Thread by @mclolcat

The #OntEd system offer a HUGE variety of secondary courses & now we can add ASL and LSQ.

But you'll never be able to take any of those courses if @Sflecce go through with the billions in education cuts.

A brief🧵to explain why and how course offerings work.

The most important thing you have to understand is your local high school's obligation is to offer enough courses so that your child can graduate with a diploma.

Your local school are assigned a certain amount of Instructional Units (IU). Each unit represents a course.

Your school would have asked your child what courses they would like to take next year. That's taken into consideration, but the IUs will first be used to create compulsory courses like English, grade 9 math, etc.

The details here can become tricky.

For example: you need one art credit for your OSSD. Incoming grade 9s are asked whether they want drama, art, or music.

But that choice isn't mandatory. Your school can cancel all their drama courses and only offer art or music. Which, by the way, the school close to mine did.

So long as there is a way for your child to fulfil their graduation requirement, the school is justified in doing it.

Suppose your child needs grade 12 calculus to go into a university engineering program. Well guess what? Grade 12 calculus isn't a compulsory credit.

Neither is senior biology, chemistry, or physics. Or food and nutrition. Or art. Or computer science. Or math for everyday living.

It's not an OSSD requirement and therefore they are not obligated to offer it.

So if your child "needs" a certain course, they will be directed to take summer school, night school, or transfer to another school for a fifth year.

Once the compulsory course offerings are taken care of, then optional courses are looked at with what IUs remain.

Here is a Twitter style simplistic explanation as to why education cuts will impact your child's chances of taking those interesting courses:

The more cuts are made, the less IUs will be available for optional courses.

If your school has to choose between offering an ASL course or another section of grade 12 English, then it would be irresponsible NOT to use that remaining IU for English.

Basically it's either graduation or ASL. They're not going to choose ASL over graduation.

People often complain about the lack of financial literacy courses in schools. There's actually already a course for it! It's called Math for Everyday Life (MEL4E).

But why would a school offer a course like that if they have limited IUs and might have to shut it down anyway?

You want your child to learn about nutrition & healthy living? How to fix a car? Or build a wooden chair?

Those courses take up a lot of class space, have low class sizes for safety, & need money + IUs.

Better to not even have them as options & save the money for compulsories.

That's how education cuts kill courses. It forces schools to choose and in turn cut down on the variety of courses they can offer to students.

Once optional courses die in a school, they are quickly forgotten and are generally not offered again in the future.

So it's fine that @Sflecce announced a new ASL and LSQ course. It's fine because most of you won't see that course anyway and if you do, it'll be at the expense of another optional course.

So maybe instead of grade 12 Earth Space Science, you can have ASL.

You want more relevant and interesting courses?

Courses that excite student learning? Courses that make students excited to go to school?

Then you need to oppose those billions of dollars in cuts @Sflecce is making.

#Onted #NoCutsToEducation