A controversial DEI trainer has been hired by a Canadian school board to give lectures on ‘disrupting racism’, despite being accused of driving a principal to suicide.
Kike Ojo-Thompson is set to give elementary school teachers and administrators at York Region District Schools a crash course on ‘disrupting racism’.
TNC News first reported that the diversity trainer, based in Toronto, will be giving pre-recorded sessions to staff through an online portal.
The four sessions will cover ‘naming and disrupting our norms’, ‘racism, anti-black racism and racial inequity’, ‘whiteness, white supremacy and organizational culture’, and ‘fostering change for racial equity’.
Totaling eight hours, the board told TNC that it had partnered with ‘award-winning equity consulting firm’ Kojo Institute, to offer a ‘comprehensive professional development training program’ to educators.
Kike Ojo-Thompson is set to give elementary school teachers and administrators at York Region District Schools a crash course on ‘disrupting racism’
The York Region District School Board is set to have teachers tune in to eight hours of pre-recorded seminars from the trainer
The board said: ‘Developed and facilitated by Kojo Institute’s expert equity consultants, this training develops participants’ skills and capacity for confronting and addressing racism (and other forms of oppression) and anti-blackness with the board.’
This school board taking on Ojo-Thompson comes in the wake of the suicide of Richard Bilkszto who took his own life following an encounter with Ojo-Thompson.
Ojo-Thompson had turned on him during a session in April 2021 after he challenged her claim that Canada – where both lived – is more racist than the US.
In the audio of the session, obtained by The Free Press, Bilkszto can be heard saying that maybe Canada was not ‘the bastion of white supremacy’ that Ojo-Thompson had made it out to be.
He pointed out that public schools serving Canada’s poorest students are generally better funded than their equivalents in the United States.
Ojo-Thompson turned on Bilkszto, telling him in front of all of the others gathered: ‘As white people, there’s a whole bunch going on that isn’t your personal experience. It will never be. You will never know it to be so. You will never know it to be so.
‘So your job in this work, as white people, is to believe.’
Ojo-Thompson – who was paid $7,500 an hour for eight hours of seminars – laughed in a subsequent discussion over the challenge made by Bilkszto, who was described as a deeply progressive man hailed for his focus on ‘equity’ at work.
The anti-racism trainer was later branded ‘abusive’ by an official government investigation into her antics.
Richard Bilkszto, 60, took his own life in Toronto on July 13 after two years of turmoil following an April 2021 encounter at the school where he was principal. He filed an official complaint and won, and had just filed another suit
KOJO Institute founder Kike Ojo-Thompson. Bilkszto said she accused him of supporting white supremacy because he challenged her comments
And she referred to him again in the next session as an example of ‘white supremacist resistance’ in newly-released audio clips which also show her laughing while making an example of him.
The late principal’s family say his distress was only heightened when the superintendent of his school district, Sheryl Robinson Petrazzini, further shamed him in a tweet suggesting he was a racist.
The tweet, since deleted, hailed Ojo-Thompson ‘for modeling the discomfort administrators may need to experience in order to disrupt ABR,’ or anti-black racism.
The week after his death, Kike Ojo-Thompson, the diversity trainer, issued a defiant statement which did not apologize for her role in Bilkszto’s death – and even implied that she was the victim.
‘This incident is being weaponized to discredit and suppress the work of everyone committed to diversity, equity, and inclusion,’ she said.
Bilkszto, who was gay and single, was said by friends to have devoted his life to teaching
‘We will not be deterred from our work in building a better society for everyone.’
Bilkszto filed a complaint with school officials saying that he’d been harassed.
Ontario’s Workplace Safety and Insurance Board investigated and in August 2021 concluded that Thompson’s behavior was ‘abusive’ and amounted to ‘workplace harassment.’
But friends said he never got over the humiliation of being labelled a white supremacist, and the confrontation ate away at him.
The school board and Ontario ‘s education minister are investigating Bilkszto’s death and whether the obsession with woke policies may have contributed to it.
Bilkszto, who was gay and single, was said by friends to have devoted his life to teaching, and spent time in a tough majority-black school in Buffalo, New York.
He had recently retired, hoping to travel more, but was convinced to come out of retirement to work as principal of Burnhamthorpe Collegiate Institute in Toronto.
Source: | This article originally belongs to Dailymail.co.uk
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