There will be no time limit for school principals to grant a student’s request to start a gay-straight alliance club, according to a new bill introduced in the Alberta legislature Wednesday.
And, if passed, students would no longer be guaranteed permission to use words like “gay” or “queer” in any school club names. Although public, private and charter schools would still have to write policies promising to create a safe and respectful environment for students and staff, the government would no longer tell schools what those policies must say, and schools could keep the policies secret if they want.
The same provincial privacy legislation would still prevent school employees from disclosing whether a student is in a school club, save for exceptional circumstances, such as someone threatening members of a gay-straight alliance (GSA), government officials said.
However, replacing the School Act with the Education Act would eliminate a clause that says school principals may only tell parents if the school has a GSA, and no other information about the club.
The rolling back of protections for LGBTQ students introduced by the former NDP government prompted those now-opposition MLAs on Wednesday to dub the government’s bill, “An Act to Destroy Gay-Straight Alliances.”
The proposed legal changes are part of an exhaustive list of overhauls to Alberta’s central piece of school legislation as the new government moves to replace the 31-year-old School Act with an amended version of the Education Act.
On Wednesday, Education Minister Adriana LaGrange introduced Bill 8, which seeks to tweak the Education Act passed under the former Progressive Conservative government in 2012, but never proclaimed.
“Today’s bill will help us to deliver a modern education system so all children in Alberta can reach their full potential,” LaGrange said Wednesday.
Still to come later this summer are 21 sets of education regulations that may further change the rules for Alberta schools, including limits on school fees, parameters for charter schools and transportation requirements.
A prohibition on charging parents for basic school supplies will likely remain in place, but the future of free school bus rides and reduced cost school bus passes for students is unknown.
More powers for school boards
If amended as proposed, the Education Act would allow boards to provide alternative programs outside their geographic boundaries if the local school board doesn’t want to offer them.
School boards could fire a trustee who breaches their code of conduct and will be able to draw their own ward boundaries without government approval.
Catholics would be eligible to vote and run for either public or Catholic school boards, but non-Catholics could only vote and run for public school boards.
Boards and charter schools must also appoint an audit committee with at least one member of the business community and one member of the adult education community who are not school trustees.
Dropout age to stay at 16
The government has opted to toss out some changes in the original Education Act, such as allowing students to attend school free up until they were 20 years old. The dropout age would remain at 16, not rise to 17. The province can’t afford these changes right now, and fewer students are dropping out early to work in the oil patch, LaGrange said.
Also removed was a proposed switch to define a student’s residency by where the student lives, not by where her parents or guardian lives.
The government also intends to keep a plan introduced by the NDP for a provincial age requirement to start kindergarten. As of fall 2020, all children starting kindergarten must turn five by Dec. 31 of that school year.
New teacher quality standards and new certification requirements for superintendents and principals will still take effect Sept. 1, 2019, as scheduled.
The amended Education Act would also do away with a cap on Alberta’s charter schools, which is currently set at 15. Bill 8 would change the requirements for charter schools and make them subject to the same fee limits as school boards. There are currently 13 charters in Alberta.
School boards would also have to introduce policies to guide schools on stickhandling disputes between parents and school staff.
Many school boards will also need to print up some new letterhead. There will no longer be distinctions between school districts, divisions and regional divisions, and division numbers will be removed from their names.Clash over LGBTQ rights
Under the amended act, all schools would be required to have a publicly posted student code of conduct to prevent bullying.
“I care about every single student, regardless of the label that they have,” LaGrange said.
School principals must still “permit” GSAs, but if they delay or refuse a student’s request, a student would have to appeal to the school board or raise the issue with the education minister.
Opposition NDP education critic Sarah Hoffman said the former government introduced stronger language in 2017 because students said some school leaders were stalling their club requests.
After the UCP was elected in April, students across Alberta held walkout protests to express their concerns about changes to GSA rules and LGBTQ-friendly policy requirements.
During Wednesday’s question period, Opposition NDP Leader Rachel Notley said the proposed changes would discourage students from asking for GSAs and scare kids away from attending for fear of being outed to their families. She also said reverting to old GSA rules puts kids’ lives at risk, given the high rate of suicide among LGBTQ youth.
“Minister, be honest, you know as many as half of (school) boards will abandon GSAs and you’re OK with it, because your values are more important than the safety of those kids,” Notley said.
LaGrange said LGBTQ students she’d spoken with wanted a more “balanced approach” to privacy rules, that would allow students in GSAs to go on field trips with parental permission.
The government will have “good oversight” of schools to ensure student GSA requests go smoothly, she said.
Last year, the then-NDP government said 28 Alberta private schools were at risk of losing their public funding over safe school policies that didn’t meet the current law. Funding to those schools had never stopped, LaGrange’s press secretary said.
One of the school’s policies says, “Men and women are to dress and behave in accordance with their biological sex,” and, “God’s institution of marriage, a covenant relationship between one man and one woman, is the sole environment within which sexual activity is permitted, and is the context in which children are to be raised.”
LaGrange did not answer a question about whether such policies are acceptable by her or the proposed Education Act.
“Every school authority will have to adhere to the law,” she said.
Conversion therapy group answers by Friday
A working group that was examining how to ban the practice of conversion therapy expects to hear from Health Minister Tyler Shandro by the end of the week on whether the new government will support its efforts.
Several members of the group were in the legislature’s public gallery during question period Tuesday when NDP MLA Nicole Goehring, who co-chairs the effort, used her question to publicly challenge Shandro to meet with the group.
Shandro agreed, and a 30-minute meeting was held a short time later.
“He sat down with us, we expressed again the importance of this work going forward,” Goehring said.
Goehring said her group wanted some clarity on its next steps. It didn’t get one, but Shandro promised it would by the end of the week.
Conversion therapy is a discredited and harmful practice in which pseudo-psychological and spiritual interventions are used to try to change someone’s sexual orientation or gender identity.
Some in the UCP, including Shandro, continue to suggest the group was created as a political move by the NDP hoping to expose socially conservative views in UCP in the lead-up to the election.
But Glynnis Lieb, from the Institute for Sexual Minority Studies and Services at the University of Alberta, rejected that characterization.
“We are dealing with people dying constantly over this feeling there is something about them that is broken, and unless the government actively stands up and says this is wrong … we are going to continue to have a base of Albertans who believe that these folks are broken,” she said.
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