Waterloo Region District School Board (WRDSB) trustee Mike Ramsay says he is the victim of a “radical left NDP group of trustees” who don’t like that he was re-elected and speaks his mind.
“The school trustee game of thrones continues. This complaint is about something I supposedly said in meetings and on a radio show years ago,” he wrote. “Don’t we have something better to do? Like govern a school board?”
He suggested that if citizens felt another $10,000 investigation was “a great use” of taxpayer money, they could send a “polite and civil” message to the chair of the WRDSB board, Joanne Weston.
Mr. Ramsay wrote that there is “no merit to this latest complaint” and that there are some trustees on the board who “simply refuses to accept the results of the October 2022 election,” which returned Mr. Ramsay to his role as trustee for another term.
‘Challenging Times’
On Aug. 3, Mr. Ramsay shared an opinion article on his situation by a Waterloo Region Record columnist that provides details of the new allegations made against him by the WRDSB, a little over a month after the school board was in court on a previous legal action brought by the public school trustee.One of the new allegations is that in February 2022, Mr. Ramsay read out part of a tweet sent by a board employee who made derogatory comments about white people. He did not name the employee but asked if it was appropriate behaviour for school board employees.
In addition, Mr. Ramsay came under fire for his guest appearance on a radio talk show in 2020, which allegedly involved an upcoming decision by the school board on whether or not to keep police officers in schools. During the show, Mr. Ramsay said he disagreed with removing police from schools and stated that there were others with different opinions on the issue.
Mr. Ramsay told The Epoch Times on Aug. 6 that, per his legal team, he cannot make further comment beyond his statement. “These are very challenging times,” he said.
Investigations
The new complaint is one of the latest that have been levied against Mr. Ramsey in recent years. In a July 20, 2022, opinion piece he published in the Waterloo Region Record, he said he found lesson plans on “White privilege,” distributed by the Elementary Teachers’ Federation of Ontario, to be “troubling.”Mr. Ramsay said he and fellow trustees had heard from “hundreds” of parents about concerns over “critical race theory.” He wrote, “They legitimately fear their children are being taught that if they’re white then they’re racist, and if they don’t agree that they’re racist because they’re white, then they’re doubly racist.”
He said that he tried to address the concern along with another trustee, raising a motion for school board staff to provide “a detailed account of what students were being taught.”
In response, he said six trustees voted to remove him from all meetings from June until the end of September 2022.
“The reality is that I often challenge ‘woke’ claims and initiatives. Most trustees see me as the wrong kind of black man. They don’t like my politics. They think that because I’m black and don’t sign on to critical race theory and ‘white privilege,’ I’m some kind of race traitor,” Mr. Ramsay said.
According to the trustee, colleagues on the board suggested that even bringing the motion forward “had done harm.”
