Alberta’s education minister threatened to cut off funding to a Sturgeon County private school this week unless it followed the law on gay-straight alliances.
Education Minister David Eggen announced Wednesday that he had sent ministerial orders to 28 accredited private school authorities that had not complied with the Act to Support Gay-Straight Alliances.
Said act requires school boards to post policies on how they will allow students to join and create gay-straight alliances, which are support groups meant to provide a safe environment for any student.
Specifically, the law states that schools are to allow students to create such groups on request without delay, appoint an adviser to help run them, allow them to be called gay-straight or queer-straight alliances, and are not to tell parents which students join such groups.
Eggen said all of Alberta’s public, separate, francophone and charter schools had met the law’s requirements as of the June 30 deadline. Some 28 of the province’s accredited funded private schools had not.
The Father’s House Christian Fellowship School in Sturgeon County was one of those schools, and had failed to post a policy that complied with the law.
The ministerial order includes a specific safe and caring school policy that boards are required to post and follow by June 30, 2019. It also requires boards to post the text of the order on their websites and send a letter explaining it to parents.
Eggen said these schools would lose their provincial funding for the next school year if they did not comply with the ministerial order.
“Ensuring that vulnerable students feel safe is not optional,” he said, especially when private schools receive up to 70 per cent of their funding from taxpayers.
“If you’re taking public money, you follow the law.”
About 4,000 students attend schools affected by these orders. Eggen said he was not pulling the cash for these schools immediately because he did not want to disrupt the current school year.
The Father’s House School is a K-to-8 school with about 100 students affiliated with the Morinville-based Father’s House Christian Fellowship, which last February moved the old King of Kings Lutheran Church building from St. Albert to Morinville for use as its new headquarters.
Church officials did not return repeated requests for comment for this story.
As of Nov. 16, the school’s website was listed as under construction and did not include the text of the ministerial order, but did link to the school’s safe and caring school and student conduct policies.
While Alberta Education officials would not disclose to the Gazette how these policies broke provincial law, they said the school was provided specific feedback on them. A close reading suggests that the policies did not explicitly require students to refrain from, not tolerate, and report bullying (as the School Act requires), and did not state how the school would allow for the creation and naming of gay-straight alliances (although they do quote the relevant sections of the School Act).
St. Albert human rights advocate and MacEwan University professor Kristopher Wells said he was glad to see Eggen “bring down the hammer” on these school boards, noting that June 30 was a generous deadline.
“The minister has made it clear that discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity has no place in our schools or in our society.”
Wells said this law would likely be an issue in the next election. A court challenge of this law by many of the schools subject to this ministerial order was also set to go to trial next month.
Even if the NDP is voted out and the next government wants to overturn this act, Wells said doing so would mean reopening the contentious debate over LGBTQ students in Alberta.
“Alberta has really changed as a province,” he said, and LGBTQ parents are now proud to speak out about their kids.
