{"id":23516,"date":"2019-04-11T20:35:15","date_gmt":"2019-04-12T00:35:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/?p=23516"},"modified":"2019-04-18T12:25:56","modified_gmt":"2019-04-18T16:25:56","slug":"students-demand-change-in-province-wide-walkout","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/students-demand-change-in-province-wide-walkout\/","title":{"rendered":"Students demand change in province-wide walkout"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

By Brock Weir<\/b><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Riley Maniscalco has dreams of attending law school.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As a Grade 11 student at St. Maximilian Kolbe Catholic\nHigh School, it\u2019s crunch time to make sure she has the courses in the year\nahead to lay the foundations of a successful post-secondary career, but Riley\nsays she feels she\u2019s at a crossroads \u2013 as did hundreds of students across\nAurora taking part in a province-wide walkout last Thursday afternoon to oppose\nsweeping changes to the Provincial Government\u2019s approach to education. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThis is very important to me because I am a big believer\nin a strong and good education, and I am here not just for myself and my fellow\nstudents, but for all the ones to come because it is going to effect all the\nfuture students of Ontario.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One of her main concerns, she said, was the cancellation\nof free tuition in favour of a reformed OSAP system, which has put an emphasis\nback on loans as opposed to the grant system put in place by the previous\ngovernment. \u201cI would be an OSAP recipient and the fact [Premier Doug Ford] is\ncutting down on the family income to be even lower and taking away the\nsix-month grace period, which would mean I would start collecting interest and\nI would have to start paying bills the second I graduate school, really worries\nme because I am already going to be in a lot of debt. Not having that grace\nperiod is definitely very concerning. If I don\u2019t have OSAP, I don\u2019t really know\nwhat I\u2019ll be doing.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Riley was not alone; concerns over OSAP funding were a\nfamiliar refrain from students across Town, and were added to a list that\nincluded worries about class sizes, a mandatory shift towards e-learning for\nmultiple high school courses, as well as cuts to arts and special education\nprograms and supports. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI am out here as much for the students as for the\nteachers,\u201d shared Cory Mueller, a Grade 9 student at Dr. G.W. Williams\nSecondary School, who moved their protest from outside their school to the\ncorner of Yonge and Dunning. \u201cThis is classic just cutting of funding for\nreally important things such as education and health. We are the next\ngeneration and there are a lot of people who are being singled out by this:\narts are getting singled out, individual teachers are going to get laid off.\nWhether you believe it or not, that is how it is going to happen. Larger class\nsizes means that teachers aren\u2019t going to be able to connect enough with their\nstudents and classes aren\u2019t going to be able to get the support they actually\nneed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cOriginally, we were told not to protest. Our walkout for\nour school was called off by our principal, but we were able to get it started\njust at the corner.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Taylor Lindsay, a Grade 10 student at Williams, added she\nwas out to protest cuts to the Special Education programs. Taylor said she has\nan IEP \u2013 an Individualized Education Program \u2013 to help her through certain\nsubjects and she didn\u2019t want the IEPs cut along with Educational Assistants and\nsupport teachers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI need certain accommodations to help me in math and\nEnglish,\u201d she said. \u201cIn Grade 3, I ended up having trouble and I ended up not\ngetting help until Grade 6. I don\u2019t want that to be lost in high school because\npeople need help in certain areas.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Williams students were joined by at least two\nstudents from a feeder school, Regency Acres Public School, who said they were\ntrying to send a message, speaking out in particular about changes to the\nhealth and sex ed curriculum which, they said, they believed was \u201csending a\nmessage that LGBTQ really doesn\u2019t matter\u201d and was reminiscent of the 1940s, and\nlarger class sizes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Larger class sizes was another top-of-mind issue over at\nSt. Max. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThis is our future,\u201d said Grade 12 student Sathana\nSurendran. \u201cStudents only make up 20 per cent of the world right now, but we\nare 100 per cent of the future. How are we supposed to have a future when all\nof these cuts are made to our education? [What\u2019s most concerning] is making\nfour classes mandatory online. I think when you\u2019re in high school and\nelementary school, your fundamentals are built. When you\u2019re being taught\nonline, you don\u2019t get those fundamentals. You need to be strong and you need\nstrong learning; without those teachers and people supporting you, you don\u2019t\nnecessarily get that.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Added Grade 9 student Austin Fortia, \u201cI think Ford\u2019s cuts\nare kind of stupid, like e-learning and increasing class sizes. Some kids need\na teacher to learn. It cuts the one-on-one time. Kids aren\u2019t even going to be\nable to ask questions.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

While Christopher Hillmer, Principal of Dr. G.W.\nWilliams, refused any and all questions related to Thursday\u2019s walkout,\nPrincipal Peter Parente offered some insight as he kept a watchful eye on\nstudents from just outside St. Max\u2019s Wellington Street entrance. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cMy main goal as Principal of the school is to ensure the\nsafety of my students and that they do what they intend to do to exercise their\ndemocratic right peacefully \u2013 and that they\u2019re safe above all else. We did\nspeak with our student leaders and our teachers who oversee student Council to\nremind them about what a peaceful protest looks like, to be particularly\nmindful of traffic along Wellington Street, to ensure they stay well back of\nthe road so they can be safe.\u201d<\/p>\n\r\n\"Facebook\"<\/a>\"twitter\"<\/a>\"mail\"<\/a>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Teens staged walkout Thursday afternoon to protest changes to Ontario’s Education system.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":23505,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-23516","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-general_news","category-news"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/04\/2019-04-11-01.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3D2k4-67i","publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-04-15 16:51:36","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23516","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23516"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23516\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/23505"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23516"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23516"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23516"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}