Mari Rutka
Interview
Can you please introduce yourself and your organisation to our readers?
I am the public school trustee for Willowdale. The public school system in Toronto is the Toronto District School Board and it has about 550 schools, it has about 250.000 students from kindergarten degree to 12 and another 160.000 adult learners also take courses within the Toronto District School Board or TDSB as we usually call it. Our students come from all over the world and here. We very much value having all of the honouring and bringing into our system all of the cultural backgrounds that were so lucky to have here in Toronto. So we really believe in that, we really believe in strong relationship building for students with one another with their teachers with their community. So we try to promote that in our schools and I think we have a very good public education system here. We do quite well in terms of testing and international rankings and so forth. We proud of that, we recently had opportunity to talk to ambassadors from 11 countries in Europe and the thing that they were most interested in was the multicultural piece of our education system. It is very challenging thing in a city with people coming from so many different places. To really be teaching kids to value one another as individuals, into really care about other things
Can you please tell us the background of this event? For how many years have you been organizing this event? What are the major purposes of the event?
This is my tenth year, no actually eleventh year as trustee and as a trustee I have come across many community agencies and with many all the other levels of governments, city governments , provincial government and the federal government and I have come to realize there are many many services and programs that are out there to help families, to help children and youth and parents and to connect them to their community to support them when they have different kind of problems or issues but a lot of times people don’t know about them. And a lot of those agencies and programs don’t know how to get word out to the community that they are there. So I guess about six years ago, well actually seven years ago, I brought a number of these agencies and people together and we started talking about how we get people do know more about them. We came up with the idea of having information fair. So we had a first one five years ago, so this is the fifth year we have this event. I think it is a great way for people know about what is there to help them in their community.
