BY: KEITH BAYBAYON
The role of a Student Trustee is to advocate for the students within a respective school board and voice their thoughts, opinions and concerns. It is not an easy task that one can breeze through without facing obstacles along the way, trust me, I know it all too well.
My name is Keith Baybayon and I am the Student Trustee for the Toronto Catholic District School Board, and I represent all the students within the Downsview area. I ensure your views and opinions are always present within the boardroom.
When beginning my term, I laid out all my focuses and initiatives for the year involving many equity issues affecting students. Although, many other problems appeared during the peak of the pandemic, such as the inability to pay financial dues and even pay for uniforms.
When students started reaching out to my Co-Student Trustee, Kathy Nguyen and I about the high expenses of uniforms, we knew something had to be done. We had an abundance of responses from youth within the Jane and Finch community, such as students from James Cardinal McGuigan.
Many reached out to us stating that their parents had lost their jobs due to the pandemic and would not be able to pay for new uniforms. The cost of uniforms within the TCDSB can vary from $400 - $600 which troubled countless individuals within the Downsview area. This was a troubling cause because students had either outgrown their current uniform or need new ones entering high school.
To combat this issue, we wrote a motion to address the financial discrepancies when it came to school uniforms. Kathy and I wanted to temporarily suspend the uniform policy and even quoted statements from JCM to uplift our mission. It was eventually passed by the Board of Trustees but then rescinded due to the concerns of the Catholic Community. We didn’t let this keep us down, and instead, continued to work to find a solution.
We reached out to our school board’s charity— The Angel Foundation for Learning to create an equity fund to provide students with uniforms. This system allowed students to request financial assistance for new uniforms without having any burden on their families. Students were now able to live their school lives with a bit of their stress lifted off.
We could not have accomplished such a task without the students themselves. Youth within the Downsview Community utilized their voices to truly make a change, and I was proud to amplify them.