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From the National Post

One-third of pupils at T.O. native school suspended - All Grade 3s failed literacy test

Chris Wattie And Katie Rook, January 12, 2008

TORONTO - Overlooked amid the coverage this week of a report on violence in Toronto's schools was the story of one of the city's most unfortunate, underperforming schools.

The First Nations School of Toronto suspends a full third of its elementary school students every year, while its entire Grade 3 class could not meet provincial standards in reading, writing or arithmetic last year, according to the Falconer report on school safety.

The school's record may raise questions about the possibility, now being discussed by the Toronto District School Board, of setting up similar specialized schools for black children.

The report, released on Thursday by lawyer Julian Falconer, points to "disturbing realities at the First Nations School of Toronto," which is made up of native students from kindergarten to Grade 8.

"The school occupies the lowest rung in academic standing amongst the 451 elementary schools in the [Toronto District School Board]," says Mr. Falconer's report. "[And] over the last three years, the First Nations School of Toronto has suspended an average of 33.44% of its students."

The report calls that suspension rate "an extraordinary level for an elementary school" and observes that the majority of the 75 students at the school near Dundas Street and Broadview Avenue are struggling academically, to the point where in last year's province-wide testing, not one of the First Nations School's Grade 3 students reached provincial standards in reading, writing or arithmetic. Testing last fall showed the entire Grade 1 class was at the lowest levels of literacy.

The 1,000-page report, which looked into the issues surrounding the shooting of Jordan Manners at C.W. Jefferys Collegiate Institute in northwest Toronto, was focused on safety in the schools, listing an alarming rate of violence, sexual assault and gang activity in some of the city's high schools.

But Mr. Falconer also included a little-noticed section on the school board's native education programs and the First Nations School, concluding that the school board "is failing one of our most marginalized and vulnerable communities."

"The fact that we are failing yet another generation of aboriginal students is not a secret. It is well known

to the [school board] and it is well known to the teachers, parents and students."

The First Nations School of Toronto was started in 1977 as an "alternative school" within the public board as an effort to close the "achievement gap" between the academic performance of aboriginal students and non-native students. The report noted that "the achievement gap for aboriginal students has increased, rather than decreased, over the past five years."

The TDSB is currently discussing similar specialized schools focusing on an Afrocentric curriculum, an idea endorsed in the Falconer report.

Mr. Falconer said in an interview yesterday that he spent two days at the First Nations School and left feeling "crushed" by conditions there. "Despite all the best efforts of its principal, all the best efforts of its incredibly dedicated teachers, the conditions in that school are appalling."

He said the school board has systematically failed to support the school, which suffers from a shortage of teachers with an aboriginal background, lack of funding for a full-time, permanent youth counsellor and no aboriginal counsellors. "We have to change the way this board thinks. The system simply has to do better. "These kids need a voice," he said. "They are being failed by this school board."

Others, however, believe that Afrocentric schools are unnecessary and that exploring the idea of such schools further delays the implementation of other solutions.

Courtney Betty, the lawyer representing the Manners family, agreed that African-American students would benefit should all levels of the TDSB become racially diverse, but, he said most troubled students need caring teachers, irrespective of the race of the teachers.

"Our young people nowadays are less concerned about race than they are about finding individuals who extend care and compassion to them," he said.

Students who tend to improve are those who have received encouragement from a teacher.

"From my practical experience, I went to a school where -- except for one [teacher] -- all the teachers were white. And I had teachers who directly had an influence spurring me on to achieve the things that I have."

In some pockets of the GTA there are already schools where most students are African-American, he said. Such schools have not necessarily demonstrated the advantages suggested by those who support the idea of Afrocentric schools, he said.

An Afrocentric focus could be introduced into flexible aspects of the existing school structure, he said.

Stacia Loft, the youth program co-ordinator of the Native Canadian Centre of Toronto, said many of the native young people she works with are former students of the First Nations School and they have told her that many suspensions were the result of fights between native youngsters and students from the public school with which the First Nations School shares a building.

The school is chronically short of such basic supplies and resources as text books, she said.

"So you take a group of people who are already at a disadvantage, put them off in a school by themselves and give them even more of a disadvantage," she said. "Then they're surprised when they score low on tests?"

In its passages on the First Nations School, the report says the school board and the provincial government have failed to provide either sufficient resources, stable funding or concrete initiatives to help the school's native students, despite making public announcements of programs to address such issues as the drop-out rate among native students.

"Although promises have been made ... in practice these promises have not been upheld," the report says.

For example, a breakfast program for the school's children, many of whom come from low-income families, has been stalled for the past year because of delays in funding the conversion of a classroom into a lunch room.

Ms. Loft said many native children face enormous problems, ranging from physical abuse at home and single-parent families to poverty and drug or alcohol abuse in their families, which often lie behind their behavioural problems. "It's generation after generation of problems that are piling up on these kids."

Wayne Kodje, the principal of the school, told Mr. Falconer that the suspension rate for his school was the result of serious violence: two-thirds of the students suspended had attacked and harmed another student or teacher.

"Approximately two-thirds of the school's suspensions are a result of serious violence by a student," he was quoted as saying in the report. "A lot of the students [suspended] are the same students repeated: Some of them got three, four, five suspensions. It was just not stopping. They were being suspended and coming back and they're still engaging in the same kinds of behaviours that they were suspended for."

He said a social worker was brought in to help his most troubled students, but only for a few months until the board funding ran out.

The report concluded that while the principal was doing his best, "Due to the absence of counselling and services for his students, he has few tools to respond to behavioural issues in the school."

At one point, Mr. Falconer said, as many as half of the students at the school were suspended. "Although the number of suspensions has dropped in the past two years, the behavioural issues have not declined," the report says.