Juno News - July 22, 2025


EXCLUSIVE： Grade 8 students in Waterloo told parents’ right to know is a “lie”

Mentioned
Waterloo
Tamara Lich faces 7 YEARS, Liberals push censorship law as CBC execs get raises Premiers push for ＂long overdue＂ pipeline

Episode Stats


Length

2 minutes

Words per minute

188.0

Word count

450

Sentence count

19


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, we take a deep dive into the lessons that were given to Grade 8 students in a public school in Waterloo, Ontario. These are exclusive documents that were shared with True North that show students at Sentimental Public School are being taught about privilege and identity during actual instruction time.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Grade 8 students in Waterloo are being taught to unlearn what their teachers describe as lies
00:00:05.640 about LGBT youth. These are exclusive documents that were shared with True North that show
00:00:11.060 students at Sentimental Public School are being taught about privilege and identity during actual
00:00:17.440 instruction time. And this is all designed around a model that is making students learn, unlearn,
00:00:23.320 and then relearn in an exercise that can honestly be classified as propaganda. So we're going to go
00:00:29.060 through some of the actual slide decks that were shown to students. So obviously this first one is
00:00:34.140 talking about pronouns. To be honest with you I don't even know what half of these mean but words
00:00:39.640 like assigned sex and gender identity are used. As well non-standard pronouns like z, xers, and m.
00:00:47.000 Next students were taught to unlearn what the material labeled as myths which include parents
00:00:52.480 have the right to know about a change in a student's gender or sexuality. Now a parent actually
00:00:58.560 raised concerns with the teacher about the politicized content that was being taught.
00:01:02.920 These concerns were elevated to the school principal and then the superintendent and
00:01:06.620 finally to board level staff. Now the parents said that the responses were polite but felt that
00:01:12.300 the complaints were pretty much dismissed. The parents said failing to teach English is already
00:01:17.460 troubling enough but replacing that with what feels like divisive messaging is unacceptable.
00:01:22.580 Next students were asked to do something called the privilege walk which essentially you have
00:01:27.260 this number line right here, and you either get to move up or down the privilege line based off of
00:01:32.480 these questions right here, and I guess it's supposed to determine how privileged that student
00:01:37.840 is. Now, I'm not going to go through every single question, but I'll state some that I took notice
00:01:42.480 of. One of them was if you can find band-aids at a mainstream store that match your skin color,
00:01:47.880 you get to move forward. If you're right-handed, you can take a step forward. If you would never
00:01:51.880 think twice about calling the police when you're in trouble, you can take a step forward. If you
00:01:55.900 discouraged from an activity because of your race class gender sexual orientation or disability
00:02:01.980 take a step backwards and you get the idea there's no indication that alternate perspectives
00:02:07.180 or critical discussion was invited in the classroom the article goes through these
00:02:11.500 lessons in way more detail so if you'd like to read the full thing you can visit junonews.com
00:02:15.900 or click the link in our bio would you feel comfortable with your child learning and
00:02:19.580 and participating in these exercises,
00:02:22.080 leave a comment and let us know.