Fighting for Funding for Ontario’s Multi-Faith Disabled Students
Written by: Diana Hart
Demanding provincial funding for their disabled children, eight families are teaming with a coalition of multi-faith schools to sue the McGuinty government.
Allan Kaufman, Multi-Faith Coalition for Equal Funding of Faith-Based Schools’ legal counsel, says they realized they needed to take drastic action after a Ministry of Health civil servant told them only $4.5 million of the $14.4 million allotted for Ontario’s disabled students in faith-based schools is being spent.
“The government is slicing and dicing the children with disabilities in our religious schools. The situation is intolerable and we are not going to permit it anymore,” says Kaufman.
Traditionally, faith-based schools, other than Catholic schools, did not receive any government funding. This changed in 2000, when the Ministry of Health began funding students in faith-based schools who needed speech therapy, nursing services, occupational therapy or physiotherapy.
This funding excludes disabled children who are blind, deaf or have learning disabilities, after the Ontario government, in what the coalition calls an arbitrary move, designated the Ministry of Education to be in charge of these students. Kaufman says the families and schools have never received money for these students.
This lack of funding has limited who schools can allow in, says Khalid Khokhar, officer of the Multi-Faith Coalition and principal of the Islamic School of Cambridge. He says his school has had to turn down some disabled children, sending them back to public school, because they didn’t have the money to take care of their special needs.
About 50,000 students attend Ontario’s faith-based schools. The relatively small amount of money needed to help special needs students in those schools would be far outweighed by the good the money would do, says Bill Shell, the human rights lawyer representing the families in the lawsuit.
"We provide all kinds of money for all kinds of purposes that are hardly as valuable then our investment in the welfare and futures of children in Ontario who have disabilities," says Shell.
Nadia Moussa, a Scarborough mother with two young visually impaired daughters, says she is taking part in the lawsuit because her daughters deserve to learn about their faith in school while getting the extra attention they need.
Moussa’s 10-year-old daughter, Tebat, who is legally blind, says when she moved from public school to an Islamic school, she lost the extra help she needs, like specialized computer software and a teacher’s assistant to tell her what is on the blackboard.
Tebat says she gets hassled by classmates when she blocks their view of the board when she goes for a closer look.
“I’d like them to stop yelling at me,” she says quietly.
