Popular Africentric school may need to add portables ( Toronto)
October 14, 2009
Louise Brown
Education Reporter
Just months after scrambling to find its first 40 students, Toronto’s Africentric alternative school has become so popular it has had to close its doors at about 130 pupils, start a waiting list for 25 more and begin grappling with where to put the new grade it plans to add next year.
Since Labour Day it has hired two more teachers, both of them men.
Now Canada’s most controversial school may need to consider portables.
“That’s a problem people will welcome, considering not that long ago they were wondering if the school would even open,” said Ainsworth Morgan, father of two sons at the school and a daughter in the school child care centre.
“I never really doubted enrolment would grow once the community saw the school was up and running,” said Morgan, a teacher who was on the committee advising the Toronto District School Board about the project.
The surge in new students, largely from junior kindergarten to Grade 2, has made the school one of the largest among Toronto’s 42 alternative schools, which have a combined enrolment of about 3,700, said trustee James Pasternak.
“And the small size is part of the appeal of an alternative school,” said Pasternak, who called portables “a last resort.”
The school, located in an unused wing of Sheppard Public School on Sheppard Ave. at Keele St., is designed to help fight the 40 per cent dropout rate among Toronto’s black students by using lesson plans that go beyond the traditional European-based curriculum to include African and black culture and history.
With a largely black staff as role models and a school atmosphere that highlights black achievement, children are encouraged to know more about their African heritage.
The program is open to children of all backgrounds.
“Our Ancestors live with us. They created the first civilizations thousands of years ago and they suffered the pain of the Maafa. And yet, they were able to endure the most disastrous and dehumanizing circumstances ever perpetrated against a group of people, only because of the power of the African spirit. They did not have the freedom to affirm their cultural heritage. We now have that choice. In the African view of life it is our responsibility to honor their name.”
-Dr. Marimba Ani