Peel District School Board officials say they're having a tough time getting an audience with the new education minister.
Peel Board chair Janet McDougald said she requested a meeting with Minister Liz Sandals, but was told by the education minister’s office that she isn’t currently meeting with any school boards.
“I was told the minister is not making appointments with school boards. She is totally booked until the end of June,” McDougald said.
In the meantime, while Sandals will be visiting and touring school board programs, McDougald said she was told the minister won’t be conducting any formal meetings with school board officials.
“I really wanted to sit down and talk to her about the funding formula again,” said McDougald, who noted the Board’s 2013/14 budget is due at the end of June.
The Board is engaged in what has been a lengthy lobbying effort to get the provincial government to change the formula being used in determining how much funding each school board receives.
The Peel Board has been arguing for years that local students are grossly underfunded because the government’s funding formula is based on outdated census data.
The Board is also spending about $12 million more than the Province is providing in funding to meet the needs of local special education students, according to McDougald.
She estimates the Board would receive millions of dollars more if the Province were using census data from 2006 instead of 2001 or 1996.
“I’m very disappointed,” McDougald said of the education minister’s unavailability. “Basically, she said she didn’t have time for us.”
As the second-largest school board in the country, with critical funding issues that have not been addressed, McDougald said the Peel Board should be able to get some face time with the minister.
“I would have hoped that we would have been a priority,” she said.
The Board is planning to reignite its lobbying campaign that will enlist the aid of parents in trying to get the ministry’s attention on local funding issues, particularly the funding shortfall facing special education.
A former Portland businessman filed a federal lawsuit Thursday that accuses the U.S. government of complicity in what he describes as 106 days of imprisonment and torture at the hands of plainclothes police in the United Arab Emirates.
Yonas Fikre, a 33-year-old naturalized U.S. citizen of Eritrean descent, seeks $5 million each from two FBI agents he accuses of trying to recruit him to serve as their informant inside Masjed As-Saber, the southwest Portland mosque where he prayed.
Fikre's lawsuit claims that the U.S. agents were angry when he refused to cooperate during 2010 interrogations in Khartoum, Sudan.
The suit alleges that the government put Fikre on the no-fly list and used that classification to keep him overseas. The U.S. agents also appeared to be standing by in 2011 as Fikre was brutalized when police officers from the United Arab Emirates blindfolded him and interrogated him, the suit says. He alleges that police in Abu Dhabi mimicked some of the same questions previously posed to him by the FBI agents.
Beth Anne Steele, the FBI's spokeswoman in Oregon, said the bureau cannot comment on pending litigation.
Fikre, who now lives in Stockholm, Sweden, accuses the U.A.E. police of beating him repeatedly with batons, forcing him to sleep nearly naked on a cold floor and threatening to strangle him with a flexible plastic pipe.
"One particulary painful torture method his interrogators used was to force (Fikre) to lie on his stomach with his sandals off, whereupon he was beaten severely on the soles of his feet; thereafter, he was required to stand on his feet, which standing caused him great pain."
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