Juno News - April 07, 2026


School board excludes boys from career fair for “female-identifying” youth


Episode Stats


Length

2 minutes

Words per minute

156.13383

Word count

420

Sentence count

12


Summary

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

A school board in Ontario told parents that it was holding a careers fair for, female identifying students only. But is it true? And why did the school board omit this detail from the information sent to parents?

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
00:00:00.000 A school board in Ontario told parents that it was holding a careers fair for, quote, female identifying students only.
00:00:08.640 But is it? This is the Thames Valley District School Board in Ontario, which sent out basically this email to parents promoting a career discovery expo for female identifying students in grade 7 to 12.
00:00:25.280 You can read it.
00:00:25.880 now this careers fair includes pathways into skilled trades tech and apprenticeships and it's
00:00:35.320 one of several boards in the province that is under supervision and you can see in the email
00:00:40.280 here it said that the event is directed towards female identifying students now the parent who
00:00:46.980 sent me this also sent me an email from the london catholic school board so it's catholic opposite
00:00:52.840 it, which in the email also mentions, quote, hi parents, see email forwarded below. This is for
00:00:59.660 female students only. So you would think parents reading this would reasonably assume that basically
00:01:05.960 no boys are allowed. But if you follow the link to the event organizers page, that's not true.
00:01:12.180 You can see here it says while this event is directed towards female students, all grade 7
00:01:17.860 to 12 students may attend and their parents are guardians and blah, blah, blah. So it's not
00:01:24.580 exclusively for female identifying or female students at all. So why would an email to parents
00:01:30.820 omit that detail? Now, this was sent to me by a representative of the Concerned Parents
00:01:36.360 Association of London, which is a parent group, a local parent group. And they told me this kind
00:01:40.900 of messaging for them is a problem. And so they're asking, why are the school boards sending
00:01:46.180 misleading information that suggests that boys are completely excluded? And furthermore, why are
00:01:52.280 students being pushed towards having to identify as a girl, not even identify as a girl, but identify
00:01:59.140 as female? And the thing is, we see this kind of sex-based exclusion or identity-based exclusion
00:02:05.480 pretty regularly now when it comes to public service hiring or public sector hiring and
00:02:10.440 university sector hiring and now it seems to be sweeping into the k-12 education system
00:02:16.840 no boys need apply and so in this story at minimum parents are getting mixed messages
00:02:22.760 between the board and the event organizers about who can access publicly funded programs for for
00:02:29.000 youth for minors so do you think it's okay for school boards to exclude boys or at least send
00:02:35.960 misleading information that would exclude boys from career opportunities? Let me know in the comments.