Peel District School Board continues to fulfill Ministry mandates to ensure equity audit tools for 2023

BY PAUL JUNOR

It has been over two years since the Ministry of Education fired its former Director, Peter Joshua, and appointed Supervisor Bruce Rodrigues to oversee the operations of the board. After the Ministry of Education’s report came up with eighteen Ministry Directives, the PDSB has been gradually implementing them. One of the important mandates relates to a comprehensive diversity audit of schools, which includes naming, mascots, libraries, and classrooms. There was an update on the board’s progress toward the implementation of three equity tools at its monthly meeting, which was held on December 14^th, 2022.

The equity audit tool is an important mechanism that school administrators and personnel within the schools will be able to utilize to ensure that there is a rigorous review of practices that have resulted in the formation of systemic barriers that have impacted students’ overall academic performance and well-being. The removal of these structural factors is crucial to ensuring that the learning environment is equitable, inclusive, accepting, welcoming conducive to the success of all students. There was an announcement that the deadline for it to be completed was June 2023.

There will be a three-step process for the implementation of schools’ audit with respect to School Library Learning Commons that is expected to be finalized by September.

The three-step process are:

• Equity informed weeding of collections to remove damaged, outdated, uncirculated resources.
• An anti-racist and inclusion audit of collections to ensure resources, especially text and images do not perpetuate negative stereotypes and promote deficit thinking.
• A representation audit of the collection to identify voices, identities, and perspectives that are overrepresented and those who are missing.

The Mississauga News reported in an article on Thursday, January 6^th, 2023, that Bernadette Smith, Superintendent of Innovation and Research of the PDSB noted that there will be differences in terms of which books are removed from specified schools as there is no list currently in place of banned books. Individual schools will make the

decisions about which books to remove and which ones to retain. She states, “which books remain, which are appropriate, and which are not will very be based on the three-step process In addition, a school naming, mascots, and logos audit tool is currently being worked on that will give educators the mechanism to evaluate images and representation in PDSB schools. This will enable teaching staff to critically examine how schools’ identities can be redesigned using anti-colonial and anti-racist paradigms to redress historical harm.”

There has been much progress in the PDSB for 2022. It released its new Anti-Racism Policy on Wednesday, June 22^nd, as well as the “Black Student Success Strategy: We Rise Together 2.0”. The timeline for the actionable steps extends from 2022-2027 for the BSSS and there are accountability frameworks embedded in it. On November 22^nd, it launched the Centre for Indigenous Excellence and Land-Based Learning which will officially open in September 2023. There are great expectations and hopes for what the PDSB’s Black Students Centre of Excellence will look like which it plans to unveil in 2023.

The Black community in Peel will continue to stay alert and informed of how the PDSB continues to fulfill the remaining Ministerial directives of the 27 mandated by the Ministry of Education. Anyone interested in staying abreast of the PDSB can check:

Website:https:www.peelschool.org

Twitter:@PeelSchools

Facebook:Peel District School Board

Instagram:@peelschools