The Lambton Kent District School Board is joining others across the country in lowering the Canadian flag to honour residential school victims.
The move is being made to commemorate the deaths of 215 First Nations children whose remains were discovered last week near a former residential school in Kamloops British Columbia.
Director of Education John Howitt released a statement, saying “flags will be at half mast to acknowledge the all too frequent loss of children’s lives at Canadian residential schools and to show respect for the 215 children discovered in mass graves in Kamloops.”
Meantime, flags at all provincial and federal buildings in the country are flying at half-mast as well.
“To honour the 215 children whose lives were taken at the former Kamloops residential school and all indigenous children who never made it home, the survivors and their families,” Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said in an online statement on Sunday.
The school operated between 1890 and 1969. The federal government then took over operations from the Catholic Church, operating the facility as a day school until it closed in 1978.
Memorials have been popping up across the country, many laying out 215 pairs of shoes to honour the victims. Others, like the Aamjiwnaang First Nation laying tobacco at its Residential School Monument.
Meantime, calls are mounting to actively search the grounds of more than 130 other former residential schools across the country to find any other hidden remains.
