FEATURED HEADLINE
A photograph of a staff slide from a 14 September 2026 all-staff meeting at an unidentified York Region District School Board elementary school. The slide told teachers to accept that the institution of education is an instrumental tool for maintaining and furthering the ideology of white supremacy and to dismantle the structures and systems of white supremacy rather than debate whether those “lived realities” exist. Jonathan Kay received the image from a teacher. The school was not named. The principal was not named. YRDSB did not answer National Post when asked if the slide was authentic. Tristin Hopper wrote the column. The people who clicked present that morning were allowed to vanish behind “a York Region elementary school.” That is how you run material you know the public will hate.
Bill Cober is Director of Education and CEO. The professional learning, school improvement plans, and equity implementation sit under him. Ron Lynn is Board Chair. Trustees hire the director and set the direction. Neither man has to put his name on the local slide because the local slide is kept anonymous while the ideology is treated as board policy. Cecil Roach spent more than a decade as Coordinating Superintendent and then Associate Director of Equitable Outcomes and Schools until he retired in September 2023. He built Inclusive School and Community Services, drove the Dismantling Anti-Black Racism Strategy, and helped install the language that now appears on staff projectors: colonial ideology, staff as carriers of supremacy, dismantle the structures. Ron Lynn called that work a lasting and indelible legacy. Darcie Sutherland was appointed Principal of Inclusive School and Community Services to coordinate DABRS implementation and “racial literacy” training. Louise Sirisko, as earlier Director, launched the DABRS in 2021 as a coordinated effort. Tana Turner of Turner Consulting Group helped write the DABRS. Latoya Reid of ReiDefine Consultancy led work on the 2024 Dismantling Hate and Oppression framework, which told the board that schools are shot through with colonial ideology and that staff are unwitting purveyors of white supremacy. ETFO published its own anti-oppressive primer telling members they work in an inherently oppressive system they must dismantle. The unnamed principal did not invent this. Cober, Lynn, Roach, Sutherland, Sirisko, Turner, and Reid built the pipeline.
Cecil Roach’s public pay record is an embarrassment in its own right. Ontario’s Sunshine List shows $269,852.99 in 2016 as Coordinating Superintendent of Equity and Community Services, a spike against $197,354.18 in 2015 and $190,920.11 in 2017. Later years sat in the high $190,000s to low $220,000s. In 2023 he was paid $210,850.54. In November 2016 he wrote an internal letter accusing senior leadership of cancelling equity initiatives and mishandling Ghada Sadaka, the Markham principal whose Facebook posts were called Islamophobic. He said he feared reprisal and consulted a lawyer first. He was also moved onto student-discipline work around that period. He did not blow the whistle against the ideology. He demanded more of it. He stayed, rose, and left with the apparatus intact. That is not accountability. That is a well-paid official locking a school system into a doctrine that now tells working teachers they serve white supremacy.
The board’s older record is worse, not better. In 2017 Education Minister Mitzie Hunter ordered a review after trustee Nancy Elgie used a racial slur toward a parent and after Ghada Sadaka’s posts. Investigators Patrick Case and Sue Herbert found a culture of fear, trustees who lacked a basic understanding of their jobs, a disturbing lack of accountability, and selective use of the code of conduct as intimidation. They wrote that the board used the code to force a racialized trustee to apologize for saying “white privilege,” while no trustee brought a complaint when another trustee used a racist term about a parent. Director J. Philip Parappally apologized for hardship he had a role in causing and was removed. The equity machine that expanded after that scandal is the same machine producing 2026 staff slides. Charline Grant took the board to the Human Rights Tribunal over racism involving her children and later watched trustees spend an estimated $177,000 on a byelection rather than appoint her as runner-up after Anna DeBartolo resigned. Elizabeth Terrell-Tracey was elected trustee amid accusations of xenophobic comments about opponent Lena Singh. This is not a clean institution that briefly lost its way. It is a board with a documented habit of protecting itself.
The money story is the same contempt. Freedom-of-information work reported by Juno News found at least $2.89 million invoiced by twelve Ontario public and Catholic boards to equity, anti-racism, and related consultants between 2017 and 2026, about 85 percent of it from 2021 to 2025. Nicole West-Burns received $889,103. Isaac Murdoch received $570,782. Those two names took more than half of the documented spend. Durham paid West-Burns the majority of its consultant total. While that industry was paid, YRDSB moved to cut front-line people. In May 2026 CUPE 1734 said the board planned to cut up to 249 positions, including more than 201 educational assistants, 36 secretarial and administrative staff, six IT workers, and six library technicians. Michelle Campbell called it a student-safety and human-rights issue. The board talked about declining enrolment. Community groups using gyms on weeknights watched permits jump from about $715 to more than $5,400, an increase parents described as an 800 percent cash grab including a parking charge over $600 on nights when custodians were already in the building. That is what “serving the public” looks like when the public is treated as a problem to be managed.
The hiding of the school name is the tell. If the slide were ordinary professional development, the building would be identified and the principal would answer questions. It is not identified because the text is indefensible in daylight. Staff were not even made to recite it; it was styled as an “agreement,” which is a bureaucratic way of planting a loyalty statement without the risk of a recorded chant. Teachers who object are already living inside documents that treat disagreement as denial of lived reality. The leaker stayed anonymous because retaliation is a rational fear in a system that spent years calling dissent a form of supremacy. Cober and Lynn can praise inclusion in welcome letters. They will not put a school name under a slide that tells employees their workplace exists to further white supremacy. That is not humility. That is contempt for the parents and taxpayers who pay the $1.8 billion operating budget and send the children.
Bill Cober, Ron Lynn, Cecil Roach, Darcie Sutherland, Louise Sirisko, Tana Turner, Latoya Reid, Nicole West-Burns, Isaac Murdoch, J. Philip Parappally, Nancy Elgie, Ghada Sadaka, Elizabeth Terrell-Tracey, Mitzie Hunter’s investigators Case and Herbert, ETFO’s authors, and the still-unnamed elementary principal and whoever ran that 14 September meeting are the chain. The public did not ask for this. The public is not allowed the school name. The salaries, frameworks, consultant invoices, staff cuts, and gym-fee shock are public. If any of those people are angry at being named, that is the cost of doing this work with other people’s children and other people’s money.
LIKE OUR WORK?
Recent Comments