{mosimage}MISSISSAUGA, Ont. - The funding formula war between Queen’s Park and the Dufferin-Peel Catholic District School Board ended just in time for the school year, and local trustees are claiming victory.

{mosimage}Former Prime Minister Kim Campbell once famously remarked that an election campaign is no place to debate major public policy changes. The electorate judged her harshly, but she was right to point out that the process of fighting elections has a negative effect on the merits of a policy.

TORONTO - The last place you might expect to find school-aged children on a Saturday morning would be, well, at school. But at St. Andrew’s Catholic School in Toronto, 150 children, youth and parents attended sacramental preparation classes every Saturday morning for nine months last year.

Editor’s note: Michael Bator, director of education for the Dufferin-Peel Catholic District School Board , retired this month after 34 years as teacher, principal, superintendent and director. He offers below a reflection on what Catholic education has meant to him.

{mosimage}TORONTO - This summer Fr. Henry Carr Catholic Secondary School is moving a few blocks south to Doomstown — to the corner of the street where 19- year-old Jose Hierro Saez was gunned down June 3 in another case which pits police seeking leads against a community too afraid to break the code of silence. Doomstown is the local nickname for Jamestown, the neighbourhood off Martin Grove Road south of Finch Avenue, and one of Toronto’s poorest and most violent.

{mosimage}MISSISSAUGA, Ont. - For the first time since Ontario’s Catholic schools received full funding in 1984, a publicly funded Catholic school is going private.

{mosimage}TORONTO - As Mass ended under bright sunshine outdoors and teacher-librarian Kathryn Zaleski-Cox announced St. Brigid’s Elementary School had made the grade as an Ontario EcoSchool, a cheer went up. For the 580 students of east-end Toronto’s St. Brigid’s Elementary, their teachers and two dozen parents participating in the May 17 Mass, they weren’t just cheering for something students had accomplished with a year’s worth of litterless lunches, reduced energy consumption and heightened ecological awareness. The cheer also recognized prayers answered.

If C1+ reminds you of a mediocre grade you got in high school chemistry, that’s because you weren’t paying attention in French class either.

Editor’s note: The following is a position paper produced by the Catholic Civil Rights League on “The question of Catholic school funding.” 

As Ontario prepares for an election in October, several groups are trying to raise the question of continued funding for the province’s Catholic elementary and secondary schools. Some claim that all publicly funded schools would be operated more efficiently if there was one, non-sectarian system, with school boards drawn geographically and, in most localities, in French or English streams. Several public school boards have already passed resolutions to this effect.

{mosimage}TORONTO - An Ontario Catholic school board has pulled The Golden Compass and other His Dark Materials novels by outspoken atheist Philip Pullman from school library shelves in response to a U.S.-inspired campaign against both the books and the movie version of The Golden Compass, which opens across Canada Dec. 7.