The rights of Muslim students to have midday Islamic prayer sessions in their public schools trumps Ontario’s rules around education, according to a statement from the Toronto District School Board.
After days of silence, TDSB director of education Chris Spence issued the statement late Friday afternoon, saying Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms “supersedes” the Ontario Education Act, and that Toronto’s school board has a “responsibility and an obligation” to accommodate students’ faith needs.
Public schools, Spence writes, must take “responsible steps to provide accommodation to members of religious groups who state that the Board’s operations or requirements interfere with their ability to exercise their religious beliefs and practices.”
The TDSB’s statement comes after reports that at least one public school in the city, Valley Park Middle School, has been giving over its cafeteria on Fridays for seven months during the school year so it’s Muslim students can be led by an Imam through noontime prayer sessions.
Critics of the sessions say publicly-funded schools should be used for education, not religious practices, and that the traditional arrangement of the sessions — boys sitting up front while girls sit as a group behind them — gives young girls a message that they are second-class citizens.
But Spence and the TDSB step away from the gender issue in the statement, saying the board "(does) not have the authority to tell faith groups how to pray,” that the division of boys and girls is “part of the Islamic faith.”
The students, it says, “participate voluntarily and with parental permission,” and they are under no obligation to participate if they don’t want to.
But by allowing prayer sessions to continue, says one of the more moderate voices in the Muslim community, the TDSB is going against the Ontario Education Act, the legislation that governs the province’s school system.
“The TDSB, by allowing the propagation of religion, is going against the education act,” Tarek Fatah, founder of the Muslim Canadian Congress, said on Friday. "(The act) says no religion can be propagated in the public school system.”
And the separating of boys and girls during the prayer sessions?
The TDSB has taken one of the more radical and patriarchal forms of Islam, run with it, and hasn’t bothered to question it, Fatah said.
“How did the TDSB pick the worst form of gender separation and say this is Islam?” Fatah asked. “The TDSB is guilty of importing a version of Islam that is from...Islamic fascists.”