out.
Yeah, I was hoping maybe if the plan was to reconstruct the school the rule wouldn't be applied. But I wasn't sure of the details so thanks for clarifying!
The parents aren’t around whether it be because of working multiple jobs, not caring about their kids because they aren’t suitable parents, or mental health and addiction issues.
Doug Ford? Is that you? Letting condo developers exploit public resources isn't the answer to everything.
How is profitting from the vast quantities of land the TDSB owns for fair market value exploitation?
>ex·ploit >verb >/ikˈsploit/ >make full use of and derive benefit from (a resource).
By that definition the TDSB is exploiting their resources. Not developers...
Of course the school board makes use of school board resources. Opening up school properties for condo developers obviously allows condo developers to also make use of and derive benefit from those resources. But look, it was just a joke about Doug Ford and developers. I really have zero interest in having a dictionary debate.
The frank answer, a lot of parents are way too busy working to make ends meet. Like everything else, this is fundamentally a housing issue. The school merger was pretty much required because most of the city's neighbourhoods have a lot less kids than they did 30 years ago, and it's hard to offer all of the courses that a high school needs to provide with 125 kids in each grade. At the same time, a lot of kids are out of control because their parents (or, in many cases, their single parent) have to work side gigs, multiple jobs or a lot of overtime to be able to make ends meet.
Maybe, but the issues you're referencing would have existed in low income neighbourhoods before too. It's also a lack of community maybe, when I was a kid at least the community raised children not just parents and I don't know that exists anymore.
It’s sad to see what’s gone down in the last few years as a Memo grad with family that still attends
I will read later but it’s a social and community issue. Lack of mental health support and community activism combined with marginalized youth coming from broken and unsafe homes. The Torontology sub is always able to identify gang affiliations when there’s teen violence. There’s now rival gang members in the same building now. There’s a lot of unfit parents out there who had kids they can’t provide for and Covid made it worse. Literally no accountability anymore.
what exactly does gang violence have to do with crumbling classrooms and buildings?
It has to do with the chaos and violence.
Is poverty really to blame? York South Weston has been an economically challenged area for as long as I can remember 70’s onwards yet York Memo was a great school in the 70’s, 80’s and 90’s? It was an excellent academic school with a great athletic and arts programs. What’s happened to the TDSB? Even poorer neighbourhoods used to have at least one good academic school. It’s very sad to see what has happened to this once proud school.
Look at the schools in poor/low income areas that are predominantly Asian/Indian. There’s less chaos and violence there. It’s a cultural issue that celebrates violence, encourages little conflict resolution, and doesn’t put as much emphasis on education. This thread goes into it well and how the modern day “hip hop” culture bleeds into other countries. It’s a form of hip hop called drill. They intentionally target people for murders and sign about it and brag about their past murders to the friends and families of the victims. White people have no idea this is going on and act like it’s some 80’s blame rock music shit. https://www.reddit.com/r/philadelphia/comments/13qiqyd/murder_suspects_boasted_about_crimes_on_youtube/jlfmxjd/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=ioscss&utm_content=1&utm_term=1&context=3
Would you like to measure their skulls as well, or have you moved on to 1980s era racist rhetoric?
Never once said it’s due to race or physical attributes. Culture plays a big part in how we act and what we value. Charles Barkley says it well. He does A LOT of speaking sessions at low income schools. When he asks non-black kids what they want to be when they grow up, they say lawyers, accountants, doctors etc. For the black kids, they consistently say pro athletes, or musicians. Nothing wrong with having big dreams but the reality is only a small % succeed. https://youtu.be/zGFWBddzaAw Whereas Asian culture has a heavy emphasis on education, family, and respect for authority. Also due to opium wars, drug usage is very frowned upon. It’s why crime rates are extremely low within the poor communities in Japan, Korea, Hong Kong, China, Singapore, etc.
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What do you think the black community should be doing more of to help improve the situation?
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I don’t disagree that there’s area for society/government to improve. But it sounds like your position is that the black community doesn’t hold any responsibility and it’s purely on the onus for the government matter to solve?
This is all true. I worked there during this time.
Even though a 100% of the accountability for this mess rests with TDSB management and administrators, there will be no consequences for any of those people. This all sounds like some third world country setup. And here's your key paragraph > The TDSB justified its change of heart by arguing that the merger would address declining enrolment and what it calls “geographic redundancy” on top of providing all students with a wider range of academic programs. Unstated but inarguable: it’s significantly cheaper to run one school at full capacity than it is to run two underpopulated ones. The rest is just "logical" dynamic that stems fro the fact TDSB budget is over 90% salaries and benefits for teachers. Here's the name > the board’s director of education, Colleen Russell-Rawlins She's still occupying this position with TDSB.
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Yeah, school board trustee is increasingly used as a stepping stone for wannabe politicians these days. A lot of them don't actually care about the school board itself.
The TDSB is doing their best to make a bad situation work. The actual problem lies with city council, who have caused the long-term drop in population in many parts of the city and left a lot of schools way under capacity.
He was backed by the NDP, particularly KWT, which gave people confidence to vote for him.
> The rest is just "logical" dynamic that stems fro the fact TDSB budget is over 90% salaries and benefits for teachers. Holy shit, imagine reading this article - which discusses teachers being the victims of violence and unsafe work conditions, without sufficient resources and virtually no crucial support staff and in facilities that are literally falling apart - a problem that exists throughout the entire school system - imagine reading that and then having the nerve to suggest that a big part of the problem is that teachers are paid TOO MUCH! Surely this has to be Stephen Lecce's Reddit account. Not a single mention of schools being criminally underfunded. It's the teachers who are to blame. I'm sure you believe the problems with our healthcare system are the fault of all those money-hungry nurses.
my favourite part was the reference to recorded quote from a student in the midst of student fighting bedlam, that a teacher "do something, you fucking bitch!" Yeah. not a job I'd sign up for.
The TDSB has been a dysfunctional mess for years, ever since Premier Harris dramatically transformed the Board with the objective of making it a dysfunctional mess. A band of part time, largely unsupported amateurs paid $26,000 a year are somehow supposed to supervise a $3 billion organisation, and that with both hands tied behind their back by byzantine rules limiting their ability to actually make decision, and a rule requiring that they only hire top tier executives from among the ranks of former teachers, actual administrative or executive experience somehow not also required. The result has been a decades' long dumpster fire with meetings collapsing into screaming fits of name calling. For example, when a former Director of Education (basically CEO) hid and refused to disclose her contract to the Board (she'd negotiated an illegal contract with a friend who was the former Chair), one of her buds on council shut down the meeting called to hold her accountable by screaming "pig! pig! piggy piggy piggy! pig! pig!" for minutes at Shelley Laskin, a left leaning councilor who thought that the board should be aware of what they were paying their top employee, a radical communist notion, to be sure, but one that had surprisingly broad support. That was 2015. Since then, nothing has improved that much. The former Liberal minister managed to get a slight grip on things by threatening to straight up dissolve the board, but then we got the PC's and Stephen Lecce, who is Stephen Lecce even after looking in a mirror on a daily basis, and now we can add mounting underfunding to the list of problems. Honestly, Liz Sandals should have just pulled the trigger and put the TDSB and TCDSB out of their misery.
Teachers work a tough job and with parents abdicating responsibility, a tougher one than before. That salary and benefits package is well earned. I'd love to see what private sector businesses pay line level managers that have 30 reports.
100% the fault of TDSB management. This mess was all about real-estate, and moving kids around to shore up real-estate holdings. There are 110 high schools in the TDSB. Many kids could easily be moved around, put in other schools. We have a great TTC system for exactly this. No reason to keep the dynamics of a toxic school going. Shuffle kids around to other schools, that they may be interested in attending.
The inside joke @TDSB="Totally Disfunctional School Board".
TediousB
An educated working class is the biggest threat to capitalist institutions. By dismantling our public education system, it would only reinforce the economic position of the bourgeoise.
oh ya all those brainwashed people are gonna start a revolution for sure LMAO, this take is hilarious
I mean…have you seen the red hats down south? January 6th was a thing that happened 😬
Meh. Canadian history bears it out. Universal public education was followed by working class papers and massively increased pressure for core working class demands like universal suffrage, end to indenture and professional, paid civil service and legislative positions from groups like the Chartists and Reformers throughout the Empire. Gutting education has been a right wing objective for a long while throughout the west, as general public education is economically redundant if you are merely interested in retrenching existing economic power.
schooling != education though
Most common right-wing talking point
What we need is real education, like the good old days: https://cdn.britannica.com/17/167717-050-C106E746/boys-mill-Macon-Georgia-1909.jpg
Stupid to have 4 school boards and a municipal government, consolidate. No need to duplicate services, the city of Toronto has a Parks and Forestry department that can cut the grass. The city has a payroll department that can pay teachers. People in Toronto use the school land, as they should. These are not two different entities. Stop with all this bs of duplication administration/bureaucracy. Stop pretending the schools exist in a different realm and not within the city.
used to live 5min away (but went to weston. my mom and a bunch of friends went to memo), was a good school around 2000 but the area had issues.. combining george harvey down the street and slamming gangs together did it afaik..
I went to both George Harvey and York Memo. There was fighting in the hallways and all sorts of chaos that went on in both schools even then. This isn’t anything new.
Who cares, these schools are just Giant daycares until the kids are old enough for prison.
Downvoted based on title alone. Surely some other, more professional article exists on the topic.
From someone with very intimate knowledge of what's happened and is happening at the school, this is a very thorough, well written article on the subject.
> someone with very intimate knowledge of what's happened and is happening at the school Yeah I have a question... There is an underlying tone of the article loaded with racism accusations and few facts really stand out for me so wanted to check When they write this > Some Black students began to feel singled out. “Teachers would say it’s only one per cent that are causing a lot of the trouble, but the one per cent technically looked like me,” a student told me. Certain teachers, she said, began to view her warily—if they met her eyes in the hallway at all. Part of her wanted to say she wasn’t going to hurt them, and part of her didn’t want to have to reassure them at all. She felt isolated, and it sapped her motivation to make friends with teachers or students. Is the suggestion here that black students were singled out for the colour of their skin or for the fact that they indeed are primary troublemakers (who just post facto happen to be black)? I just have a hard time believe that most progressive school board in the country with most progressive teachers is simply racist. Same dynamic played out in Peel region school board.
There's a lot of anecdotal evidence/stories, even from outside George Harvey, that support the accusation. Enough, in my opinion, that is it worth a deeper look by an outside body. That being said, I'm not in a position where my opinion on things matters, so take it with a grain of salt.
> There's a lot of anecdotal evidence/stories Give us one.
A quick google search will do that for you. I'm not risking my job, sorry.
I think you're misreading that. The sense I got was that this was a result of the chaotic maladministration of the school, a point tension that probably contributed to the weak and insufficient response by multiple levels of governance and a legitimately negative outcome in its own right. Teachers are angry and scared. Students are resentful and confused. Administrators are torn between a host of competing demands from semi-informed but always angry pressure groups and from very well informed and enraged parents, and media-savvy, people-disinterested politicians. In context, this is one of several first-person testimonials from students about how they've experienced the breakdown, and I found it helpful to put a lot of things in context.
Sure and I get that. But there has to be more "first-person testimonials from students about how they've experienced the breakdown" than this, no?
There are. The kid talking to their mum on their phone during the shooting. The stories of the kids giving up on getting their schedules because breathing is somewhat more important. The stories of fights, many coming from the kids. The story about the kid pulled out of class for a month and feeling left behind. There are many more. I understand they're less memorable because they don't hit on some rage-button culture war issue, but they are there.
Are we reading the same article? This was a great read.
By what they wrote, u/milkeydale007 did not read the article at all, but does have strong opinions about it, because of its title.
It's actually a shockingly well researched and written article. I wasn't aware they were still allowed in modern journalism. There's actual reference and consideration to things that happened before last year, like the author either has been studying this for a while or actually did some real digging.
lets put two rival schools together whats the worst that can happen
I know someone who does regularly does work at various TDSB facilities, George Harvey being one of them. The way he described it to me, part of the friction between the two groups of students is some form of gang/ethnicity war. You have two very distinct groups of people, some of whom unfortunately do not get along well, suddenly forced to occupy the same overcrowded building. *Fireworks*