More than 100 secondary students from across the Durham Catholic District School Board — including Ajax — came together Thursday for a day focused on turning human rights awareness into concrete action in their schools.
According to the Durham Catholic District School Board, 115 students attended the 2nd Annual Student Human Rights Conference at the Pope Francis Centre on Thursday, October 15. This year's theme was “Human Rights in Motion: From Awareness to Action.”
The conference is the second of its kind hosted by the board, and it gave students a full day of learning and collaboration built around human rights fundamentals.
The learning covered core human rights concepts, including discrimination, protected grounds under the Code, protection from retaliation and allyship, according to the board.
Students did not only sit through lessons. They were invited to work together and share their own thoughts on how to make DCDSB schools more inclusive and accepting spaces for everyone.
A significant part of the day involved dissecting case studies. The board said this exercise was aimed at expanding students' knowledge of effective advocacy in their schools while also helping them identify ways to stop, disrupt, heal and act when harmful incidents involving racism and discrimination occur.
The four-part framework — stop, disrupt, heal and act — framed how students were asked to think about responding to discrimination, moving beyond recognizing harmful incidents to responding to them in constructive ways.
By the end of the day, students discussed next steps with their classmates. Those conversations included how to integrate their ideas within their own schools, what changes they want to see, which partners they want to work with, and their human rights and equity commitments going forward.
The board framed the conference as part of a broader effort to give students the tools and confidence to lead on equity issues in their school communities rather than leaving the work to staff alone.
For families in Ajax and elsewhere in Durham Region, the event signals a continued push by the Catholic board to put student voice at the centre of its human rights work, with the expectation that participants will carry what they learned back to their home schools in the weeks ahead.
