{mosimage}TORONTO - The Toronto Catholic District School Board has launched its version of the Character Development Initiative proposed by the government of Ontario in October last year.

{mosimage}TORONTO - Catholic school boards in the Greater Toronto Area have all chosen the chairpersons who will lead them into the new year.

{mosimage}MISSISSAUGA, Ont. - Where Halton opted for a ban, the Dufferin-Peel Catholic District School Board has decided to go with a note.

TORONTO - Like most refugees in Canada, Khulood Jarjass appreciates her new homeland for its relative safety, the freedom, the opportunity to dream again of a future for herself and her family. But what really excites the mother of three and former high school math teacher is a free Catholic education for her kids.

“When I heard in Canada it’s free — Oh my God!” she said. “I was so happy.”

Her kids range in age from seven to 13, Grades 2 to 7, all in St. Andrew’s in Toronto’s Rexdale neighbourhood. The Jarjass kids spent a year-and-a-half in crowded Syrian classrooms with a mass of other refugee students. Their teachers couldn’t help but look at the Iraqi students as an added burden and the Syrian kids saw the Iraqis as invaders in their schools. Syrian and Iraqi kids fought in and out of the classrooms.

TORONTO - Ontario's Catholic bishops, teachers and trustees say they're eager to co-operate with the education ministry as it revamps the province's controversial sex education curriculum.

A joint statement issued April 28 by the Assembly of Catholic Bishops of Ontario, the Ontario Catholic School Trustees' Association and the Ontario English Catholic Teachers' Association, said the three groups look forward to participating in a review that was announced earlier in the week by Premier Dalton McGuinty. A new province-wide sex-ed curriculum that was to launch in September was sent back to the drawing board by McGuinty following howls of protest from several parent groups.

{mosimage}BURLINGTON, Ont. - Catholic Grade 8 students in Oakville, Burlington and surrounding areas won't be vaccinated on school property against a virus that causes cervical cancer. Halton Catholic District School Board voted 5-4 to reverse last year's decision to host public health nurses giving the Gardasil shot against HPV to girls whose parents have requested it.

{mosimage}TORONTO - Just because provincial education bureaucrats and top union officials are sitting down together  in meeting rooms talking about wages and benefits with an eye toward another four-year deal doesn’t mean Ontario has embraced province-wide bargaining with teachers’ unions, said Education Minister Kathleen Wynne.

{mosimage}TORONTO - Senator Romeo Dallaire wants teachers to save Canada. According to the retired general who led United Nations peacekeepers during the Rwandan genocide in 1994, the only thing that can save this country from cynicism, apathy and petty regionalism is leadership.

{mosimage}TORONTO - Ontario Education Minister Kathleen Wynne put a positive spin on the bitter debate over confessional education during the fall election campaign in a speech to Catholic teachers at their annual union meeting in Toronto March 9.

{mosimage}TORONTO - Fifty years have passed since Irish priests from the Spiritan order founded Neil McNeil Catholic High School, an all-boys’ Catholic school in Toronto’s east end.