Following a ceremony last week to celebrate the opening of the Peel District School Board’s Centre for Black Excellence, the board’s Chair, David Green, made false claims about why Kola Iluyomade’s name was dropped from the building despite a 2022 commitment by PDSB officials to name the facility after the widely revered Black advocate.
Iluyomade was instrumental in exposing the harmful anti-Black racism systemic within the PDSB. He passed away in 2021.
The following year, the PDSB committed to naming the new centre after him, and a report from Director Rashmi Swarup in 2023 described Iluyomade as the “modern-day Superman”. Naming the Centre for Black Excellence in his honour, she wrote, would become “a symbol of acknowledgement by the Peel District School Board of Kola's transformative leadership.” The report made it clear that naming the new centre after him was in line with the board’s official policy.
A screengrab from Director Rashmi’s Swarup’s 2023 report that outlined potential names for the Centre for Black Excellence—including Kola Iluyomade—which aligned with the Naming and Renaming of Schools policy.
(PDSB)
Trustees who had opposed Iluyomade’s advocacy, and had allowed him to be targeted in a board threat to ban him from entering PDSB properties, ignored the report and stripped Iluyomade’s name from the centre. They cited an updated policy—approved by themselves a few weeks earlier—that prevented them from naming the centre after "identifiable individuals”.
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Following a ceremony last week to celebrate the opening of the Peel District School Board’s Centre for Black Excellence, the board’s Chair, David Green, made false claims about why Kola Iluyomade’...