Sex ed protests called 'offensive, upsetting,' by teacher
An elementary school teacher in Windsor calls the public protest of the new sex ed curriculum "offensive" and "upsetting."
"I find it offensive on a couple levels. On a personal level, I find it off putting. As a Canadian, I find it hard to swallow," said Jim Reid, a Grade 4 teacher at Central elementary school. "I find it really upsetting that parents would pull their students out of class and miss valuable instruction time, not just in sex ed, but in literacy, and reading, and science and art, over this."
Eight of 26 students in Reid's class were pulled from class in protest of the new material, he said.
Come September, teachers across Ontario will have a revamped sexual-education curriculum that brings the province up to date with the rest of the country and no longer leaves them "in the dark."
Ontario's curriculum hadn't been renewed since 1998, making it the oldest in Canada.
Key components of the new curriculum include education about consent, sexting, sharing explicit content online, sexual orientation and gender identity.
Thousands of parents across Ontario pulled their kids out of school this week in protest of the curriculum that the Minister of Education Liz Sandals vowed will be in place come fall.
Some parents say that the new sex ed curriculum is not appropriate, not age-appropriate and does not conform with some religious views.
"We're not against the school or teachers. We know how to teach our kids about sex. Why break the innocence in the child? We are the parents. We know what's good for the kids," Bassim Alhamadwi said Tuesday during a protest at Northwood elementary school in Windsor.
That protest drew hundreds of people who had kids attending various schools in at least three different school boards.
Reid said teachers would never present anything that they thought would harm students.
"If a parent trusts me to teach their children and take care of their children for five or six hours a day every day, who better to talk to them about this kind of stuff?" he said.
In 25 years of teaching, Ried said a parent has never once discussed sex ed curriculum with him.
He said the current curriculum is "very out of date" and "very much in need of revamping."
"The changes that are coming are really very small. It's a tweaking that's very much required," Reid said.
Reid said the new curriculum will be a very small piece of the overall health and physical education curriculum. He estimates he can teach the new material in 100 minutes of class time.
"You look at that in terms of the entire school and it's about 1000th of what I teach. We're talking something so small, you wouldn't even know it was missing," Reid said. "The students pulled from my class are missing a whole bunch of pieces. It doesn't make any sense to me."
Reid said now is not the time to protest.
"If they're really serious and they want to withdraw their children, the time to do that, after talking to me and consulting, is when it's being taught," he said. "What they're doing is throwing the baby out with the bathwater."
