Education is no place for segregation

In August of 2025 I wrote a letter to the editor Titled “ Dear Mr. Bailey ” In that letter I addressed the issues I was seeing with the school system and the hardships my family was having trying to navigate an underfunded system.

In August of 2025 I wrote a letter to the editor Titled “Dear Mr. Bailey” In that letter I addressed the issues I was seeing with the school system and the hardships my family was having trying to navigate an underfunded system. Here we are over a year later without a response to any of my attempts to reach our MPP and nothing has changed, if anything the situation has gotten worse.

A local paper recently reported that the provincial government refuses to provide transportation funding for First Nations students attending Lambton-Kent schools. And then I woke up this morning to a report that the Minister of Education is discussing bringing back the old exclusion model for educating children with disabilities. I want to be very clear with what this is- It is segregation and it is wrong. Children from Aamjiwnaang deserve an education without barriers and children with disabilities deserve an education without barriers. The only thing currently preventing either group of children from participating in school is the government refusing funding.

My child has a disability, he also loves school, he loves math and science, and he thinks English is boring. When he grows up, he wants to be an Engineer like his uncle and he deserves the same chance as anyone else to achieve that goal but because the school doesn’t have enough EAs and therapists he is often sent home which puts him further and further behind his peers. The Ministers new grading criteria that include attendance will negatively impact him not because he does not want to be in class but because he does not have the support he needs to be in class. It will also negatively impact students who are not able to get to school because there is no safe transportation for them to get to school.

This is not the staff’s fault, it is not the union’s fault, it is not the local board’s fault, it is not the trustee’s fault, and it is not the parents or the student’s fault. Fault lays directly in the hands of our Government and the Minister of Education. They have stripped funding, stripped trustee power, stripped boards of their autonomy and now they are forcing our education workers into a strike by refusing to bargain fairly.

The education Unions have integration models that I believe are what our children actually need, they are fighting to better support all children in the classrooms. The workers are fighting for all our children; they are fighting alongside parents. The government wants parents to blame schools and the schools to blame parents, but we need to stand shoulder to shoulder with the teams who actually help us raise these kids and tell the government enough is enough.

No Segregation in Ontario schools. Education is not a game; it is not their toy it is the future of our entire society.

–  Anna Gollen