Dozens of students from a Toronto public elementary school skipped class on Friday to protest their right to year-end report cards.
Friday's rally comes one day after the Toronto District School Board announced students won't be sent home with full report cards at the end of the term. Instead, teachers will be handing out placement letters indicating whether students have passed or failed.
"I think it's unfair we don't get to know how we did," Grade 7 student Carly Manis told CTV Toronto. "We worked so hard this year, we studied every day – to not get a report card back, it's like we did it for nothing."
Manis was one of dozens of protesting students who gathered outside Glenview Senior Public and outside Premier Kathleen Wynne's office on Friday morning, chanting "We want report cards, we want report cards." Others also held placards protesting their "right" to report cards.
Students who skipped class on Friday said they were sending a message to the TDSB and the teachers' union.
"We want to show people we have a voice," one protesting student said. "We have a voice, we want to be heard."
According to Glenview’s acting principal, Jennie Ucar, the protesting students later returned to class at approximately 1 p.m.
“Today, about 50 of our students participated in a demonstration to express their views about the recently announced decision on report cards,” Ucar said Friday in a letter addressed to parents. “To be clear, this was not a school or TDSB-sanctioned event.”
In April, the Elementary Teachers' Federation of Ontario announced its work-to-rule campaign, which the union says will continue until a deal has been reached with the school boards. The job action means teachers aren't performing certain administrative tasks, including writing comments on report cards and inputting grades.
A number of smaller boards, however, will still be handing out report cards, according to the union. But teachers in the TDSB, the York Region District School Board, and the Peel District School Board will not.
The head of the Peel board previously said staff looked into hiring additional workers to enter grades in a report card system, but said the board couldn't cover the estimated $1-million cost.
TDSB spokesperson, Shari Schwartz-Maltz, said even if workers were hired, they can't replace the job of thousands of teachers who typically input the data.
"It's not just a data job," she said. "It's confidential information that's confidential to students – not anybody can just input that."
With a report from CTV Toronto's Naomi Parness
