A school in Toronto’s Parkdale area has decided to completely remove Grade 12 students’ yearbook quotes after some of them wrote political messages, and the Toronto District School Board (TDSB) says more schools could follow suit.
The Parkdale Collegiate Institute (Parkdale CI) in Toronto’s west-end had warned students back in March about writing political comments in the yearbook, after some high school seniors wrote“Free Palestine” and “Free Tibet” as their quotes, according to The Star.
According to media reports, at the time, the school principal had told students that they should change the language in the messages to say “Palestine for Palestinians” or “I love Tibet.”
But even after doing that, TDSB’s senior members, Human Rights, Legal, and Communications departments met with the school’s administration to discuss the situation.
On Thursday, a TDSB spokesperson told Now Toronto that during the meeting, the school decided to exclude all yearbook quotes, leaving the designated space blank to allow students to manually sign messages.
“After careful discussion, it has been decided that, in the interest of fairness, no grad comments will be included in this year’s yearbook,” they said in an email statement. “The space originally designated for comments will remain blank and we will provide students time before graduation to sign and leave messages in each other’s yearbooks in that blank space.”
According to the spokesperson, the decision was based on a Ministry of Education memo released last September, which outlines rules around political statements in schools, including that “schools and school-related activities should never be used as vehicles for political protests that enable inflammatory, discriminatory, and hateful content.”
The memo was issued by the former Ontario Education Minister Jill Dunlop, and aims to protect students after it was reported that racism, antisemitism and Islamophobia spiked following the beginning of the Israel-Palestine conflict.
“The intention with grad comments is not to censor students or silence their identities, but rather to align with the Ministry of Education’s guidelines. However, we recognize that the Ministry’s statement may disproportionately impact equity-seeking groups,” the spokesperson said.
Meanwhile, the TDSB says Parkdale CI is not the first, and will probably not be the last school in the region to remove yearbook quotes after the memo.
Last week, students at Ursula Franklin Academy (UFA) in the west end walked out of class after the school covered yearbook photos of two students who were wearing Palestinian keffiyehs, according to media reports.
Even though the school said the cover-up was a mistake, the TDSB then told TorontoToday that they decided to do that for political reasons.
Now, the TDSB tells Now Toronto that more schools might decide to remove yearbook quotes, following the Ministry’s memo.
“We are not the first school to make this decision, and after consulting with other administrators, we believe this approach may become more common across schools,” a spokesperson said.
The board says that it believes at this time this is the best way schools can comply with the ministry, while still allowing students to express themselves by manually adding comments.
