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The homeschooling co-ordinators at the Peel District School Board have received a couple calls but “not anything significantly more than the kinds of call they would have dealt in the past,” said spokesperson Jeff deFreitas in an interview. “There’s not a mass exodus here.”

Peel, the province’s largest board covering bedroom communities to Toronto’s west, was one of the flash points in the sex ed debate, which saw parents across the province pull kids from school for a day or week last spring. But that has not materialized in a sudden increase in homeschooling numbers. But DeFreitas noted that class lists and enrolment figures are never final until a few weeks into the school year, so it’s still possible there will be an increase.

Peel Region also contains a lion’s share of the approximately 5,700 kids who are homeschooled in the province: about 1,000 in any given year, deFrietas said, noting that doesn’t include numbers for children in private or parochial schools.

Toronto’s public and Catholic school boards, which had several schools where hundreds of students were kept home as part of a protest against the new curriculum, have also not recorded an increase.

“There is no evidence that there has been any impact our enrolment at either the elementary or secondary level,” said John Yan with the Toronto Catholic District School Board.

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“We have not seen an increase in home schooling requests and there have been no requests indicating that their decision is a result of the new revised health and physical education curriculum,” said Lynsey Meilke, spokesperson for the Waterloo Region District School Board.