Captured—Teachers constrained by identity-equity ideology | Dave Annis
August 10, 2026
Robert Vaughan:
We're joined by Dave Annis. Dave Annis was a teacher at the London Board of Education, Thames Valley District School Board, London, Ontario, for 25 years, five years as a vice principal, and he is or was the candidate for the People's Party of Canada in the riding of London Centre. Hi, Dave.
Dave Annis:
Good morning.
Robert Vaughan:
Now, was that right? Are you still the candidate for the PPC or Candidate of Record?
Dave Annis:
Yes.
Robert Vaughan:
Okay, good. Thank you for putting your name forward.
Dave Annis:
You’re welcome.
Robert Vaughan:
Now that you're retired as a teacher. I was a school trustee in that board, London Board, London, Thames Valley District School Board. So I think we're on a common ground here as far as fundamentals go. And I know that there was a number of teachers who had taken issue with a lot of the policies of the board and the province, and weren't allowed to say anything for fear of reprisal, both from the board, their employer, or the Ministry of Education, or worst of all, the College of Teachers.
Dave Annis:
Yes.
Robert Vaughan:
So now that you're retired and you are a free agent now to speak your mind, what is the most burning issue that you had when you were a vice principal or an elementary school teacher that you wanted to tell the people, the public, but were afraid to?
Dave Annis:
Well, there are two really. One was safety and physical safety. The other one is ideology that is just rampant in Ontario schools. And I would say that the vast majority of teachers that I talked to didn't agree with the ideology, or they would agree to it a little bit, but not the whole slate. However, they're muzzled. They have the golden handcuffs, so to speak, because it's a well-paying job, good pension, time off, and it is a very hard job. It's a rewarding job, and there are some amazing teachers out there, but just like in every profession, there's some that are amazing, some are good, many that are average, and then there's some that are really bad. So teaching's no different.
Robert Vaughan:
What is the ideology you're talking about?
Dave Annis:
I'm talking about diversity, equity, and inclusion, as well as the parts of it that the indigenous push right now. That is the noble savage idea that these people were immaculate and couldn't do any wrong. And as individuals, they're great, just like anyone, any other group would be. But the problem is they're looking at them as groups, and they're not looking at them as individuals. And that's what identity politics really comes down to is—and our common friend Bob Metz would say that that's an oxymoron that you can't have identity politics. They don't meld together, they're individuals, and you have to look at the individual because you can't tar a whole group with one brush because they're not the same. Yet, our board and our ministry of education in the province is doing that, giving special rights to special groups and creating resentment and the opposite effect of what they're hoping to create.
Robert Vaughan:
Can we just label all of this this ideology as either left or woke? Since 2015, 2010, 2015, we've identified it as woke. But under the huge rubric of left ideology, which the current government, as a matter of fact, all past governments of the province of Ontario have ascribed to, especially under Doug Ford, an extreme socialist, an extreme woke premier, if you want to have my opinion. The name of his party is Progressive Conservative—emphasis on the word progressive. What they want to conserve is progressivism. So that is the ideology. Okay, so we've got identified that.
Now what about the makeup of the teachers in the Thames Valley District School Board? I would imagine that they are pretty much no different demographically as far as his ideology goes than the rest of the country. A majority of them would actually be in favour of the ideology of their government and governments, federal and provincial.
A very large minority would be small-c largely conservative, however we want to describe it as being in opposition to the irrationality of the left-wing politics of their province and country. And we're talking then about many thousands of teachers. I think when I left, we had employed 5,000 teachers or had at least 5,000 employees in that board. So we're talking many, many hundreds, if not a thousand or more teachers who are stifled. Would I be correct in that assumption?
Dave Annis:
Yes, yes. They are muzzled. You know, I used to think that the majority of the young generation that's coming into teaching are left wing. I don't know because they're self-censoring. They are afraid to talk out. They're afraid to let your views be known.
For example, when we had our monthly staff meetings, and I was forced to give certain information from the board. For example, there's this—and how that would happen is the board would prepare a slideshow and they would send it out to all these school administrators, and we would present it and give the speaking notes, or create our own if we wanted, as long as they follow the main message. So this one time I had to give a presentation that said that our system is systemically racist, and that therefore we're racist as well.
Robert Vaughan:
Meaning white. Meaning, of course, the white portion of the staff.
Dave Annis:
Yes. And my staff at the time at the school I was at is mostly white, and they sat there like this, and arms crossed, faces angry looking, because again, it's the signing of guilt or association by group, collectivism instead of the individual. And so I couched what I said by saying I'm being required to tell you blah, blah, blah, blah. And then I double checked with one teacher that I trust that I found out has similar views as I do. I said, so are the staff getting what I mean by I'm required to tell you? And she said, oh, yes, they all know that you're just saying the party line, but that you yourself don't believe it.
So back to your question. Some after that started coming to me and saying things. For example, I had one staff member after the American election. He came into my office and he whispered that he's happy Trump won because they're now going to close the borders. Just stuff like that. And then I just said out loud, not whispering, I'm happy that Trump won so that he'll close the borders, and I'm not whispering about it. But I'm not going to bring that up in the school unless someone else talks to me first, right? Because that's not my job as a school administrator is to talk politics.
But those little tidbits of information that you give out, they spread. And so the staff at that school came to know where I stood in certain areas. But some would come to me, but others would not.
And as to the idea that the majority are it, I think it really is by a demographic. The older teachers are less likely to embrace this left woke collectivism. It was the older ones because they've been in the profession long enough to see how it has deteriorated in education, but they're not willing to speak up about it. I've heard of other teachers would talk to the ones I would trust, and I would hear, oh, they have the same position as I do, but they wouldn't come to me because I was in a position of authority.
So, and they're afraid of it getting out. And then the ultimate, like you said, of going being reported to the College of Teachers, having your teaching license revoked, and on top of that, publicly shamed, because what happens is the College of Teachers quarterly prints a magazine, and in it they have what's called the blue pages. And if your name's in there, it's because you've been found guilty of some offense, some of it quite serious. We're talking a lot of it is sexual allegations, sexual misconduct, things like that, but also something as simple as not following the school board's diversity, equity, and inclusion practices, right? And then it gives a blurb about it, but only gives one side. And so it's humiliating. And so people are terrified. They will not come forward.
Robert Vaughan:
Now the College of Teachers came into being, I believe, in 1997. I was actually on CFPL TV London debating against the creation of that under Dalton McGuinty, I think it was. 97? Yeah, probably around there. And although teachers have always been regulated, they had the Normal schools. Going back as far as you can count, there was always some sort of oversight either by the ministry or Normal schools or individual colleges. But to have this overarching mouthpiece for the left-wing government ideology as called the teachers of college, where you have to pay dues to this guild and do their bidding as another boss or risk either fines or termination, to me is so repulsive that I don't know how anybody can live and work under such restraint. It's not as it is as bad as the unions. And to have that fear over your head, you have the teachers' college, you have the ministry, you have the trustees and the board. Well, not so much the trustees, they're a bunch of lame ducks, and currently under supervision, they're suspended.
We can get into that if you like. Because that goes into DEI as well. You just recently sent me an email about the cost of the DEI team at the TVDSB Thames Valley District School Board, and over $600,000, I think you quoted. And the board of trustees, the school board itself is now, as of April of last year, 25 suspended under supervision by the ministry. In other words, there technically is no trustee on the school board at all. They've been set aside, they're not even getting paid because of financial irregularities, including a 40,000 retreat in Toronto by the mucky mucks in the board. And yet here we have the $600,000 plus DEI team. They're suspending the board for 40,000, which was the trigger event. Do you want to speak to that a bit? I mean, we can come back to all of these things. This is such a mess that it is a bit of an octopus, but let's deal with this first. Do you think that supervision of the board was justified given their expenditures on stuff and nonsense like DEI?
Dave Annis:
Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. They deserved it. Now, the board is in debt some crazy million amount, millions amount. They're cutting back resources for special education. All right. And then these they're called senior administration. So for those of you who don't know, administration is broken into two levels. So you have senior administration, that'd be superintendents and the director, and then you would have school administration, which would be principals and vice principals.
And so the senior administration went on a trip to the Rogers Center, aka SkyDome, and spent money on this while doing the cutbacks to special education, pink slips to educational assistants, and those are the people in the school board that work with our special needs students one-on-one, or they might have two, two on one, that sort of thing. So these cuts would mean that there are less people specifically working with these students that have really challenging issues, and then if those people aren't there to deal with those issues, it falls onto the shoulders of the teachers in the regular classroom. So your child, whether the typically most of them are not special needs, of course, all right, will have some of these students in their room, and they might have a part-time EA or a three-quarters of a time EA, and whatever time that there is not an EA there, it's up to the classroom teacher.
And so when these kids leave or walk around the room and start going through people's lunch boxes or taking their stuff, it's the classroom teacher has to deal with it. So, how does the classroom teacher deal with the student who just leaves the room and takes off? Because she can't leave the class, so she buzzes the office. And so if the school has a vice principal, it's typically a vice principal who deals with it, or what they call an LST, which is a learning support teacher. So that's someone that whose job deals with special education students in the school.
And so these resources are being taken away from everyday education, from dealing with helping the principal and the vice principal dealing with typical everyday school issues. So some might argue though, well, this is part of the job, this is what you need to do. And that is true. However, due to these cuts, more and more of that's falling on the shoulders of these classroom teachers, LSTs, vice principals, principals, and that gives them less time to do their job. And so that has consequences.
Robert Vaughan:
So they're taking the money away from the critical purpose of the school, which is to educate children and to provide for their educational needs, especially the special ed students, the autistic students, or students who have other learning disabilities, they're taking that money and they're putting it towards the implementation of a mandated provincial government policy of DEI towards junkets to Toronto, perhaps elsewhere. And there is a mismatch between the trustees' responsibility to protect the education of the students in a fiscally responsible way. So, yes, kudos to the Doug Ford government and the Minister of Education for putting them under supervision, taking them out of the picture. And they're not the only board, by the way. I think there's like six or seven other boards that are under supervision in Ontario at this moment, which speaks a lot to the quality of the trustees that people are hiring or voting for these days. So this is egregious.
This is the simplest thing in the world. I was a trustee for like six years, and a budget would come towards me. And you would read it, you couldn't read the whole thing every word because it was quite massive. You're talking a billion dollar budget at the time, it's probably more than that now. But I never voted for a budget. I always voted against every single budget because I could always find waste, including, for example, and I don't want to take up your time, but this is an example of what you're talking about at one budget, they wanted a 100,000 to renovate the chairperson's office, which, if you've ever been there, is just an office with a secretary in a kind of an anteroom. $100,000 at that time, they would probably be in the late 90s. You could buy a house for 100,000, not a small house, but a house. And they want to—so would I support that budget? No, I'm not going to support that budget.
Windows were broken at Masonville School. Would I support the budget spending money elsewhere until those windows were fixed? No. And yet every single trustee would vote for such budgets, except for me. But I'm a weird duck. So, that's just a bit of a background and to let you know that this is not just today. This has been going on forever.
Dave Annis:
Yeah. And so, and Robert, so to be fair to these trustees, they see special education budget with X amount of dollars, and it might even be subdivided into certain sections, but it doesn't mean anything to them because they don't know what's going on, and they can't, and that's the problem with the system we have. This is the problem of centralization. This is the problem of thinking that trustees, or frankly, superintendent of special education, actually knows enough to make the decision to run this stuff. How can they possibly know this? No human could. And this is why the centralization system for education does not work.
And so I'm going to say something that's going to be surprising to most people that someone who worked in the public board for 30 years, and it's something that I would never have said as a teacher until near the 20th year when I started opening my eyes, and economically, and is that I believe that the vast majority of education should be privatized because the waste is stunning, and through no help of there, no fault of their own, these people can't do it. These trustees are not going to be able to do it.
Now they should know the egregious stuff, like saying money to go to the Rogers Center to have a retreat and discuss—like that's easy. But how to run spec ed?
I'm going to give you an example, another example of waste. So when I first became a vice principal, I was 0.8 vice principal 0.2 LST. So I'd never been in LST before, so this was a steep learning curve. The school had two developmental centers, so two classrooms, or sorry, one developmental center with two developmental classrooms in it. And so they would—a developmental classroom has eight to twelve students in it, depending on the students, all right? A teacher and two EAs in each classroom. And so we got a new student.
And so the student gets assessed by an occupational therapist of what their needs are and what sort of items would be a benefit for this student. And then that list is given to the LST, so in this case, me, and we order it.
And so I got this long list of items, and it totaled over $30,000. So it's like, oh wow. I went over to my principal, and so I asked him, so which one do we order? And he says, all of it. You know, my—like, what? All of it? Yep. But our budget, this will destroy our budget because it's not coming out of the school budget.
And so the point of it was, so I ordered it all. That child used three of those items, destroyed over half of them, and the others collected dust. And I talked to the teachers, to the educational assistants, and they said, yes, this is common, because I was new to the spec ed part of the board at that time. They said, yeah, unfortunately, this is common, this is what happens. But why does it happen? It happens because it's not their money. It's your money, it's my money, it's every taxpayer's money, with no voice in how to spend that.
Robert Vaughan:
Well, that's a common occurrence in any bureaucracy is that if you're given a budget, you use it. You use your budget. Otherwise, you'll be reduced in the following years. So, yeah, that's common. I understand that.
Let's get into the gender identity thing because you told me on the phone there a couple days ago something horrific. We've heard it in other jurisdictions, of course, typically in the United States, United Kingdom, where if a student has gender dysphoria, the latest fad, if you ask me, and they want to identify as something that they are not, defying reason and logic. You're not allowed to tell the parent as a teacher. You're to use that person's preferred third person pronoun, and you're not allowed to tell the parent in a parent teacher's meeting or even over a phone call that this is going on, even though you're acting in loco parentis in the place of the parent, this should be a common channel of communication between you and the parent, but you're forbidden. Talk to me about that.
Dave Annis:
That is correct. So when a child decides to question their sexual identity, every single employee in the Thames Valley District School Board must affirm whatever it is that student is now saying. They must affirm. Whether it's a teacher, secretary, custodian, vice principal, principal, social worker, psychologist, every single one.
Okay. Now the board has a policy that forbids the staff from speaking to those parents because and it comes under the umbrella of safety because there is the fear by these people who wrote this policy that the parents of these children will somehow strike out in some fashion against these kids.
The unspoken issue here is that I believe that they're really worried that their parents would say, no, you're not a girl, you're a boy, or no, you're not a boy, you're a girl, and you're perfect the way you are. And yes, we do have students who suffer from gender dysphoria. It's a real thing. But all the scientific literature from the Cass report that came out from the UK, it shows that roughly 90% of these students, if you leave them alone, they grow out of it.
So what happens or what can happen if a student questions their identity? So a teacher might say, are you sure you're a boy? Or you sure you're a girl? And then the kid might question it, and then they might think, no, I'm the different one, the opposite one. And then that triggers a response. And so all the staff that teach that student would be told. All the administrators would be told.
And so we now, if they're old enough and they decide, do you know what? I want to, I'm biologically female, but I want to use male pronouns. The teacher must use the pronouns that the student wants. Typically it's they them. But sometimes it's the opposite sex, he, and it's in the report card.
So what the board will do, because they're saying that they're worried about the child's safety, and they probably are, is that they will come up and have come up with systems that hide the change of pronoun. So they would come up with two sets of report cards. One would go home to the parent with the biological pronouns, and there would be a separate one. Yes, because you have to keep the child safe.
Robert Vaughan:
I wonder if under freedom of information a parent could ask for that second report card if they even know about it.
Dave Annis:
Well, it's not common.
Robert Vaughan:
I imagine that there would be some loophole to say that, oh no, we can't do that. Just like you can't under FOIA or freedom of information ask for a police report if it's done in the duty of policing, you can't get it. And this would probably have some sort of loophole. But I did not know that. This is amazing. Double reporting. It's like two books.
Dave Annis:
Yeah, yeah. Cooking the books. So they also had an issue with Google Classroom, because Google Classroom was a tool used by teachers, accessible by students, and you could send summary reports to the parents if the parents signed up for it. And there was some kind of mismatch where there were pronouns that were being revealed, and then so they fixed that. Okay, so they look at the technology.
They also—there's the issue of sports teams. Okay, so this isn't common. I don't want anyone to listen to this and think it's common and rampant because it is not.
Robert Vaughan:
The fact that it happens once is bad enough.
Dave Annis:
Yes, it's happening. So I have three daughters, they're in their 20s, and they were all sporty. And if my kids were entering kindergarten right now, I would not send them to public education because there's the risk that I'll get some left-wing collectivist supporting teacher, which is what's these teachers' colleges attract, all right, question. So, my daughters, are you sure you're a girl? Because they all played sports.
Robert Vaughan:
They would encourage the transition.
Dave Annis:
They would encourage it, yes.
Now, again, you can't say that they're all doing this, or even the majority are doing this because they're not. I've had plenty of student teachers come through from teachers' colleges, they got two feet planted on the ground that they're realistic, they don't believe in it, and they censored, but you could tell.
But I had one of these people fill in for a teacher that was off for two months near the end of the year, so she had to write the report cards, and without any instruction from me or anyone else, use they them for every single student in the classroom. She took it upon herself to do that.
And so I found this out because we as school administrators, we read every single report card just to check that they're following the guidelines that the board has set out for report cards and give feedback to the staff. And I saw this. I'm like, what's going on? And so I brought her in, and I said, I noticed that you've changed the pronouns to they them. I said, why'd you do that? Well, I don't want to offend anyone.
And at first, I just paused for about three seconds to see if she was joking and playing a joke on me. But no, she believed this. And I said to her, I said, listen, if I send these home, I'm going to offend every single one of these parents. And she looked at me like I'd grown a second head. She goes, really? And so this is what's out there.
Robert Vaughan:
Not only that, Dave, she violated DEI because she's not using the preferred pronouns of the students.
Dave Annis:
Yes. Well, that's let's chalk it up to inexperience and being a young, a young teacher. So but, you know it's stunning. And for hiring. So you think—I said this is stratified by age about probably whether they would believe it, more likely to believe this. And I'm telling you that the younger ones would because there's a bias to these teachers' colleges.
So for hiring, and here's how the hiring system works in Thames Valley. So I have a teacher comes to me, says she has to go off for maternity leave or illness, whatever. And so we post a job. And so that involves sending filling out some information on that goes to the board office, and we fill in the requirements, the time, that sort of stuff. And so people, it gets posted, people who are interested will apply.
And so the board has a system that is a merit-based system for the most part. But there's a second part, they have a tiebreaker, and so they have rules that school administrations must interview at least three of the applicants, okay? But we can choose to have more. So typically most school administrators will generally interview five or six. But how do you choose which ones to interview? So there's a ranking system, a point system that when I was there was a score out of ten. And the board would come up with certain criteria that were legit, and I agree this was good by the Thames Valley Board, you know, qualifications, experience, all these sort of things that you would think, any job would have.
But then there's the question about what about the tiebreaker? So if I am going to interview five applicants, and four of them are 10 out of 10, but two of them are nine out of 10. So the four tens, I'm interviewing them, but I'm left with the two, the two nines. How do I choose? Well, the board has a tie-breaking system, and we are required by board policy to interview the candidate that is self-identified as marginalized.
Okay. So how do they—how do I know that they self-identified? Well, they have a little red asterisk beside their name. Okay, and I have to have a certain number of marginalized applicants that I interview. And if I don't, and there are some that have identified, then I have to interview them, regardless of score.
So what does marginalize mean? So there's when they fill in their—these applicants, when they fill in their information to the board to be a supply teacher and then to be able to apply for these job postings, they could fill in something like gay, lesbian, homosexual, all right, bisexual. Then you would see Asian, you would see asexual, pansexual. I would see mother of three kids. I would see mother with unsupportive husband. And I would see also the field left blank. They check the box, but they don't fill it in. And so they're getting the benefit of being chosen over someone who's not identifying as marginalized without even having to say what category of marginalization they fall under.
And so, as you can see, this creates a push for these types of people to get interviewed. And does that mean they get the job? Of course not, but you're getting more and more of these people being interviewed, which increases the odds of them getting jobs, which means there's more and more of these people teaching, which means there are more and more of these people questioning. Are you sure you're whatever? Throwing pronouns, they them into report card comments. And then when you as a parent complain, and you go to the board and you're called a far right extremist, that you're unsafe, that you're racist.
And then so then we're back to well, who has the ultimate care here? And it should be the parent. But many, not all, not even a majority, but many of these educators think that they know better than the parents. And as an educator, I can tell you there are some really awful parents out there, and in those cases, you're right. But that's not the majority. And just because you have a degree, a teacher's college degree, and you specialized in English or physiology or whatever, doesn't mean you have expert knowledge on parenting. You know, it's the audacity of some of these people is stunning.
Now I want to qualify that by also saying that there are other staff that are not believing in this stuff, and they are amazing, and they don't push it. And so, again, you have to look at this as individual, not as a group. You can't say, oh, the teachers are all left, or the teachers are whatever, or the superintendents are all, because you don't know. I talked about those golden handcuffs because they have a mortgage, they have a car loan, their kids going to university, whatever it is. They're not going to speak out.
And so what do you do? It is a risk putting your child into public education. Now, I would not do it. They're alternatives, but the system is not set up for the benefit of parents.
Robert Vaughan:
Or children.
Dave Annis:
Yes, well, another example for example, the board says that it's there for children, and one of the policies they wanted to do is they wanted to reflect the population of students. So if half the students are black, they would want to hire black staff. Okay. If half of them are Asian, they want to hire Asian students. Well, I made a joke in my main office. I said, well, my school's almost all white, and the vast majority of staff are females. Half of my students are white males. So I guess by this policy, I should be hiring white male staff? You know. And I said it as a joke. And then I qualified by saying, no, I'm going to hire by merit.
However, someone overheard that and reported it to my superintendent, and I got a phone call. I was told I can't be saying that stuff. So the board has this policy, but it doesn't believe it.
Robert Vaughan:
I have been in perhaps every single school in the city of London and a lot of the surrounding area, every single one of them. And I made it a point when I would walk into the lobby of the school to look at the staff photo. Every school has in the lobby a picture of all the staff. And you're struck immediately by the fact that probably no more than 20% are male. Some schools have probably a 90% women, 10% male mix.
And so, to your point, of course, they do not believe in mirroring the demographics of society. That is a lie. They are simply mirroring a left-wing ideology of woke and racism and sexism and division. That is their mirror.
Dave Annis:
Yeah, it's oppressor oppressed.
Robert Vaughan:
Pure Marxism.
Dave Annis:
And since the males been seen as the oppressor, they're not going to hire those males, even though there's so much scientific literature out there saying that both sexes bring strengths to the table, and that we should have both of them as much as possible, as much as we want those people, or sorry, that those people want those jobs.
I'll give you another example. So the OPC, so that stands for the Ontario Principals Council. I had a discussion with one person who works there, just down in Toronto, and there's a push for more female school administrators. Okay. And at one point, it was mostly male. It's not now, it's now it's the majority is female.
And I said to the guy, but what's the goal here? Well, we should have 50% female, because 50% of the population is female. And I said to him, well, I understand that, but do 50% of females want the position? I said, because that's what you should need to be going for.
Yes, you should educate females about the pros and cons of this position and say, you know, we'd love to see more females in it. Maybe it's something that will be right for you at some point in your life. But you should also be doing it for males. Can't just focus on one, but that's all there is. It's all female based right now. There isn't any push for boys in elementary schools.
Robert Vaughan:
I mentioned this to you. Yeah. I mentioned this to you earlier on in our conversation that back in 97 as a trustee, I broke the confidentiality of an in-camera meeting when they said that their intention was to hire all female vice principals. I don't know how you got through that, but hiring all female vice principals. And of course, I asked them to clarify. I said, can you just say that again? I want to make sure that I get this right, that no male can advance beyond teacher. They would just have to stay there, and only females will get into the vice principal pool, from which, of course, principals are chosen, so then eventually all principals will be female, from which, of course, superintendents are chosen from the principal pool, so eventually all superintendents will be female. In other words, every single person of responsibility and authority in the school system would be female.
And they double down, yes, was the answer. That is correct. That would be our policy. This was an administrator talking, not the trustees, who by the way just ate it up, they don't care. They're in that philosophy.
So I broke confidentiality. I could not sit idly by and let the male teachers of London know that they stand zero chance, as you say, zero chance of ever becoming into a position of authority based on the division divisive politics of the board.
And of course, I got written up. I was censured publicly by the school board for doing that. I love that. That's great. I wear it as a badge of honor. And I've got a press clipping that would describe it. So maybe I'll post that somewhere someday.
How did you get to be VP under that condition? They must have like they must have rescinded that.
Dave Annis:
There is a career ceiling for people on the right. That would some more conservative values, but I would say that, and you open your mouth about it, but to get to become a vice principal, it's a tough gig, and not a lot of people want it. That's how I got in. If there there'd been a lot of females applying, I doubt I would have gotten in.
Robert Vaughan:
Well, that is—you mentioned this briefly. You say they're saying that our females applying for these positions, because perhaps females don't, as a group, as a collective, as a different species from men, don't want that role. They're much more happier to deal with the children in the classroom in a sort of parental motherly type of environment, and I think there's a lot of truth to that, than to assume a role of authority, which is not for every woman, and there is a difference, vive la difference.
Yeah and much the same as entering into a profession of plumbing or welding or an oil rig worker, you're not going to find the women wanting to do these jobs. So while you have vice principals, who the role of the vice principal, one of the primary roles is discipline, and a woman may not want to be in that position. So would is that what you were getting at? Would you concur?
Dave Annis:
Yeah, you see, and in the role of vice principal and principal, you deal with a lot of confrontation. All the bad news comes your way, and so you have to make decisions. And so if you're someone that wants to please everyone, and know you have two opposing sides, they often don't make decisions and you frustrate both sides.
But with confrontation, so men are more disagreeable on average than women. So this is something that Jordan Peterson talks about with the big five personality traits that on average, men are more disagreeable than women. So men are more likely to—
Robert Vaughan:
I don't believe it.
Dave Annis:
Pardon?
Robert Vaughan:
It was a joke.
Dave Annis:
Nicely done. Now so when you have confrontation, we were trained about having hard conversations. You know, this is confrontation, giving bad news. And so you're dealing with confrontation with students. You're dealing with that's not so much a big deal for male or female, but it's the confrontation with staff and the confrontation with parents.
And so I remember when I first started teaching, the principal that I was with at the time, I asked him, so what's it like? Because I was thinking down the road, eventually becoming one. And he said it's like being a septic tank because all the crap comes your way. And I thought, ugh. But so you're dealing with a lot of negative information, a lot of negative consequences, and most women in general don't like dealing with that.
And so I would see some people who are in the vice principal path, you know, they would do it, they would return back to the classroom. And I've in the five years that I was a VP, I saw six return back to the classroom. Five of them were female, one of them was male. Okay.
And please don't, and those of you are watching and listening, don't say, well, I know someone who's the exception. Yes, I'm talking about in general. There are some awesome females who are very great at dealing with confrontation, but they're not the norm.
Okay, they're not the norm. And so when going back to the hiring part, is that you need to be pushing for not to have 50% females in a role or 50% males in a role in any job, is you need to have the amount that want to be in the job. And if it's lower than that, if 25% of females want to be a principal, and it's at 10%, then there's a problem. And then, yeah, you got to push.
But, you know. And then I had this one teacher, she was thinking becoming a vice principal, and she came to me and she says, I know you'll tell me the truth about the job. And I thought, oh, okay, that's good. And I told her all the positives as well, but I told her the negatives. And then, because when you first become a vice principal, you can go back to the classroom for up to two years. And so she was in a really tough situation, and she ended up coming back to the classroom. And there are a lot of reasons why she came back, and that she didn't have a good experience as a vice principal. But it's because of the system.
Now, how do you fix it? Like I said, it needs to be privatized for the most part. I'm on the fence about whether students that have severe special education needs would do well in a privatized education system, whether they would get into good schools or things like that, I don't know. I'm on the fence. I'm open to hearing conversations about that, so I don't know. But for the rest, yes.
And so those of you who are teachers out there who are throwing spaghetti at the screen trying to hit me with it, I know that those amazing teachers, those amazing school admin out there, you would actually do better in the private sector, running your own school or being at a private school than you are right now. And teachers are paid well, I think they're that if after 10 years with all their qualifications, it's around 110,000, I believe. So that that's a good wage. 12 weeks off in a year, a decent pension, benefits are okay.
You know, it's a good job, but it's a hard job, and I recognize that it can be brutal because you get these kids dumped into your class, and they come with all sorts of needs and issues, and it is tough.
But in the private, there's the responsibility of the teacher and accountability for the teacher, but there's also the responsibility and accountability for the student. And that's what's lacking right now. There is very little.
Every student passes. Every student walks across the stage in grade eight, no matter what they've done. How little, how much.
Robert Vaughan:
I've asked the director of education once that very question, how many students in the Thames Valley District School Board, or it could have been the London board, which was preceding that, graduated this year. And he said, every single one. We didn't fail any. Zero failures. And I’m going.
Dave Annis:
Yes. You’re doing a great job.
Robert Vaughan:
I said, what is the value of a diploma? What then is the value of a diploma when the biggest retard, stupidest student can get a diploma, and the brilliant genius in the classroom, the valedictorian can get a diploma. It means nothing. It means nothing.
And of course, that well, it's child-centered learning, you know. It the education follows the child, and we do the best for each individual child.
So an objective measure of a diploma is that it is meaningless. It is simply a measure of the fact that you just spent 12 years of your life in a public institution, much like prison, same thing.
So this is a huge problem, I think, in that what the trustees and the teachers and the principals and the superintendents are doing is protecting a system.
I came out as well when I was a trustee and said we should just abolish the board of ed. We should just abolish the Ministry of Education. School, charter schools, private schools. That's the way of the future. That's the way it can solve this problem because this is a system that is—yeah, we're in agreement. This is a system that is destroying not only people's lives as far as education goes as children and young adults, but also it is a huge waste of money.
The amount of—we did this research back in the day, the amount of money to educate a child privately is actually less than that if you can talk about the aggregate, a child in the public school system, or even the Catholic board, another public school system, but under the Catholic system.
We had a meeting once in a cafeteria, it was a private meeting with all the trustees, because the image that the board was getting was negative, mostly due to me. And they wanted to have a talk about it, and they couldn't exclude me, obviously. And so they asked me point blank, why are you a trustee? And I said, I want the best education at the lowest cost. That's the role of a trustee. Best education, lowest cost.
Why are you a trustee? I asked them back, and to a person, and they all responded to a person, it was to protect the public education system. In those words, to protect the public education system. They didn't like seeing students change their tax to go to the Catholic board. They would do everything to prevent that. Yeah, they didn't want to see parents homeschool. An idea, by the way, that people should understand in the province of Ontario, you're very unique in many respects in that a parent does not have to send their child to school. Check it out.
You do not have to send your child to school.
Dave Annis:
Can I interrupt for a second?
Robert Vaughan:
You're a truant if you send them to school and they don't show up, then you're truant.
Dave Annis:
Yeah.
Robert Vaughan:
But as far as the laws of Ontario go, they trust the parent to be the arbiters of their child's education, and you don't even have to register with a school board. Now, mind you, it would be wise to do so to let them know that you're homeschooling so that they get off your back. But people should know that you do not have to send your kid to school in Ontario. You do in other provinces.
Dave Annis:
Yeah. Well, it's interesting because you know, with what's available on the internet for education now, and with AI. You can become educated for next to nothing. There's something called the Khan Academy, K-H-A-N. So the reason I'm talking about this is some people think, well, I'd love to homeschool, but I don't have the skills to do it. You don't need the skills. You can use AI and it will tell you what to do. And it'll chump boom, boom, boom, boom, and tell you all the steps, the order, all that sort of thing. It'll tell you the best resources. Something like Khan Academy, which is a math-based, it's amazing. You know, the things you learn on YouTube or Rumble, amazing.
Right now, so what one of the big fallacies of education is that for teachers, they're required to meet the individual needs of every single student in their class. Well, it's impossible. It is literally impossible. You throw on that that you're in a split grade, teaching a split grade, which two grades is the most that a teacher could possibly teach. But then you have IEP kids on there who in there who are below grade level.
One year I had seven kids on different leveled math IEP. So I was teaching grade eight math, grade seven math, grade six, grade five, grade four, and grade three.
They're not getting the same kind of education. So I'm teaching the kids at the grade eight level, and I'm using a certain method. But the other kids are getting drill books, and I'm going over to check because you have—it's literally impossible.
And so the reason I'm bringing this up for those of you are homeschooling is that right now they have programs that for reading and for math, and probably for writing too, but although I haven't looked into that very much, but for reading and for math, definitely, where it starts answering or asking questions, the child answers it, and it figures out the child's level, and then it gives them the next level of what they should attain. And so now they truly are getting individualized education, and they're doing it at a fraction of the time, and it's going at the speed that they need. So those students that are super intelligent and keen, they're whipping through. Okay, what we call enriched or gifted now. They can whip through stuff.
Like my daughters, they're really good at math. My youngest, because this story kind of burns me, but I recognize what she was doing. She would get her work done in 10 minutes and then go wander the halls and go into other classrooms and talk to her friends. I'm like, what? She goes, Dad, I'm going to tell you something, but you promise you can't get mad. And then you know, she'd tell me, she goes, don't tell the teacher, don't call the teacher, don't, you know. And someone said, well, Dave, that's an opportunity for that teacher to be enriching your child by giving him or her more work to do.
And yes, they could have done that, unless they're being overwhelmed with dealing with the kids who are struggling, and they don't even notice those kids who are whipping through things, they think, do you know what? I'm not disrupting the classroom, that's fine. I'm just going to deal with these kids and actually need my help.
But see, this is what's going on. So, this was in high school. This is a grade 11, grade 12, so university level, right? You know, because they de-streamed on these many of these grades, grade nine, grade 10 in high school.
Yeah, it's the system's not working, it's not working, it's a collectivist system, it needs to be privatized. The amazing teachers, the amazing school administrators will do better than they currently are financially right now, with less stress, because like I said to you, there's no responsibility for the parent and for the student. You know.
Robert Vaughan:
What was the academic level of these children that you were teaching? Elementary school, grades seven and eight, I understand. So what are you talking? 12 to 14 years old in that area. I got involved in education as a trustee because of my own children getting into the system. I sent them to Montessori first so that they could learn how to read and write before I put them into the public school system.
But it was because there was an OECD report of 17% of all Ontario high school graduates were illiterate. And I'm going, what's going on here? Why should I put my kids in such a system? So I investigated, I read a book called Why Johnny Can't Read by Rudolph Flesch. Investigated the pedagogical practices of Kenneth and Yetta Goodman in Arizona, how they developed things like whole language, look say versus phonics. And—
Dave Annis:
Balanced literacy.
Robert Vaughan:
Yeah, well, it's gone by a host of different names over the years. By the way, for many hundreds of years, people have tried to get away from the phonetic deconstruction of language and to decipher the code. And that's all it is. 26 letters, I think it's 47 sounds. Boom. Put them together, you got a 97.4% of all little English languages phonetic. The rest can be learned, like the word the TH sound is not a phonetic sound, it's a something you have to learn.
And that's how I got into it. So I want to ask you, your students, how were they in reading and writing and language comprehension literature, things like that? Did you find it okay? Or have they started introducing phonics into the system?
Dave Annis:
Yeah, so when I was teaching, I was teaching balanced literacy. And it's all those things that you just talked about. And so I would say that I had students who excelled despite it. I had students who learned to read despite it.
There's an awesome podcast called Sold a Story, and it's all about the science of reading, how they knew that how kids read and it's phonetic, and they should be using phonics, and how the system is based in the states, but it applies to every country that followed the states, which Canada did. And how the reading scores of these students dropped down tremendously.
But you have a certain percentage of students that it they weren't connecting the dots on their own that they needed that explicit instruction. And so Ontario noticed that these numbers of illiterate children graduating or not graduating as illiterates. It did an inquiry, that the science of reading inquiry, and found that the majority of school boards, mine being one of them, were not using science to teach. And so they forced those boards, Thames Valley included, to return back to it. And to Thames Valley's credit, they did a great job in retraining the teachers, the staff in doing that. So kudos to Thames Valley for that.
Robert Vaughan:
Excellent. I've got so many clippings that I could go back, and I gotta publish these someday, maybe under the host section of Just Right Media's page. But the Freedom Party of Ontario, of which Bob Metz was the founder, put out a production called Just Say No to Whole Language, K N O W, where we talked about the history of language and reading and instruction. And I remember we were invited, both Bob and I to the home of a teacher in London who took exception, who was a member of the Freedom Party, but took exception to this particular policy of ours, yeah, education policy. And it took about an hour and it got a little heated at the end there. But what this teacher, a woman, meant by the word reading was different from what we were talking about when we said to read.
If I put up D-O-G, to read it means dog. To understand what a dog is is something—it's comprehension, and she was conflating reading with comprehension. And that was a big issue. And when she understood then finally that no, no, when we're talking about reading, we're talking about deciphering the code.
My child at six, I could give them a chemistry textbook from university, they could read it. Would they understand it? No, I probably didn't understand it. But the point is they could read it, then they can go and say, what does this word mean? And then pronounce the word. That's phonics. That's reading. It's not comprehension. That comes over many years of experience. So there's a stumbling block. This teacher didn't know what the word reading meant.
Dave Annis:
Yeah. And well, to get back to your question about how the students are doing. So in Ontario, we have the EQAO. So it's a test of the grade three and six reading, writing, and math, and then grade nine, math, and grade 10 literacy. And the scores are going up. So you the goal is to get a level three or higher. Because level three means you're meeting the expectations. Okay. Well, the numbers were going up.
But then I would get these grade four and grade seven staff coming to me, and they're saying it's said in their EQAO score that Johnny got a level three in reading, but he can't read. So the EQAO scores are not a good measuring stick for reading.
Just it's just coming back, Robert, to what you said, that when everyone passes and everyone gets a diploma, because that's the goal, then they become meaningless. When everyone gets a high school diploma, well, that's good, but when everyone gets a degree, well, it's—you know, it's the scarce things that are worth something. When everyone's got a degree, a degree is no longer worth anything. And so the school board's push is to have everyone go to university, because they see that as the best path to a successful and fulfilling life. And for some students, it will be, but for others, it will be miserable. And it's not.
Robert Vaughan:
They're setting them up for failure. They're setting a goal that they think is best for the child, contrary, maybe to what the child would think. And then when the child follows the leader, because this is the wont of children is to please the adults. They become frustrated, they become angry that they're not following their goal. Thank you very much. I wanted to become a fisherman, I wanted to be a welder. I wanted to be in construction like my dad. No, no, no, no. Matriculate, go to university, be a doctor, you know.
Dave Annis:
And the irony of all ironies now is that these university jobs are the ones at risk from AI. So you know, so what are you going to do now, school board? Right? Oh, now I'm going to push trades again. Well, he better. You better.
I had a plumber come in to fix my sink about a month ago. And I said, so is it busy out there? He says, yeah, I'm turning down jobs. Yep. He says, I could be working 24-7, and I would say—
Robert Vaughan:
It’s the same in this province. It's the same here.
Dave Annis:
Yeah. I said, so would you say that as a plumber that you're making, you know, 75, 80,000? I said, in general, plumbers in general. He says, oh, easily. Easily. He says, it all depends on how much you work. And also if you own your own business, you're making more, he says.
But he says, and it's not just plumbing, it's electricians, it's carpenters, it's welders. And I said, so when you went to school, I said, was it here in Ontario? He said, yeah. I said, was there a push for trades? He says, no. He says, he's dyslexic, he had trouble reading, and so he knew he was going into trades.
Robert Vaughan:
And this that's not necessarily to say, and I know this, that just because a person may not have that particular desire to get into academe to be intellectual, that doesn't mean that they aren't intellectually inclined, that they—you can have a very intelligent, smart, well-read electrician or plumber or trade person, right? This is not a disparagement or a judgment against them. I think that that's probably some of the mindset of the people who are saying, oh, you got to matriculate, you gotta go to university. That's better for you.
Dave Annis:
Yeah, it's and it's funny because university—that's the home of no accountability of ideas, right? You know, they throw out ideas and they don't suffer the consequences again. Just like I believe elementary and secondary should be privatized, so should universities. You know, then you get accountability, then because it's your money. Your money's on the line.
Robert Vaughan:
Well, in some regions, now down in the states, every universities are government. Here, for example, if you go on to the University of Western Ontario, you'll see a sign at the gates before you enter is that this is private property. This is a private institution. It receives government largesse, government funding, but technically it's private. So privatization in this respect may not be the answer. I think to be more specific, it is making sure that government get out of the education business, the education service, because that is what it should be.
Because how do you get a good product through competition through the price system, through capitalism, by providing a need, providing filling a need, filling a purpose. That is not done when everything is just given to you by government and they throw money at you.
Dave Annis:
Yeah, yeah. And what a the centralization allows, choke points, bottlenecks. And when you have that, it is easy to get captured. And this is what's happened.
So this is—so, you know, people ask me, is it true that we have pornography in elementary school libraries? And I say, I've pulled two out. And they say, well, how pornographic is it? I said stick figure pictures, text that explicitly describes stuff. And they're looking at me, and so how did it get in there? And I said, didn't your librarian check it? No, no, that there's so many books going to the library that the librarian doesn't have time to read them all. So it's centralized. So a committee approves the books. Someone on that committee, hopefully, I don't know, read them. Okay?
And so when I've—when I did a—so I had a parent come and tell me about it, and I went looking, and there it was, and I opened it and I was flabbergasted. Showed the librarian, her face went red. She didn't know about it, right?
The vast majority of people don't want this in there. And as you said in our earlier conversation, if we put some heterosexual sex books in those in elementary school libraries, you know, people would be up in arms. But it's because it's a special group. And whenever you have a special group with special rights, and then special privileges, then you start creating resentment and one group against the other, fighting for me, me, me, me, instead of individuals promoting individual rights.
And so, yes, they they're able to get it in there. And so, but the principal and I, we saw these, we found two in our library. So hopefully other principals and other schools yanked them, but it's up to the school administrator, but I wasn't going to leave that in there. I didn't care what anyone said, because I would just here and let's show this to your the parents during your meeting, because I've seen videos during trustee meetings that when people read from these books, they stop them saying that's not appropriate, but it's appropriate in a school, right? So there's the hypocrisy, it's two things.
Robert Vaughan:
I went through all of this when I was a trustee again. I'm sorry to hearken back to the before time, but this is what I know. Sex ed was big at the time, and they were bringing in this new curriculum of sex ed, and it was very controversial. Again, I was on TV, radio, newspapers talking about this because I was one of those people who were saying that this is inappropriate for the level that you want to discuss it with, pre-pubescent teens, you know, pre-pubescent, yeah, grade school, early grade schools, kindergarten, grades one, two, three, and what you want to talk about there, I think is best left to the parents or not spoken about in this institution.
And of course, I got a lot of flack for it. But this is going back 30 years now, 35 years, well, 30 years. And the level of inappropriate material that was being taught to the children was disgusting to say the least, but this is a personal opinion. But it was inappropriate at an age level. That's what I found. I mean, some of it, yeah, you could teach that. I mean, everybody has gone through sex ed, you know, the mechanics, the dangers, things like that, the risks. That's fine. That's all well and good, because these are factually based. As far as the what you say, the DEI and the alphabet army that that's political, and that was being infused into the sex ed curriculum, and I protested. And so this is going back, like I say, 30 years. That was the thin edge of the wedge. I'm sure probably even before my time, it was being pushed as well.
But now it is being—I would never be a trustee. I would be lynched by the administration. I would be lynched by the ministry. I would be fired as a trustee if I said what I believe now as a trustee. So quite literally, I think some trustees in the province of Ontario have actually been removed from office for voicing.
Dave Annis:
Yeah, by other trustees. So you need a majority of the trustees to back you in order to make the change. So and you know, getting back to the ideology and being captured. So for example, people think, oh, well, it's just health class. And I know the teachers just teach it at the end of the year when they whip through it. It's not just them. It is not just them.
So what do I mean by that? Because they have to teach language for three periods, a minimum of two, but most likely three periods. So that's 120 minutes. Okay? So they are exposing children to all these different texts. And some of it has this stuff baked into it.
And how is it getting in there? Well, it's because the textbooks that and other resources that teachers are allowed or recommended to use, unless they buy their own or bring find their own, are board approved. And so that means it has to follow the ideology that is approved by the board. And so you're not just getting it in the sex ed class. You'll be getting it, and maybe not as directly, but indirectly in the language classes. It'll be in your history books. It'll be in your geography books. It'll be in your science books that these kids are seeing.
So, for example, the climate hysteria. Like no one with two brain cells to rub together will deny that the climate's changing. Of course it is. Is it going up? Yes. Is it because of carbon? No. They've proven this with ice samples that from the air bubbles trapped in them, that the temperatures went up before the carbon went up. So it can't be the carbon causing temperature to go up. Right?
And so you this is just one example of the climate ideology that is currently in schools, that's in language books and science books, and it's in geography books. And so you're getting bombarded. It's like death by a thousand cuts. And that's why whether it's the alphabet mafia pushing their agenda, or as the climate, or it's the indigenous ways of knowing, you know. It's all being pushed in various avenues.
Robert Vaughan:
Yeah. Before our conversation, I was thinking about how I should approach this because education was so very much more a part of my life, not just as a student, obviously, because I did graduate from university, but as a trustee politically, it is a very important to me. And I was thinking, if we were to rate, and this could be different for every person and every parent, if you were to rate and give it a score of based on hours, for example, of the following influences: the parents, your teachers in the schools, your religious figures, your friends, entertainment, those five areas. Rate them based on hours in a day over the say up to the age of 17, which is when you graduate from grade 12, hopefully. That a child is spent in those areas of influence.
Schooling is right up there. Every day for five days a week until the summer, you're in front of a teacher. Let's say for five hours a day on average, because you got recess, you got lunch, and all that stuff. Five hours a day, every day, five days a week for years. Compare that to Hollywood, television, Netflix, radio, music, hours every single day, seven days a week for many, many children, almost all of them.
Now then compare that to how many hours you spend with your parents. Yeah. Or your friends, your friends, I would say that more people spend time with their friends than they do with their parents as they get older and older. When you're a baby to the age of maybe six, it's mainly your parents, of course.
After that, man, the Marxists, to get political, have taken the education system, understanding that this is perhaps for many people the primary source of influence, and have usurped its original purpose of education, and are using it as a tool to indoctrinate them into an ideology that many of their parents would not approve of, and is antithetical to reason. Well, that's my rant. You tell me, do you agree.
Dave Annis:
I agree?
Robert Vaughan:
Oh, okay, good. I agree completely. And so what's the solution? The solution is to take your kid out. And I understand that for many people it's not a possibility because they need it—it acts as child care while they're at work. Fair enough. Absolutely.
Remember, remember they don't have to send the kids. You don't even have to teach your child. You don't even have the home school.
Dave Annis:
Exactly. Although I recommend teaching them or getting someone to teach them.
Robert Vaughan:
Of course.
Dave Annis:
So find those other disaffected parents and make an education commune. You know. There's so many homeschool resources on the internet, so many. Find those, and there are lots of teachers who are disaffected that do not like this system whatsoever, but they're forced in it because there's there is no other choice.
But the biggest vote you have is with your money, and when you send your child to school, the school board gets a per pupil grant of X amount of dollars, and when you pull your child out, that is when the school board will finally listen to you as a parent. It is the only time they'll listen to you. Guaranteed.
Robert Vaughan:
I have a good friend who was raised Catholic, as was I, no longer, of course, lapsed, if you would. And when he had his children, he sent them to Catholic school, not because he was Catholic, because like I said, he was no longer Catholic, except that's how he was brought up, because his viewpoint was the public education system was amoral. Anything goes, there is no right and wrong. While the Catholic system, wrong in his eyes that it was, about a level of morality, their metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics are different than his, he said at least they taught that there is a right and a wrong, that there is a moral code by which you should live your life.
It's up to me as a parent to basically deprogram them or set them straight when they come home. However, that was preferential to a system which is in the public school system, which is anything goes, there is no right or wrong. Who am I to judge is the motto of public school system? And I would agree with him.
And if anybody out there in Ontario or any other province is listening to this, give that a thought. Perhaps you don't want your money, your tax dollars going to the public school system. Consider putting them into the Catholic school system if you are able, or another religious school system if you're able. Yeah, because or don't school them at all, or homeschool them because, in my opinion, and this again is just my opinion, and I was a school trustee, and my kids went to public school. The education that they would get there makes them less capable of becoming responsible adults than zero education in a formal sense.
Let me clear let me clarify that. If they did not go to any school whatsoever, but maybe had a bit of encouragement from a parent to do this, read that, find out this, that child will be better educated than if you graduated—what does that word mean? Left the public school system after 12 years. I mean that because the people in the public school, the children who go through that are being taught nonsense, irrationality, division, hatred, racism, sexism. That is what they're being indoctrinated in, while a person left to their own devices will not usually be subjected to these things, unless they're watching Hollywood movies.
Dave Annis:
Yes, and dear listener and viewers, not all of them. We're saying in general, just keep that in mind.
Robert Vaughan:
I always have to say that, Dave. It's becoming actually a little tedious.
Dave Annis:
Can you put a banner that just scrolls along the bottom?
Robert Vaughan:
This is this is a part of reason. You know, when we say that this is the case, and if we're talking about a system of thousands and tens of thousands of people, oh, do you mean every single teacher in every single situation is acting just like this? Don't be a fool. Of course not.
It has to be said because there are too many fools out there who are going to take this. What you're saying, what I'm saying is that every single person is talking about this. And it's not the case. You're a good case in point.
Dave Annis:
Yeah. And so, like to end, I would just like to say despite the many, many awesome and competent school administrators and teachers in the public system. You have to realize that your children are your responsibility. Their safety is your responsibility. Their education is your responsibility. And just like what Robert said, it's really hard to deprogram or to get rid of a bad habit. So I recommend getting them out of the public school system. Because the money will follow them to the Catholic board if you switch to that. It is less woke, less left, although it still has its issues. But if you go to them and tell them why you're sending them there and say and push, they're more likely to see why you came and want to keep you. Because I know that the public board is bleeding students to the Catholic board right now in the London area. And they're worried about it. They're having meetings about it. They've asked us for why these students are leaving.
In my last meeting before I retired, I was asked this and I said nothing because whenever I've opened my mouth in the past, they've just disciplined me or didn't listen. So I'm not going to help you out now. But maybe you'll watch this video and get mad at it anyway and learn the truth. And maybe you'll change, and that would be wonderful.
But yes, parents, take them out. I would not send my own kids into the system if they're in kindergarten right now. I would probably homeschool, but if that's not an option, private school if you can afford it, Catholic school or some other religious school, and have the money flow to them. And when the money flows away from the public board and you create a crisis by leaving them, that's when they'll suddenly listen and realize, oh, you have a voice now. Because money speaks louder than any word, and it is the best way you can vote.
Robert Vaughan:
That's a great place to end it, Dave. I thank you very much. And again, in the next election put your vote toward Dave Annis if you’re in London Centre.
Dave Annis:
Yes, I recognize that education is not part of the federal jurisdiction. That’s fine. So but Robert you mentioned about coming on again in the future to talk about federal issues that the PPC is championing and I would love to do that.
Robert Vaughan:
Great. We’ll talk again. Thank you very much, Dave. Appreciate it.
Dave Annis:
Thank you.