The Christmas party thrown by Vincent Massey high school students for underprivileged kids that was cancelled because of teachers union sanctions has now been revived.
“It’s a yes!” Karren Wang, a student trustee for the Greater Essex County District School Board who is one of the party’s organizers, reported Friday, after local officials of the Ontario Secondary School Teachers Federation met and gave their green light to allowing members to participate, and then school officials met to decide whether there was still time to organize the annual event.
“We’re holding a meeting with volunteers, probably within the next hour or so,” Wang said early in the afternoon. The event will happen Dec. 15 as originally planned.
“Next week is going to be absolute chaos for us, but it’s going to be worth it.”
School principal Melissa Nantais said everyone at the school is very excited the party – a school tradition involving couple of hundred student volunteers – is a go. “Now we’ve got a lot of work to do.”
The party, for about 200 children from around the city and county, was cancelled after the sanctions were announced early this week, requiring that public high school teachers not participate in any volunteer or extracurricular activities outside of normal classroom hours starting Monday. But a memo issued by the union on Wednesday makes an exception for charitable events already organized for December, allowing its members to see those events through.
Windsor-area OSSTF officials met Friday to discuss if the Massey event fits the memo’s criteria and whether having members volunteer at it would contravene any other sanctions. “So the school is being given the green light by us, to say, if you want to keep it going, keep it going,” OSSTF District 9 president Jeff Brosseau said Friday.
Related articles
- Sanctions hit students starting Monday (blogs.windsorstar.com)
