Students at Oakwood Collegiate don't understand. News has leaked out that the Toronto District School Board is proposing to put a black-focused school at Oakwood. The idea is to group black kids together to study "through the lens of Africentric-based experiences."
Putting it at Oakwood strikes many students as crazy. Theirs is a mixed, diverse school where kids from dozens of backgrounds learn and hang out together – a thriving little microcosm of Toronto diversity. Why, they ask, would the TDSB want to mess with that by drawing lines between races?
"Martin Luther King taught us to break down barriers. Not put barriers up. The TDSB is putting a barrier in our school," says an impassioned note on the Facebook protest page that quickly went up over the issue. An online petition is going around, too, and fireworks are expected when officials present the proposal at a public meeting at the school Tuesday night at 7 o'clock.
Outside the school at lunchtime on Monday, I couldn't find anyone, black or white, who liked the idea. "We live in Toronto, and we're a very multicultural society and the school should reflect that," said 11th Grader Regatu Asefa, 16, whose father comes from Ethiopia and whose mother is of Scottish descent. "Anything to do with segregating people for any purpose is just wrong. People fought so hard to integrate and I think it's just disrespectful to kind of go back in racial history." You could write a whole book about raced-based schools and still not put the case against them as eloquently as that.
School board educrats, of course, insist it has nothing to do with putting up barriers. As the board's education director Chris Spence likes to put it, it's about "salvation, not segregation."
Forty per cent of black kids in Toronto drop out of school. Years of effort have failed to close what the board calls a persistent achievement gap for black students. "We need to try something – something," says Jim Spyropoulos, the TDSB's co-ordinating superintendent for inclusive schools.
He points to the performance of the board's Africentric elementary school, which opened in 2009 after much controversy. It is filled to capacity of 161 and has a waiting list of 55. Students are scoring at or above the provincial average on tests. The school teaches all the usual subjects, but stresses black pride and achievement. "One of the important things we need to consider is that students learn and feel included in different ways," says Mr. Spyropoulos.
Students at Oakwood have no problem with that. The century-old brick school at St. Clair Avenue West and Oakwood Avenue has an African civilizations course for those who are interested. Students can join the Afro-Can club or go to the annual Kwanzaa banquet, as Regatu has.
What many Oakwood kids object to is hiving off some students to study on their own just because of their race. "Honestly, I consider Oakwood a family," says Marian Omar, 17, a Grade 12 student returning to school grounds with two girlfriends carrying slices of pizza. "We're all one. We're very close to each other, so I feel this would divide us a lot."
Like most kids in the Toronto public school system, Marian and Regatu have been surrounded all their lives by people of many backgrounds. It is as natural and familiar to them as the sound of the streetcar rumbling by on St. Clair. They believe in equal opportunity, not special treatment.
They have absorbed the ideals of multiculturalism so deeply that the idea of separating people out by colour, even for the best of motives, offends all their instincts. To them, it's against everything Toronto is all about.
"We've grown up with so many different races that we just see it as one human race rather than separate ones," says Regatu, with guileless sincerity.
Let the school board try to argue with moral logic like that.