Page Content
CBE should walk its talk
Let’s talk about bullying. So says a headline on the website of the CBE [Calgary Board of Education], which enforces zero tolerance of bullying in its schools. … So let’s talk about bullying, and the sort that seems to be going on at the highest level of the CBE. Trustee Sheila Taylor is the subject of a bogus school board disciplinary process, called on May 10, a full five months after the alleged incident. … Is it just a coincidence that Taylor is an outspoken advocate who often dissents with the board when it collides with the interests of her constituents? Taylor often argues against the majority view, and falls on the side of fiscal responsibility, transparency and openness. … The board should walk its own talk and learn “other ways to interact, to communicate and to feel powerful.”
—Paula Arab, Calgary Herald, May 22, 2012
Teaching financial literacy is priceless
Holly Gerke is a career counsellor and the CALM coordinator at J. Percy Page High School. She teachers CALM to her students, and they benefit from the life experience she brings to her classes. … Gerke’s students learn to budget everything from food costs to renting an apartment to car and life insurance. … The detailed information delivered in Gerke’s classes attest to the need for standardized instruction of financial literacy so that all students in Edmonton, and ideally in Alberta, will have access to the same depth of knowledge that she is able to share with her students. It is more and more imperative that we give our young people strong money-handling skills so that when they enter the workforce—by going to Fort McMurray for example—and make an almost obscene amount of money, they will know how to use that money for both their short term and long term advantage.
—Aspen Gainer, Edmonton Examiner, May 16, 2012
Chocolate bars in moderation
Samuel Battista has a great future ahead of him as a social activist. … Battista, 18, does most of the talking on the video he made with Brian Baah, 17, a fellow student at St. Thomas Aquinas Secondary School in Brampton, Ont. The two—Battista is student council prime minister and Baah is public relations minister—posted their video on YouTube to protest the no-junk-food policy at their school. They offer plenty of food for thought, no pun intended, about the uses and abuses of zealotry. … Baah told a report that it “seems kind of ironic to me that at 18, I can sign up to be part of the Canadian military, but I can’t choose if I want a chocolate bar.” … Zero tolerance for junk food doesn’t work. Moderation is an idea that never goes out of style—and whose time has come again.
—Naomi Lakritze, Calgary Herald, May 8, 2012
