Elephant

Well, the Drummond Report was delivered today. That's the one that is supposed to get Ontario out of fiscal difficulty. And despite probably a few good ideas (that I haven't seen yet) he didn't even go near the one many of us have been hoping for: eliminating the division of our Public Education system into Public and "Separate" (read: Catholic i.e. religious). (I actually searched the document for the word "Separate" and didn't get a single incidence.)

To his credit, Drummond went for (full disclosure: us) teachers big time (increase class sizes, make the lazy bastards work longer) but he didn't have the b*lls guts to suggest elimination of the parallel publicly funded Separate School System. This duplication of service and competition between two publicly funded entities providing the same service in the same locations is LUDICROUS! Every other province has done away with it. The UN says we shouldn't have it. Yet it remains the elephant in the room that no one wants to talk about. Does anyone fund religiously based schools in this day and age? Besides maybe the Taliban?

In our city we are dealing with fallout from this situation right now. We are faced with the closure of a city public high school due to "declining enrollment" while our city Separate (again, read: Catholic i.e. religious) schools are overcrowded (10+portables at one, a recent multi-million dollar addition to ease overcrowding at the other).

Ok. I'm going to stop ranting about this now before I get really steamed. Let's just say, I need to revisit my happy post from last week. The one with the BEER!


*(Decided to change the title of this post - too sexist before - presuming that testicles are required for making tough decisions. Ha!)