Hasidic school targeted in recent raid reaches home-schooling agreement

 

Contract with English Montreal School Board aims to ensure students meet provincial curriculum requirements

By Benjamin Shingler, CBC News

Jun 22, 2016

A Hasidic school targeted in a youth protection raid earlier this month has entered into an agreement with the English Montreal School Board to ensure it meets the Education Ministry's requirements.

Some 70 students from the ultra-Orthodox Jewish school in Rosemont–La-Petite-Patrie have signed home-schooling contracts with the EMSB, school board spokesman Mike Cohen confirmed on Wednesday.

The agreement comes three weeks after Montreal police and officials from Batshaw Youth and Family Centres descended on the school to question students and staff, in a move one community member described as "overkill."

The school doesn't follow the province's curriculum and isn't recognized by Quebec's Education Ministry.

On Wednesday, youth protection officials returned to the school, a nondescript building on the corner of Beaubien Street and Parc Avenue, to meet again with students and staff.

Hershber Hirsch, a board member at the school, which has no official name, said the community has always been willing to co-operate with the province.

"When they contacted us at the beginning of April we told them they could come in," Hirsch said.

This isn't the first school to sign such an agreement.

Last fall, the EMSB also signed home-schooling contracts with each of 236 parents from the Yeshivas Toras Moshe community in Outremont last fall.

Outremont's Beth Esther Academy also struck a deal with Montreal's largest French-language school board, the Commission scolaire de Montréal.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/hasidic-quebec-home-schooling-1.3647398