Mari Rutka

Mari Rutka

What do you expect from the communities to make this event more useful for themselves?

One of the things we offered last year and this year in particular was interpretation. So if people felt that they were not comfortable speaking to the people in English we could arrange to have an interpreter come and speak in there, go around them and help them in their language. We are also offering this year for the first time , a little session, a workshop that talks about public education in Ontario and how it works. Because we know, you know, people comes from all other places, sometimes education systems are different . They started different times of the year. Maybe their courses go half the year than they start again or maybe they start in kindergarten or maybe they start at grade one, maybe they go up to grade 12, maybe they have another system for that, maybe they start doing that in a certain way at certain age and they do it differently from how it has been done here and I know a lot of parents have questions about that and wonder what is my child learning. So we set up a session this year to help people know about that. And I thing if the more people knows about this information fair, we’ll try to keep doing this, hopefully the words spreads, the more people come because the things differ already.

What is your plans for the future of the event?

I am hoping we can keep this going and I am hoping we can make it even bigger. This year we have 54 different programs, services and agencies represented here. The more we can find, the more we try to keep including them and having them, people can learn about what will they offer.

Thank you!