Our Secular School System

Pam FitzGerald, trustee for Zone 5 with the Ottawa Carleton District School Board is not a happy person. She sees the secular nature of Ottawa's public schools evaporating quietly with no one but herself seeming to notice that religious groups have managed to breach the no-religion-in-schools compact. She had entered a motion calling on board staff to formally outline procedures in place with respect to religious services in public schools, with disappearing results.

In fact, the province's Education Act does clarify the issue unequivocally, stating "a board shall not permit any person to conduct religious exercises or to provide instruction that includes indoctrination in a particular religion or religious belief in a school." Fairly clear-cut and obvious. Its position being to ensure that there will be no encroachment by any religious entity into the secular nature of the public schools of Ontario.

People were aware a short while back that in Toronto a controversy erupted over Toronto's Valley Park Middle School, which had made accommodation for religious services led by an imam to take place, during the school day, thus disrupting regular classes, and bringing religion into an arena where it did not belong, by decree of secular law.

Trustee FitzGerald also wished to see a review of the board's pastoral care program, enabling clergy or designated representatives from faith communities into high schools for the purpose of counselling students on personal, social or spiritual matters. Is this really appropriate, for such activities to take place in a secular school setting?

Trustees voted 8 to 4 to defeat the first part of Ms. FitzGerald's motion directing staff to prepare a policies-detailing report outlining current procedures with respect to religious services held within schools, during school hours - for the purpose of ensuring that all schools within the Board respect the provincial law on this matter. How they justify their response to her reasonable request is baffling.

The pastoral care program will, however, be reviewed, and a report anticipated some time later in the school year. Ms. FitzGerald is understandably upset at this turn of events. Presumably she anticipated that her motion would be welcomed. It does reflect the law, after all, and while accommodation is well and fine, what currently obtains goes against the grain of secular schooling.

"When we allow a minister, rabbi or imam into our schools to conduct religious services during the school day, we bring in the thin edge of a wedge. Other religions rightly ask to hold religious services in our secular schools and this is precisely what happened at Toronto's Valley Park Middle School. We may also find it increasingly difficult to say no to future requests for religious based schools housed under the public board's umbrella. If and when this comes to pass, say goodbye to the greatness of our secular public schools as parents flock to ensure that their children's religious training is met during the school day."

She is quite correct, and right to be upset. She cites three schools currently in the Board's purview where religious services similar to the ones led at Toronto's Valley Park Middle School take place in Ottawa: Longfields-Davidson Heights Secondary School, Bell High School and Brookfield High School. And she states that it is her belief that there are other schools also which permit imams to enter and provide Islamic services and instruction.

What she seems to overlook is that Ontario already errs hugely in allowing Catholic religious schools to exist, and to do so under a separate Catholic School Board. This long tradition of accommodating Catholicism alongside a secular school system is one that other provinces have shed, but not Ontario. And obviously, if Catholics can have their separate religious schools, people of other faiths feel entitled to their own as well.

The presence of the Catholic separate school system is the thin edge of the wedge. Hugely unfair and disruptive to the concept of equality in education in a secular society.

Ontario should, in all fairness and justice, dissolve the Catholic school board and merge the two school systems. There is at the present time, as a result of having two boards throughout the province, much redundancy, and additional costs relating to maintaining both. Logically one school system should prevail, and one only. Which would ensure equal treatment for all.

And isn't that, in the final analysis, what we're about? Offering a standard curriculum under a sole system should be the goal, all the more so now that the province is entering a belt-tightening stage.

But a moral imperative as well.