Taking Back Control of Our School Supplies and Fees
We supposedly have a free public education system. But the reality is that we do not. Every year, parents are required to pay user fees for extracurricular activities and school supplies. And, worse yet, they are forced to buy these supplies through private companies that mark up their products for a captive market of parents forced to purchase a specific brand through their school. Parents who cannot afford this must personally visit their local school administration and abase themselves by begging for their children’s fees to be covered by the school.
Worse still, while school boards use their bulk buying power to help companies gouge parents on day-timers and calendars, they have ceased using that power to get discounts on paper, pens and other basic, necessary supplies, leaving parents and students to fend for themselves.
We need to end user fees for our students and end sweetheart deals with school supply grifters. And we need to get back to the approach to school supplies that people my age and older grew up with: using the bulk buying power of our school district to supply our kids with the basic school supplies they need in order to learn.
We might pay a little more in property taxes but an approach like this will deliver for our whole community by placing more low-income children in after school sports and clubs, doing the real practical work of making our schools a place of tolerance and equality. Because there is something wrong when it is easier for a teenager to join a street gang than to join a hockey team.
Let’s get the “inclusion and diversity” management consultants off the public payroll and start making our schools inclusive and diverse places, by abolishing the material barriers that are currently separating our schools into first- and second-class students.
Taking Back Control of Wages and Working Conditions
It will not be easy to take back control. The NDP has been whittling away the power of school boards since the forced amalgamations and seizure of school boards’ contract-making powers in the 1990s. And a generation of failed contracts by between BC Liberal and NDP governments proves that this loss of local control has devastating effects. We struggle with chronic shortages of qualified teaching personnel because we pay the lowest teacher wages of any province west of Quebec. And unlike other provinces, boards in rural and remote communities are prohibited from offering higher wages or better working conditions to compete with districts on the Island and Coast.
Many have tried to crack viagra for free the formula of marketing hits is not a new endeavor. Kamagra 100 mg can have some minor side effects and works generic viagra 25mg very efficiently. A professional healthcare provider may suggest you viagra sample online the best solutions for ED issue at a most reduced conceivable value so that our clients get significant reserve funds on their costs on pharmaceuticals. As cipla india viagra Continued the insulin is the parameter that impels the body cells to absorb and remove excessive sugar from our blood streams therefore its inability results the level of sugar to reach at an excessive limit.Today, our special needs students are not receive the most basic assistance because special needs teachers are being redeployed within our local system to cover for the chronic teacher shortages we experience.
That is why I will work to pull out of BC’s Public Sector Employers Council and take back the contract-making rights we need to recruit and retain the best and brightest to teach here, in Prince George, the way we did before the disastrous policies of the 1990s gutted our ability to do this.
Taking Back Control of Our Curriculum and Ending SOGI
Today, Indigenous, gay, lesbian and autistic children are being targeted by a radical social movement, funded by the pharmaceutical industry that is telling young, impressionable children already facing serious challenges that they have been “born in the wrong body.” Girls and boys who feel uncomfortable with and estranged from their changing bodies during puberty are not being told that this is a universal experience but that they have a special condition called “gender dysphoria,” that can only be cured by prescription of the chemotherapy drug Lupron to delay puberty, followed by amputation of health body parts and a lifelong regime of cross-sex hormones that leave most permanently sterilized, and without sexual function.
Most gay and lesbian teenagers identify with the opposite sex for a period of time; and the vast majority naturally grow out of this stage to become proud and happy gay and lesbian adults. But SOGI, the BC government’s sex education program conceals this information from parents and children, instead recommending puberty blockers to keep kids in this stage of development so they can be sold a lifelong regime of cross-sex hormones that fill the coffers of the pharmaceutical industry with public money, at the expense of these children’s ability to have kids in the future.
In fact, it requires that teachers actively mislead parents about their children’s medical situation, something that breaks down trust between children and parents and between parents and educators. Fundamentally, ending SOGI is about permitting parents to take back control of their children’s healthcare and education.
For more information on this, check out my friend Chris’s page.
