Black children in Peel schools are suspended and expelled for wearing hoodies or hoop earings or doo-rags and reasons unknown in a category called “other.”

Black children in Peel schools get suspended when they’re as young as 4 years old.

Black children in Peel schools — including A students — get streamed out of academic pathways that lead to university.

Black children in Peel schools continue to be suspended at disproportionate levels.

Senior staff in Peel schools — from trustees to the director of education — have known about the frequent use of the N-word in schools.

Senior staff have access to data that shows Black students routinely face racism, that they are degraded by principals and teachers. Senior staff in Peel schools acknowledged anti-Black racism existed but “seemed paralyzed by inaction.”

To make matters worse, senior staff in Peel schools displayed “strenuous resistance” to anti-Black racism training.

These are some of the findings released Friday by a review team sent by Ontario’s Ministry of Education to probe the Peel District School Board as it struggled with allegations of anti-Black racism and deep dysfunction. The reviewers met with, and heard from, hundreds of people — students, parents, teachers, principals and staff at all levels.

Yet, the reviewers don’t call for the removal of said senior staff.

Put another way, if Peel’s senior staff were Black children in their own schools, they would have been out on their butts a long time ago.

But they’re not Black children, therefore they’ve gotten away.

This is just wrong. I watched for months as Black parents publicly shared with Peel senior staff exactly what the ministry reviewers outlined in their findings. I never once saw evidence of Peel’s senior leadership actively addressing the systemic issues head on. No attempt at collaboration, no humility, no acknowledgment that Black kids are not “them.” They’re our children. In fact, they shut down attempts to discuss ending police intervention in schools that unnecessarily criminalizes Black students.

Now a Peel board statement in response to the ministry review promises “swift, bold and transformative” action. “We are united in our commitment to address and take urgent action,” the statement says.

There is much floweriness in the sanctimonious word salad by Chair of the Board Brad MacDonald and Director of Education Peter Joshua.

The ministry review itself states, “many have said that they (senior staff) are good at ‘talking the talk’ but not good at ‘walking the walk.’”

Isn’t the board’s response — indifference to Black voices but alacrity to the reviewers’ findings — itself not anti-Black racism in action?

What stopped senior staff from taking “urgent action” these many months? Why did they heartlessly turn away every Black person who tried to give context to why a trustee calling predominantly Black and brown students of McCrimmon Middle School “McCriminals” was wrong?

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Why did they accept the deeply troubling conclusions of their own integrity commissioner that not only exonerated the trustee who used the term “McCriminals” but normalized derogatory terms for schools such as “Meadow Jail” for Meadowvale Secondary School?

To the reviewers’ credit, they ask the board in a not-so-subtle recommendation to get an integrity commissioner who has “demonstrated experience in, and knowledge of, human rights principles and the application of the Ontario Human Rights Code.”

They also asked the trustees to immediately apologize for their mishandling of the McCrimmon incident.

However, the McCrimmon issue as the reviewers themselves said, was “a dramatic focal point,” but not “the genesis of the community’s upset.” That distress has been years in the making and has been well captured in data that led to the We Rise Together initiative to support Black male students. But the board hasn’t shown any commitment to implement that plan.

Overall, the conclusions of the review are strong and damning, its recommendations, not quite as much.

“We call for a new style of leadership,” reviewers Ena Chadha, Sue Herbert and Shawn Richard write. Among their 29 recommendations, they call for mandatory mediation to resolve the high-level dysfunction among the trustees and between the director and associate directors. They also ask for an external review of the director’s office and the roles and responsibilities for all major portfolios.

Trustees are elected officials. The board director is not. Surely the reviewers saw that many of their findings echoed the contents of a Human Rights complaint against the director and the board by Peel’s anti-racism chief Poleen Grewal, including the pervasiveness of anti-Black racism, lack of leadership and commitment to fighting it, inequitable hiring issues and a culture of reprisal.

It is not up to the reviewers to take sides in an external tribunal complaint. Yet, given the parallels between their findings and the complaint as well as ample evidence of inaction and “a culture of fear,” they could have done better than both-siding the issue.

The trouble is racism cannot be trained out of people. Anti-racism comes from a powerful urge for social justice and its recognition must begin within each individual.

If there is no evidence of wanting that change and there is, in fact, evidence of resistance to that change, and that resistance demonstrably hurts children, reviewers should have no choice but to shut it down with a message of zero-tolerance.

They didn’t do that. Perhaps the mediators will.