From the I-Wish-I-Wrote-It file…

The Globe and Mail’s Gary Mason had a kick-butt piece yesterday on the Vancouver School Board’s shortsighted and silly stand against picking up half-a-million dollars in donations towards science and technology equipment for schools. 

From his piece:

Board chair Patti Bacchus, a member of Vision Vancouver, the left-leaning party that runs the city and school district, offered tenuous reasons for rejecting the company’s overture to make the program available to the district.

She said the school board was not set up to accept corporate donations. Ms. Bacchus also said she was concerned about the “impact or influence” Chevron might have on what teachers are teaching and how they are teaching it.

Excuses with little to no validity. The real reason the funding is being turned down is politics. Vision Vancouver thinks oil is evil, as are any companies associated with it. It’s why Mayor Gregor Robertson is trying to stop the Kinder Morgan pipeline. This business about not wanting Chevron to get inside Vancouver schools is complete fiction. This is not about maintaining the purity of the classroom, this is about ideology, pure and simple.

Ms. Bacchus constantly complains that the board does not get enough money from the provincial government. And yet here she is rejecting hundreds of thousands of dollars that could be used to buy things students need, all because of rigid dogma. If I was a parent in the district, I would be furious.

Chevron is arms’ length from the program, which is administered by the Canadian charity My Class Needs. Teachers submit project ideas to the non-profit, which decides what proposals get supported. (Most usually do). There are no corporate logos on the resource materials distributed, contrary to information being disseminated by the Vancouver school board. Parents are not encouraged to buy gas from Chevron. The company has zero control over who gets funded. There is no corporate advertising in the school. There is no attempt by Chevron to influence the curriculum or lesson plans of teachers, as the board has suggested.

Since it started in 2010, Fuel My School has distributed more than $100-million worldwide. Over that period, only one school district has ever rejected the offer of funding under the program – Vancouver.

Even better, Mason on his Twitter stream destroys every spin, mistruth and jab thrown at the ideologues running Vision Vancouver. Check that out here.

Vision Vancouver is putting its own narrow-minded agenda ahead of kids. Shame on them.