Education
Teacher refuses to give up fight for free speech after being canceled for objecting to LGBT books
From LifeSiteNews
Ontario’s Divisional Court dismissed Carolyn Burjoski’s application for a judicial review of the January 2022 decision by school trustees to kick her off the board, but she will appeal the decision.
A now-retired Canadian teacher who was silenced for voicing concerns over LGBT books in school libraries vowed to continue to fight for her right to free speech after she was muzzled by her board.
Last year, longtime Waterloo Regional District School Board (WRDSB) teacher Carolyn Burjoski was stopped mid-presentation by then-board chairman Scott Piatkowski at a Board of Trustees meeting on January 17, 2022, because she was criticizing LGBT books in school libraries.
Piatkowski went as far as to expel Burjoski from the meeting. The next day she was made to work from home and told to keep her mouth shut under the threat of losing her retirement benefits. Piatkowski then told legacy media that Burjoski was “transphobic” and was using “hate speech” in the board meeting. Of note is that Piatkowski is a longtime supporter of the socialist NDP party.
Burjoski’s fight for justice began after she was removed from the board meeting because she exposed the dangers of LGBT books in school libraries. According to court documents, during her presentation, Burjoski revealed that some of the books made it “seem simple or even cool to take puberty blockers and opposite sex hormones.”
“I was ejected from a Board of Trustees meeting for criticizing the age appropriateness of sexual content in children’s books in elementary school libraries,” she said.
In May 2022, Burjoski filed a $1.7 million defamation suit against the WRDSB and Piatkowski that remains before the courts.
In June 2022, Burjoski applied for a judicial review of Piatkowski’s decision to suddenly stop her presentation, claiming it violated Ontario’s Human Rights code.
On November 29, three judges with Ontario’s Divisional Court dismissed Burjoski’s application for a judicial review of the January 2022 decision by her trustees to kick her off the board.
School board showed ‘display of authoritarian speech suppression in a public forum,’ says canceled teacher
Burjoski, in an update to social media last Thursday, said she would fight the dismissal of the judicial review with an appeal.
“I was silenced and removed for voicing my concerns about age-inappropriate content in some elementary school books. My respectful presentation was cut short by the chair who wrongly accused me of violating the Human Rights Code,” Burjoski said.
“This was not just a violation of my right to free expression, but a stark display of authoritarian speech suppression in a public forum where diverse viewpoints should be welcomed and discussed.”
Burjoski said that her judicial review being dismissed “is deeply concerning” and could set a “troubling precedent for free expression in Canada, empowering school boards and other public bodies to silence and censure every voice they disagree with.”
“So today, I am escalating this matter to the Ontario Court of Appeal by filing a notice of motion for leave to appeal. This is not just about a school board meeting. It’s about the integrity of open dialog on important issues in our educational system and other public forums.”
Burjoski noted how a true democracy “thrives on diverse opinions and the freedom to express them.”
“It’s vital that our judicial system protect our charter rights against administrative overreach that stifles our free speech,” she noted.
“I am fully committed to this cause and am deeply grateful to the Justice Center for Constitutional Freedoms for sponsoring this appeal pro bono.”
She encouraged “everyone” to support JCCF financially in its “relentless work to safeguard Canadian freedoms.”
Burjoski suffered a breakdown from the entire ordeal, which was so bad that she had to be taken to the hospital by ambulance. She said she is “still in recovery from this trauma.”
She has documented her ordeal on her website cancelledteacher.com.
Yesterday, LifeSiteNews reported that the WRDSB recently decided to get rid of the word “parent” on a slew of official documents and replace it with “caregiver” or “family.” Not all WRDSB members were on board with the change, however.
From LifeSiteNews
Monique LaGrange was ousted last December from the Red Deer Catholic Regional Schools’ board for comparing the LGBT agenda targeting children to brainwashing.
A Canadian judge ruled that a school board was justified to place harsh sanctions on a Catholic school trustee forced out of her position because she opposed extreme gender ideology and refused to undergo LGBT “sensitivity” training.
Justice Cheryl Arcand-Kootenay of the Court of King’s Bench of Alberta ruled Thursday that the Red Deer Catholic Regional Schools (RDCRS) Board’s sanctions placed against former trustee Monique LaGrange will stand.
LaGrange had vowed to fight the school board in court, and it remains to be seen if she can take any further actions after the decision by Judge Arcand-Kootenay.
The judge ruled that the RDCRS’s policies in place for all trustees, which the board contended were breached, were “logical, thorough, and grounded in the facts that were before the Board at the time of their deliberations.”
As reported by LifeSiteNews, the RDCRS board voted 3-1 last December to disqualify LaGrange after she compared the LGBT agenda targeting kids with that of “brainwashing” Nazi propaganda. As a result of being voted out, LaGrange later resigned from her position.
The former school board trustee initially came under fire in September 2023 when she posted an image showing kids in Nazi Germany waving swastika flags during a parade to social media, with the bottom of the post showing an image of kids waving LGBT “Pride” flags along with the text: “Brainwashing is brainwashing.”
After her post went viral, calls for her to step down grew from leftist Alberta politicians and others. This culminated in her removal as director of the Alberta Catholic School Trustees’ Association (ACSTA).
In September 2023, the RDCRS passed a motion to mandate that LaGrange undergo “LGBTQ+” and holocaust “sensitivity” training for her social media post.
LaGrange, however, refused to apologize for the meme or undergo “sensitivity” training.
She had argued that the RDCRS had no right to issue sanctions against her because they were not based on the Education Act or code of conduct. Arcand-Kootenay did not agree with her, saying code of conduct violations allow for multiple sanctions to be placed against those who violate them.
From the Fraser Institute
The average entrance grade at the University of British Columbia is now 87 per cent, up from 70 per cent only 20 years ago. While this is partly because the supply of available university spots has not kept pace with growing demand, it’s also likely that some B.C. high schools are inflating their students’ grades.
Suppose you’re scheduled for major heart surgery. Shortly before your surgery begins, you check into your surgeon’s background and are pleased to discover your surgeon had a 100 per cent average throughout medical school. But then you learn that every student at the same medical school received 100 per cent in their courses, too. Now you probably don’t feel quite as confident in your surgeon.
This is the ugly reality of “grade inflation” where the achievements of everyone, including the most outstanding students, are thrown into question. Fortunately, grade inflation is (currently) rare in medical schools. But in high schools, it’s a growing problem.
In fact, grade inflation is so prevalent in Ontario high schools that the University of Waterloo’s undergraduate engineering program uses an adjustment factor when evaluating student applications—for example, Waterloo might consider a 95 per cent average from one school the equivalent of an 85 per cent average from another school.
Grade inflation is a problem in other provinces as well. The average entrance grade at the University of British Columbia is now 87 per cent, up from 70 per cent only 20 years ago. While this is partly because the supply of available university spots has not kept pace with growing demand, it’s also likely that some B.C. high schools are inflating their students’ grades.
Sadly, grade inflation is so rampant these days that some school administrators don’t even try to hide it. For example, earlier this year all students at St. Maximilian Kolbe Catholic High School in Aurora, Ontario, received perfect marks on their midterm exams in two biology courses and one business course—not because these students had mastered these subjects but because the York Catholic District School Board had been unable to find a permanent teacher at this school.
The fact that a school board would use grade inflation to compensate for inadequate instruction in high school tells us everything we need to know about the abysmal academic standards in many schools across Canada.
And make no mistake, student academic performance is declining. According to results from the Programme for International Assessment (PISA), math scores across Canada declined from 532 points in 2003 to 497 points in 2022 (PISA equates 20 points to one grade level). In other words, Canadian students are nearly two years behind on their math skills then they were 20 years ago. While their high school marks are going up, their actual performance is going down.
And that’s the rub—far from correcting a problem, grade inflation makes the problem much worse. Students with inflated grades get a false sense of their academic abilities—then experience a rude shock when they discover they aren’t prepared for post-secondary education. (According to research by economists Ross Finnie and Felice Martinello, students with the highest high school averages usually experience the largest drop in grades in university). Consequently, many end up dropping out.
Grade inflation even hurts students who go on to be academically successful because they suffer the indignity of having their legitimate achievements thrown into doubt by the inflated grades of other students. If we want marks to have meaning, we must end the practise of grade inflation. We do our students no favours when we give them marks they don’t really deserve.
Just as our confidence in a surgeon would go down if we found out that every student from the same medical school had a 100 per cent average, so we should also question the value of diplomas from high schools where grade inflation is rampant.
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