(Vancouver Courier, March 16)
Two weeks ago, I wrote about a book-banning effort in Vancouver public schools led by the district’s so-called Diversity Team, a six-member troop of bureaucrats operating out of the school board building on West Broadway.
In its 27-page “planning tool” for elementary school teachers, the Diversity Team includes a censorship checklist, that if followed, would empty school libraries of classic children’s literature. Crafted by a lobbying group from California, the checklist’s narrow definition of the acceptable deems most books “published before 1973” as racist or sexist. For that column, I was harshly criticized—not by Diversity Team advocates (if there is such a thing), but by teacher-librarians including Moira Ekdahl, the district’s teacher-librarian mentor, who bristled at any suggestion of officially sanctioned censorship.
“There are no books being banned in Vancouver,” repeated Ekdahl, during an interview last week. “That’s nothing that I would ever want said on my watch.”
According to Ekdahl, she’s never been contacted by the Diversity Team about removing books from school libraries. However, after my column revealed the team’s censorship checklist, Ekdahl contacted the team. Future discussion about book guidelines, she said, must involve local teacher-librarians. “Any set of guidelines is worth discussion, but I think we need to own them ourselves, they need to be Vancouver-created.”
That’s sweet music to anyone who favours local control of public education.
Yet despite Ekdahl’s passion for literary freedom, school libraries remain vulnerable to the molesting hands of ideologues.
In 2009, retired teacher-librarian Val Hamilton sent a letter to the Courier describing those halcyon days when she ruled Vancouver school libraries at Carleton elementary and elsewhere. “When I took over a school library, the first part I weeded was the religion section,” remembered Hamilton. “I removed the Bible stories, in one school it was several dozen, and replaced them with a large selection of books explaining the various religions in the world.”
I visited Carleton last Friday afternoon. Hamilton’s legacy remains intact. The Carleton library is Bible-free.
Of course, a strict line must separate religious belief from secular instruction. But when embracing diversity in the student population, religious books, with their broad impact on culture and identity, must be included among protected texts.
Where’s the Diversity Team on that one? Lord knows they’ve got the time and the money.
Formed in 2005, the Diversity Team enjoys staunch support from the Vision-dominated school board. This school year, its budget is $762,495 with $535,866 paid by taxpayers and $226,629 in grants. Citing policy, the district refused to reveal salaries for the current school year. However, last school year team leader Lisa Pedrini made $99,031 while Jan Sippel, the team’s abuse prevention coordinator, raked in $80,603. Mary Filleul, who joined the team in December 2010, made $97,006 last school year as a teacher. She works two days a week as the team’s anti-racism consultant and spends the rest of the week teaching.
During a typical school week, team members, including anti-homophobia consultant Steve Mulligan, work under the radar, instructing teachers, modelling lesson plans and promoting books and other classroom tools.
Meanwhile, teacher-librarians are spread thin throughout the district. Since 2001, when the B.C. Liberals vowed to make British Columbia the “most literate jurisdiction in North America,” Vancouver schools have lost 20 per cent of their teacher-librarians. Only seven of the district’s 91 elementary schools employ fulltime teacher-librarians, forcing teachers to navigate library shelves and the ever-growing online bank of learning resources. Reading campaigns suffer. Books gather dust. And so on.
Critics point to provincial cuts in education, but considering the tax dollars wasted on the Diversity Team—more than half a million this school year alone—that argument rings hollow. The priorities of the school board, led by board chair Patti Bacchus, require swift adjustment.
Diversity is organic and self-evident. It flows in school hallways, marshalled by teachers, fostered by parents. The Diversity Team believes in diversity like the B.C. Human Rights Tribunal, another organization based on the sensibilities of a few, believes in human rights. When endorsing the narrow while proclaiming inclusion, the team enshrines hypocrisy in the school district canon.
How twisted, that we bankroll a small band of meddling activists while school libraries, where kids encounter genuine records of freedom and harmony, struggle to stay relevant.
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