Ontario’s new sex ed curriculum was protested in dozens of locations Wednesday, including at the office of Kitchener Centre MPP Daiene Vernile.
About 10 people gathered outside the Liberal MPP’s office to voice their displeasure with the curriculum, which takes effect with the coming school year.
“It’s too explicit, too soon,” said Bill Barrett, who said he has grandchildren in elementary school and wants to see them pulled out of sex ed classes.
“The parents should be the first ones in charge of the teaching of their children – not the school.”
Barrett took issue with parts of the curriculum that he claimed “encourage” children to masturbate and use condoms.
The Waterloo Region District School Board has said it will make “reasonable efforts to accommodate students” whose parents object to their children being taught the new curriculum, but will not allow any student to be “fully exempt” from learning it.
While specifics of those accommodations may vary from school board to school board, the director of education at the Peel Region District School Board said Thursday that there was one specific part of the curriculum he didn’t want to see any students exempted from.
Tony Pontes told reporters that parents wanting their children not to learn about same-sex families or diverse gender identities would not have that wish granted.
Jenny Collins, one of the protestors in Kitchener, said she doesn’t want her children to be taught those concepts – and plans to pull them out of the classroom.
“It takes a man and a woman to make a baby. That’s the way God made it,” she said.
“A child should be brought up in that kind of environment.”
Collins also called it “absolutely ludicrous” that parents were given only a few months’ notice of the new curriculum.
A WRDSB spokesperson says that parents with concerns about the lessons should take their issues up with their child’s teacher.
