Evidence in $7M lawsuit against PDSB filed by former associate director reveals deeply rooted anti-Black racism

In August of 2017, when Poleen Grewal was appointed by the Peel District School Board to the position of associate director in charge of instructional and equity support, she immediately launched initiatives to finally dismantle anti-Black racism, which had caused generational harm to students in the country’s second largest school board for decades. 

As the largest employer in Peel, the board’s culture directly impacts tens of thousands of families in one of the most diverse parts of the country.

A wrongful dismissal lawsuit filed last week by Grewal against PDSB and its director, Rashmi Swarup, includes evidence that shows the board’s leaders—instead of committing to dismantle racist practices that had caused widespread harm to the Black community—closed ranks, undermined the woman hired to protect marginalized students and eventually terminated her employment, after blaming her for the systemic failure to change the toxic culture.

The lawsuit also alleges Grewal was threatened with reprisal for trying to hold the school board accountable. 

“The PDSB undermined and did not support the Plaintiff’s equity and anti-Black racism work at the Board and then unfairly and falsely blamed her for the [2020] Ministry Review [which detailed a culture of systemic anti-Black racism] and supervision, making the Plaintiff a scapegoat for its own equity failures; The PDSB terminated the Plaintiff to appease PDSB staff and Trustees who were opposed to or felt threatened by equity and anti-Black racism work,” Grewal’s lawsuit, dated May 27 and filed last week with Ontario’s Superior Court, alleges.

It provides a disturbing narrative filled with evidence and allegations of a school board determined to undermine efforts aimed at dismantling its racist culture.

The PDSB is named as a defendant along with Swarup, who oversaw the termination of Grewal’s employment. She is seeking $7,256,000 from the PDSB, including $4 million for alleged loss of salary and pension income, $1.5 million for alleged professional reputational harm and $1 million for punitive damages; she is seeking $100,000 from Swarup for mental distress and reputational harm, and $100,000 for alleged harms under the Ontario Human Rights Code. 

The Pointer sent questions to the PDSB and Swarup regarding the allegations and evidence in the lawsuit. 

“Administrative staffing and personnel matters fall under the confidential responsibility of our Human Resources Department. Accordingly, Peel District School Board cannot comment publicly on confidential human resource matters. Furthermore, as a statement of claim has been filed, PDSB will not be providing any public comment,” a spokesperson wrote in an email.

The 41-page statement of claim chronologically details evidence and allegations starting with Grewal’s 2017 appointment to the position in charge of equity work in a board with 262 schools across Mississauga, Brampton and Caledon, serving approximately 150,000 students.    

Poleen Grewal led the Peel District School Board’s efforts to eliminate anti-Black racism starting in 2017. She alleges she was wrongfully dismissed for speaking out about the Board’s failures.

(Joel Wittnebel/The Pointer files) 

For decades, prior to Grewal taking over the role, PDSB had been plagued by evidence of systemic discrimination, particularly anti-Black racism in a board where almost 85 percent of students are non-white, overseen by teachers, administrators and senior leaders who were overwhelmingly white. 

Under the leadership of former Ontario education minister Stephen Lecce, the ministry determined the evidence of harm was too overwhelming to ignore, and with the support of Grewal’s work after she took over the equity position the provincial government intervened in 2019 to put an end to the systemic discrimination that was widespread across the Peel District School Board.

Black parents and community leaders had begun to methodically present evidence of discrimination at the hands of PDSB educators, and challenged the board’s elected trustees and senior administrators who had for years thwarted efforts to address glaring problems such as discriminatory academic streaming, inconsistent disciplinary conduct often out of line with education legislation and the failure to hire and promote equitably.

Advocates for Peel’s Black communities and parents of students within the board fought for years to change the system they believed was harming their children.

(The Pointer files) 

While the ministry was closing in, Grewal had already begun to work with Black parents and community representatives. 

The lawsuit highlights one of her priorities. 

“In June 2018, the Plaintiff sent an instructional memo and compendium document to all secondary school principals regarding the application of a critical, anti-oppression lens of anti-Black racism with respect to the teaching of ‘To Kill A Mockingbird’ (TKAM), an American novel published in 1960 about racial justice issues that uses many racial epithets and slurs and portrays white characters as the main protagonists and Black people as secondary. The Plaintiff had worked closely with the Black community in Peel with respect to anti-Black racism and this initiative was responsive to those concerns. Although the Plaintiff took the lead in disseminating these materials, the memo and compendium were vetted and approved by the Defendant PDSB.”

The lawsuit includes evidence to describe how the head of the school board at the time, former director Peter Joshua, immediately tried to upend Grewal’s effort. 

The Toronto Star published columns by veteran journalist Rosie DiManno critical of Grewal’s effort to educate PDSB teachers when introducing To Kill a Mockingbird to their students. The lawsuit describes Grewal as being “personally attacked” in the Star’s stories.  

“The Plaintiff felt unsupported by the PDSB, including by Senior Leadership Team ('SLT') members, Mr. Joshua and Board trustees. No formal statements or news releases were issued by the Board and the Plaintiff received an email from the Board Chair, Janet McDougald, which left the Plaintiff wondering whether the Board continued to support the adopted stance on anti-Black racism and TKAM. The Plaintiff expressed all of these concerns to Mr. Joshua, including her view that she was being personally targeted by the media because she herself was racialized. Mr. Joshua rejected these concerns, stating that there is no safety net for those at the director level and that the senior team was likely being silent because the Plaintiff had not built relationships with them.”

According to her suit, when Grewal addressed her concerns with Joshua and other members of the senior leadership team, he admonished her: “The Plaintiff highlighted that Black staff and community members had expressed to her that they felt their identities and voices were being ignored and erased by the Toronto Star’s discourse and the Board’s silence. She read out an email from a Black staff member who had been impacted…Mr. Joshua would later admonish the Plaintiff privately for her comments…”.

According to the statement of claim, after Grewal took a medical leave in late 2018, “Mr. Joshua began removing responsibilities from her role and sent an email on January 21, 2019, to all staff that training about race and racism was going to ‘intentionally shift from blame and shame’. Mr. Joshua’s email was not only false—there was nothing in the Board’s anti-Black racism initiatives, documents or training materials that ever refer to or suggested the conversation is about ‘blame and shame'—it was a thinly veiled attack on the Plaintiff.”

The PDSB has had longstanding problems representing the concerns of its student body and parent community. 

In the ‘90s, the board unsuccessfully appealed a ruling by the Human Rights Commission which found it had discriminated against Sikh students, after the PDSB— representing one of the most diverse student populations in the country—was the only school system in Canada that banned the wearing of a kirpan. Longtime chair Janet McDougald, a trustee with the board for 30 years, defended the board’s decision, a pattern of the predominantly white leadership that continued for decades without reform.

As the board failed to adapt to reflect and embody the rapid demographic change that eventually defined Peel, human rights cases began to mount.

In 2012, it settled with a vice principal, Ranjit Khatkur, after she lodged a human rights complaint alleging systemic discrimination prevented her from being promoted. Her evidence showed that leadership within the board, at the time, particularly among the principal ranks, was almost exclusively white, despite a student body that was overwhelmingly non-white. 

The lack of action to address widespread harm to Black students with the Peel District School Board, parents and young learners launched protests in 2020.

(The Pointer files)

On November 7, 2019, Lecce released a statement responding to and acknowledging overwhelming evidence of anti-Black racism and a lack of adherence to governance, leadership and human resources policies within the school board.

He confirmed that the Ontario government “will be taking action” and appointed reviewers to probe the PDSB. 

Lecce appointed Suzanne Herbert and Ena Chadha, and later Shawn Richard (who was added following backlash from the community for the lack of an independent Black reviewer on the initial team), to conduct a formal and immediate review of the PDSB in light of widespread allegations and increasing evidence of systemic discrimination. As in the past, strong advocacy work from dedicated community members was the main driver of the government’s action, and Grewal was publicly credited with supporting these advocates, as highlighted in the lawsuit. 

After the reviewers delivered their report in February 2020, Lecce issued 27 binding directives to the PDSB based on the findings of the probe, which aimed to address systemic discrimination at the PDSB, including its issues with anti-Black racism, human resource practices, board leadership and governance, including the disturbing behaviour of elected trustees, all of which prompted the initial review.

One directive ordered the school board to end academic streaming in grades 9 and 10, which sorts children by perceived academic ability and has been shown to disproportionately favour white students in Peel while removing opportunities for their racialized peers.

The binding directives appeared to have little effect on the board or Joshua. 

Two months after the release of the directives, the PDSB was again investigated by the Ministry to determine its compliance with the directions issued by the minister following public statements that suggested senior leaders and trustees had no intention of taking the orders seriously. The blistering findings of the investigation, conducted by lawyer Arleen Huggins, were reported to Lecce in May of 2020, and determined that, “the Board has failed to comply with Directions that can easily be characterized as straight-forward.”

It continued.

“I have not seen any evidence from the Chair or the Vice Chair of an appreciation of their responsibility to provide this leadership,” Huggins wrote in her report following the issuance of the mandated directives. “The collective Board and the Director’s Office is lacking both the ability and capacity, and perhaps even more importantly, the will, to address the findings in the Report,” she wrote. 

She concluded the Board was “dysfunctional and…is incapable of providing good governance”. Of Joshua, she wrote: “The Director of Education has not demonstrated the necessary capacity to lead the implementation of the binding Directions.”

The same month, Julie DeMaeyer, the principal at Central Peel Secondary School in Brampton at the time, made a “xenophobic and racist” remark at a staff meeting regarding the requirement to end streaming, according to an open letter shared by Joshua and posted on the school’s website. According to a half-dozen sources, who did not confirm if they were present at the staff meeting, DeMaeyer said the proposed changes recommended by the Province would lead to some students taking science classes and learning to make bombs.

The blatantly Islamophobic comment was made about a school, like so many in Peel, with a majority racialized population, and in an area with a significant Muslim population.

The pair of damning provincial reviews detailing the board’s systemic problems with anti-Black racism and the director’s inaction led to widespread calls for Joshua to step down. He refused, stating at the time he was committed to rebuilding trust with Black communities shunned by the board since he took over its leadership in 2017. At the same time, out of public sight Joshua and some trustees had taken legal action targeting Black community members who were using social media as a powerful tool to force change at the board. Lecce and the ministry would later describe the action and other reprisals against community members as examples of the board’s anti-Black racism. He ordered the end of the legal action and Joshua was fired shortly after. 

Meanwhile, as detailed in Grewal’s suit, she took action on her own. 

“In March 2019, the Plaintiff filed an application with the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario (‘HRTO’) against the Defendant PDSB and Mr. Joshua personally, alleging discrimination in employment under the Human Rights Code on the grounds of race, colour, ethnic origin, place of origin and sex.”

Grewal alleges that individuals directly tied to the PDSB began to pepper social media with anonymous racist and sexist posts, blaming her for the ministry’s review and the 27 subsequent anti-racism directives. She alleges Joshua, his successors and the board failed to support her.

“Mr. Joshua also made negative comments to senior staff about employees who filed applications with the HRTO. Although the Plaintiff was not named specifically, it was reasonably interpreted to refer to the Plaintiff’s formal application. The Chair of the PDSB at the time, Ms. Janet McDougald, openly made comments that the Plaintiff’s filing of an HRTO application ‘will not end well for Poleen’”.

Peel District School Board Trustee William Davies hangs his head during a board meeting in 2019 after widespread backlash from parents and advocates when it was revealed he called McCrimmon Middle School, a school with a large Black student population, “McCriminal”. Board officials first tried to deny the statement was ever made. Davies later apologized.

(Joel Wittnebel/The Pointer files)

Lecce responded to the Huggins investigation by demanding the Board provide a detailed report of its own by the end of June that year to prove they were “able to sustainably work together, and with the Director of Education and Associate Directors, to provide good governance in the interests of all students of the Board.”

At the deadline, Lecce stripped PDSB of all governance responsibilities, sidelining the elected trustees and placed the school board under the supervision of Bruce Rodrigues who would remain in control for roughly two-and-a-half-years. 

The PDSB published a brief statement in June of 2020, announcing Joshua’s removal from the Board, “effective immediately.”

More proof of the deep-rooted racism within the PDSB came the very next day. A superintendent sent a letter to staff apologizing for an alarmingly racist comment made by a Mississauga elementary school principal in May 2019, which was not addressed at the time.

In the letter, obtained by The Pointer, the area superintendent, apologizes on behalf of the board for its mishandled response to a blatantly racist remark directed at the mother of a student at the school.

The letter details comments made by the principal during a meeting of the elementary school’s internal support team, which addresses the progress of those students who need improvement in the classroom.

“Last year, during an ISRC meeting in May 2019, the Principal of… made a racist remark when referring to a student’s family,” the letter acknowledged. It includes a comment made by the principal at the meeting: “No offense to the Jamaican community, but the student comes from a typical Jamaican family where the mother does nothing, and the grandmother is very much the disciplinarian.”

A letter obtained by The Pointer in which a superintendent apologizes for a racist remark made by one of the board’s principals. 

A 2022 Workforce Census, found “there are employees who do not support the Board’s efforts to achieve workplace equity and in fact chose to undermine this work by completing the census multiple times…some also shared that they don’t see a connection between workplace diversity and the success of students.” 

Grewal alleges in her suit that after Joshua was terminated, his successors failed to effectively support her work and ignored the impacts the sustained online harassment was having on her. Eventually, after she went on another leave following the continued social media attacks, her employment was terminated. 

“The grounds of termination were based on the comments made by the anonymous Twitter accounts that attacked the Plaintiff’s reputation for over three years; Contrary to its obligations under the Occupational Health and Safety Act, the PDSB did little to mitigate the constant and vile online harassment the Plaintiff experienced over three years, including defamatory, racist and misogynistic remarks, and the breach of the Plaintiff’s privacy and that of her minor son; The PDSB gagged the Plaintiff with the Leave Agreement, preventing the Plaintiff from speaking about her situation and defending herself from the non-stop attacks on her reputation; The PDSB failed in its duty to take adequate steps to protect the Plaintiff’s professional reputation from the unwarranted, false, discriminatory and defamatory social media campaign; The PDSB’s decision to terminate the Plaintiff’s employment gave validation to the false and defamatory public attacks on the Plaintiff’s professional reputation…”.

Swarup, the suit alleges, blamed Grewal for the board’s equity failures and inability to eradicate systemic anti-Black racism. 

“On June 8, 2023, the Defendant Swarup, as PDSB Director, delivered a letter to the Plaintiff advising that the Defendant PDSB had decided to terminate her employment. Under s. 287 of the Education Act, the PDSB can only terminate the Plaintiff’s employment for neglect of duty, misconduct or inefficiency.”

Peel District School Board Director Rashmi Swarup.

(PDSB)

The lawsuit states, “Director Swarup alleged that the Plaintiff was responsible for the Board’s failures to address anti-Black racism which were the subject of the Ministry Review. The Director falsely claimed that the Plaintiff’s leave with pay was precipitated in 2021 because the Plaintiff lacked the necessary skills to implement the Ministry Directives and that the community and staff were ‘divided’ about her leadership and actions. The Director further asserted that the Plaintiff was being terminated for misconduct (related to an internal complaint against Grewal that Joshua held over her for years), even though Director Swarup herself had indicated that the matter was closed.”  

Grewal’s suit highlights that: “The Defendant PDSB had a duty under its own Policy 49 and Procedure 34C to document any alleged performance issues of the Plaintiff and provide feedback and appropriate support if she was not meeting expectations. The Defendant PDSB did not provide any negative feedback or support because there were no legitimate concerns that she was not meeting expectations.”

On June 15, 2023, Grewal asked for a proper explanation for her termination. 

“The Defendant PDSB delivered a four-page letter from its legal counsel on June 30, 2023, providing further reasons for dismissal. Nearly all of these wide-ranging allegations had never been raised with the Plaintiff before. The theme of the allegations was that the PDSB’s failures to properly address racism at the Board was the Plaintiff’s fault. The letter was a realization of the Plaintiff’s fears, as expressed in her 2019 HRTO application, that she would end up being scapegoated for the lack of progress on these issues that resulted from obstruction and lack of support from the Director and Trustees.” 

Grewal alleges Joshua used the past complaint dredged up by him as reprisal to hurt her reputation. Swarup also allegedly used it as justification for the job termination even though the matter had been closed years earlier and removed from Grewal’s file with no disciplinary action, as Swarup had previously confirmed to Grewal. 

“The Defendant PDSB also terminated the Plaintiff’s employment in part as reprisal for bringing an HRTO application against the Board in March 2019. The Defendant Swarup was aware that there were insufficient grounds to terminate the Plaintiff’s employment for neglect of duty, misconduct or inefficiency. The grounds of termination all related to events before the Defendant Swarup was even appointed as Director. The Defendant Swarup did not conduct any investigation, or did not conduct a reasonable investigation, and failed to follow PDSB policies or otherwise seek professional Human Resources advice or guidance.”

The suit adds: “By making the recommendation to dismiss the Plaintiff, the Defendant Swarup was aware that the decision would be unlawful and contrary to the Education Act. In fact, the Defendant Swarup decided that she wanted to terminate the Plaintiff’s employment to appease those who were opposed to the Ministry Directives and the work around dismantling anti-Black racism and the Defendant Swarup later sought to manufacture a justification for the decision after the fact.”

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