Hey Parent(s)/Guardians,
Are you curious as to how much the school district was willing to spend on fighting you in the human rights tribunal system?
You can submit an FOI and find out.
This is a case where the parents of a Deaf child won a human rights complaint. When they were done they submitted an FOI request (Freedom of Information), and they found out that the school district spent $681,917.00 on legal fees to oppose them.
They won $150,000.00
Here is the newspaper article.
“Todd and Kimberly Churchill filed an access-to-information request with the school board following their win at the province’s human rights tribunal in March. They discovered the district had spent $681,917 on legal fees to oppose the family’s complaints dating back to 2017, when Carter was in kindergarten.”
“In the end, the human rights commission ruled the district violated Carter’s human rights by not offering him an education in American Sign Language and ordered the school board to pay an additional $150,000 to the Churchill family.“
“I think it’s completely disgusting, because the Department of Education will say there’s no money for teachers, no money for supports, no money for children with exceptionalities,” said Todd Churchill. “But yet there’s money, almost three-quarters of a million dollars … to defend the discrimination of a five-year-old deaf child in a wheelchair.”
I have written blogs before about how much money is being spent on human rights complaints. I have done a couple of FOI requests with the Ministry of Finance to get access to the information.
The Ministry of Education doesn’t even track this kind of information. They are being told how much the district’s legal fees are, but how much of that is human rights complaints against families, they don’t know. Or won’t tell.
Read here. The Financial Cost of Human Rights Complaints in Education
I have also started tracking lawyers’ fees in general, mostly focusing on the school districts in the Lower Mainland. You can obtain all of the information from their SOFI reports that they have to publicly post on their district website.
(**Human rights cases can take years, so when high numbers are back to back, that looks interesting to me. Not all legal fees are human rights complaints against families.)
I bet the school district in N. L never saw Kim and Todd Churchill coming.
“The family said the school was “dismissive” of their concerns and repeatedly said he was receiving a quality education, despite being in an environment where he could not communicate. They were afraid for his well-being, they said, and he was socially isolated because he was unable to communicate with his peers and teachers.“
Sound familiar?
It’s quite ironic to me that school districts tout all these anti-bullying messages and messages of kindness and yet, this is the kind of stuff that they are famous for across the country.
So for anyone interested, FOI away!! You can always do an FOI to the Ministry of Finance at the same time, and see what you get. If they refuse to give it to you, you can file a complaint with OIPC and see what the OIPC thinks about that.