STAR INVESTIGATION
A tale of two schools
June 4, 2007
David Bruser
STAFF REPORTER
Two inner-city elementary schools. North Kipling and Charles E. Webster.
In attendance: Some of the city's poorest kids.
One school feeds its kids breakfast and the other does not.
One has benefactors and the other is unknown to community leaders.
At one, parents feel welcome. The other makes some feel like outsiders.
A Toronto Star investigation began with the question: Why are provincial test scores consistently rising at one school and plummeting at another?
What emerged – from principals, parents, students and teachers – is a tale of two schools.
Of one that continually makes new community partnerships to benefit the kids and another in a fight to keep what meagre resources it has.
Of one winning the battle to engage newcomers to Canada and another that can't even offer up a properly functioning parent-teacher committee.
After walking his stepson Jayden to the door at Charles E. Webster, Tristan Getten is almost home, having covered the several blocks from school to his apartment on Gulliver Ave. With a view of a trash-filled alley, it's where Tristan, a warehouse worker on the graveyard shift, sleeps on the pull-out couch with his girlfriend while Jayden gets the only bedroom.
To Tristan, the quality of public education should have nothing to do with location.
"You should be able," he says, "to get the city's best school anywhere."
Home is where the drunken anger bellows from the dirty street below.
Bottles break into shards on pavement, and Tasleem Naqvi shutters the windows and keeps her three young children indoors.
Home is isolation.
Inside the drab 18-storey tower overlooking the Humber River, Tasleem, 37, spends most days cooking and laundering for her three children and a husband that works the night shift.
Home is where the super hands out roach paste and sticky mats to trap mice.
Where windborne trash settles along the bottom of the fence that runs in back of the building.
This is where Tasleem, an immigrant from Pakistan, settled nine years ago so that her kids could have a better life – in the barren heart of a neighbourhood that the Toronto District School Board says is full of the city's neediest kids.
But a beacon flickers just down the street.
Near 9 a.m. at North Kipling, Aretha Franklin's "Respect" pumps out a speaker near the front door, prompting tardy students to class. In a kitchen attached to the assembly hall, community volunteers clean bowls and trays after feeding scores of children a healthy breakfast.
And on the second floor, the coffee's on in a room full of toys and storybooks. This is where Tasleem sits, speaking Punjabi with another parent, while her youngest child romps. Tasleem and many other mothers spend mornings here, grateful for a workaday respite and help with their pre-school children.
Tasleem feels welcome at North Kipling Junior Middle School. As well she should.
Facing significant odds, this is where all her kids are taking their first critical steps toward the Canadian dream, while her husband drives a Royal taxi into the morning hours.
"We came to this multicultural country," she says. "We came here for our kids."
Sitting in her Grade 5 classroom at North Kipling, student Priya Thomas writes:
"When I came to Canada, North Kipling was my first school ever. Everyone achieves their goal because the staff and teachers help and assist them in every way they can. ... In our school, no one bullies you for your habits, practices or beliefs. I hope you will send your kids to this nonviolent, peaceful and educational school!"
The Star wanted to know what the students at both North Kipling and Webster thought about their school. We asked both principals if a Grade 5 and a Grade 6 class would participate in a writing contest that involved answering the question: What do you think of your school?
North Kipling's principal, Lesa Semcesen, immediately agreed and allowed a reporter in the classrooms to supervise the 30-minute assignment. The kids wrote a wide range of answers, including compliments and complaints, with apparently little coaching from their teachers. Webster's principal, Anne Beetlestone, initially declined to participate, then a month later sent the assignment home with kids.
Down the hall from Priya, Grade 6 pupil Kaasim Shaikh writes:
"Staff create programs to help certain students. Some programs include: Breakfast club, snack program, hot lunches and homework clubs. ... I think my school should be awarded `The Best School in Ontario.'"
Both North Kipling and Webster share a tremendous task.
The Toronto school board, the sixth biggest in North America, ranks schools according to the neediness of the surrounding neighbourhood.
Both schools rank high. North Kipling comes in at seventh out of 473 elementary schools citywide. Webster ranks 58th. The ranking, called the Learning Opportunities Index (LOI), takes into account income and education level of area residents, the number of lone-parent families and apartment buildings, how many students immigrated to the area in the last five years, and mobility, or how often students' families move in and out of the school catchment area.
In these two neighbourhoods, many kids live in rented apartments, where tenants often are first-generation immigrants. Parents, a good number single, typically have two and three children while working in the trades, transport, equipment operation or manufacturing.
Many parents either don't have the time or cannot afford to feed their kids breakfast. Many are not home before bedtime to help with homework.
The Humber River flows in back of North Kipling and the seven apartment buildings that house its students, all 730 of them. Kipling Ave., a wide, imposing thoroughfare, lies to the west, sealing off this narrow swath of inner city as effectively as a moat.
It's why at the intersection of each hallway in the two-storey school, a green and white sign displays the name of a nearby neighbourhood, street or landmark. Like street signs, reading Steeles Heights or Humber Main.
"Our kids don't live in neighbourhoods. They live in buildings. Here, it's Kipling. There's no other road," says principal Semcesen as she walks the halls. "It is very isolating. You're enclosed. There's no fence to speak to someone over. You can't grow in isolation, can you? You wilt."
Semcesen stops to look north out a window at two of the seven buildings that house her students. "Don't see a house around," she says.
Both principals say they understand how their kids face challenges that don't exist at, say, Lawrence Park's Blythwood Junior Public School, which ranks last, or least needy, on the LOI among all elementary schools in the city.
Semcesen runs a school that is up to the task. Beetlestone does not.
Beetlestone says she's only been at Webster since January 2004, is still building relationships with staff and the community, that it takes time to offer her needy charges much more than classroom instruction.
"One step at a time," she says. "Too much too soon is difficult. It is only around your second or third year you've got the trust of your staff, that you can start to branch out to find those other programs."
She also blames a lack of parental involvement, and says teachers need to step forward and champion new programs that will benefit the kids.
But while several education experts and school board officials say teacher and parent participation is key, they all agree that the principal is the leader of the school, and so the responsibility, the job of winning that support, is Beetlestone's.
Any parent who chooses to search on the Toronto school board's website will find a clear difference between the two schools.
At North Kipling, the provincial standardized test scores are up. Since 2001, way up.
The standardized tests, administered annually to Grade 3 and Grade 6 pupils by the Education Quality and Accountability Office, measures how well students are measuring up to the reading, writing and math curriculum standards set by the province. Elementary students across the city will have finished writing the 2007 test by the end of this week.
A student can score in four levels, the third and fourth demonstrating the student is at or above where the province wants. The provincial Liberals expect that 75 per cent or more of a school's Grade 6 test takers will score in these two upper levels by 2008.
North Kipling is below that threshold but marching steadily up from the basement of 2001, when only a small group of students scored Level 3 or 4.
In 2001-02, only 18 per cent of Grade 6 pupils scored at or above provincial standard in writing, but last school year that number rose to 47 per cent. Last year's math scores for Grade 6ers declined from the year before but the number is still up considerably from five years ago.
The test scores are not without controversy. Newspapers, including the Toronto Star, print rankings of schools based on test scores. Some educators worry the lists cause parents to shop schools, creating instability in low-score schools trying to grow roots in the community.
Checking EQAO scores is one of the few ways Harinder Cheema can measure how his son's school is serving the community. Cheema, originally from India, works at home as an IT consultant, specializing in database administration. His 7-year-old son Nikshep is in Grade 2 at North Kipling, and will take his first EQAO test next year.
"That's one of the only things parents can look up, and see how the school is doing," Harinder says. "Of course, we'd like to see how he scores. We would like to see if he's going to stay a couple years, that the school is good."
Meanwhile, Webster's scores for Grade 6ers have plummeted. A Toronto Star analysis of the data shows few schools experienced as sharp and consistent a drop between 2001 and 2005. From considerably above the board- and province-wide levels in all subjects, the freefall finally stopped last school year.
Scores in every category started heading back up but to nowhere near the level of 2001.
David Lachman, an immigrant from Guyana, wonders whether his son Darryl, in Grade 3, is in the right school.
"I looked at the test scores on the TDSB site. I noticed they were markedly lower," Lachman says. "Is there enough being done at school?"
David Bruser can be reached at 416-869-4282 and at schoolproject@thestar.ca
Toronto Star