Miriam: Tell me a bit about the relationship that the Sense Project has to school boards and to schools.

Christina:

Well, with the school board, it’s, how will I describe it? It’s a non-relationship right now, like we’re not really with them. Ironically enough, the ministry wants us to be in a relationship with them. They’re like, “You guys need to date the EMSB. When are you guys going for dinner?” And we're like, "We’ve been waiting to go for dinner for a long time!" And the problem is that the healthy school’s approach and the reform, the whole goal of it was to have these 3 sectors work together - so the community, the schools, and public health officials, to kind of form this triangle base for the ultimate health of youth, so for us to be sharing knowledge, to have a discussions, to share expertise. Now what happens? It all goes back to respect. There’s definitely a lack of respect between the school board and the community, like I think that the school board ideally would like Head & Hands to be giving workshops, but they’re afraid of our approach I guess. They don’t really understand our approach. They haven’t really taken any time to listen to us, and so, we haven’t properly sat down with them to have a comprehensive meeting.

This is where I want to validate our approach, have a communication tool that’s very glossy, very comprehensive, very snazzy that they’ll just look at it and be like, “Oh, okay, so you guys are not out to get us. Actually, you’re here to help us. Oh my god, okay, great.” That’s kind of what we want, and just for them to respect what we’re doing, and to learn from us so we can learn from them, and like, ultimately, we have the same goals. Why can’t we work together? That’s kind of my analysis, Head & Hands’ also stuck their foot in their mouth. They kind of like jumped the gun a little way too much with the reform, like with their campaign, like they had this very aggressive, like "the government cut sex ed!" kind of approach, which is like, “Yes, that’s what the government did.” insidiously, by doing this whole reform thing, like it phased it out kind of, but the people at the EMSB, were really pissed off at that message. Very protective of like that’s not exactly what’s happening right now with the reform, you guys are miscommunicating us. You’re making us look bad, so we don’t wanna work with you.

So there’s like just these two camps going fuck you, fuck you, fuck you. Like at the end of the day, what happens? The youth still don't have sex ed. I was kind of frustrated with that because now, I have to deal with this *drama* that isn’t even my own, that I have to now work with, but it just says a lot about how anger is really important in community organizing, but how do you communicate that anger, and how do you transform it into something that people can work with instead of just react to?

And then, our relationship with schools. With schools, it’s easier because it’s like we’re working, we’re both in the field, we’re both on the ground, we’re both in the classrooms. It’s easier to negotiate something with the school, with somebody working in the school because you just have a meeting. Some schools have anxiety around condom distribution, which makes me go like, “Wow.” In 2008 really, you’re upset that we're going to bring condoms into your school because you think students aren’t mature enough. "If they’re not mature enough to buy condoms, they’re certainly not mature enough to have sex". And I’m like, “Well, too bad that sex is not all about maturity.” Too bad because that would be a great theory. Fortunately, hormones are involved. Hormones/mature. Hormones/mature - it's not a synonym, right? So, yeah. But all it took was sitting down with this person and talking with them, showing them like describing what harm reduction really meant, and telling them like, “You know, we’ll give you an endless supply of condoms. You figure out how you want to give them out to the students. They just need to be in your school.” And they’ll be like, “Okay, I understand that. That makes sense.” And then problem solved. And that’s it. And we go about our day. With the school board, it’s different. It takes forever to even get a phone call. It’s just a different hurdle.

Some schools have media training classes like the richer ones like Selwyn House etc., so they’re like, “Oh great. We can corporate this into our curriculum.” And a lot of the private schools also have philanthropy classes where they have to do community work, so this also is a good bridge for that, so yeah, for sure. But in the public schools, it’s more…because the peer education is separate than the workshops, right? Like we’ve divided it where we’re just there to give the workshops, and if youth wanna volunteer then that’s something separate from the school because there’s so much anxiety around peer education and media anyway. They’re afraid like, “What if the student are running around with a video camera, and what about confidentiality?” And like they just think that once we train them up, they’re just going to be like these really radical upsetting activists in schools and then they’re going to like stir sit up and ruin the comfortable day to day they have established.