Last Updated on: 21st April 2015, 03:42 pm
When you read this comment, what do you think?
“I get to meet with a class of fives on Mon. at Ken Danby. I get to make their little heads explode for 50 minutes, then they go home and tell their parents not to vote. Honestly, this is the best part of the election so far. I’ll learn WAY more from them than they could from me.”
Do you think there’s a guy who’s looking forward to talking to a group of school children on the campaign trail, introducing them perhaps to some new ideas, changing the way they look at the world and what they think they know? Or, like “a concerned citizen”, officials at Ken Danby Public School and the folks at the Upper Grand District School Board, is your first thoughtdear God, this Ray Mitchell character is a maniac who is using violent imagery to threaten our children! We must remove this menace from our property post-haste!?
Seriously, that’s what they did. The guy is running for mayor, and somebody just happened to see that little bit of conversation on Facebook and report him as a threat. School officials, who seem to be in a race to prove that they have less common sense than the wooden shelves to my right and to raise a generation with even less than that, took this information and had him removed from the school mid speech. I’m not sure what’s worse, that or this, from Board spokesperson Maggie McFadzen.
However, McFadzen said “the community was quite up in arms about (the comments),” but then said she wasn’t aware of any complaints from parents prior to Mitchell arriving at the school. And McFadzen said she didn’t know if a parent or member of a rival campaign sent the comments to the school board trustee.
“I’d have to look into that,” she said.
That’s an awful lot not to know before you go around accusing a guy of wanting to blow up a school and proclaiming your organization as the voice of an entire community, none of whom really appeared to care. If you were being flooded with complaints, you’d know.
Whether or not the email that started this mess was sent by somebody working for a rival candidate as some believe I don’t know, but I do know this: These are not the actions of people who care about children. They’re the actions of people who are such lazy parents, teachers and protectors that they’d rathertry to ban dictionaries than explain things they don’t want to explain because it might nurture a child’s curiosity in ways other than those in which they’d like it to be nurtured.I also know that people like this must be stopped. If those responsible for ultimately making this decision were up for election later this month, I’d vote for almost anybody else. Hell, I’d give some serious thought to getting a group of us together to run ourselves. I don’t have kids of my own, but I need to coexist with the ones that other people have, so I care about what happens to them. Over protective parents and a school system that’s afraid of them and everything else are ruining our future with all of this bubble wrapping zero tolerance garbage, and it needs to end.
Ray Mitchell should be welcomed back to that school and into all others, and anybody at all responsible for having him thrown out owes him a public apology and the taxpayers in this city a letter of resignation because clearly, they know not what they’re doing. People with such poor reading comprehension and interpretation skills do not belong around the very people to whom they’re supposed to be teaching those exact things.