Specialty schools may not go ahead next fall
November 15, 2010
Louise Brown
EDUCATION REPORTER
Four new types of specialty schools proposed to open next fall in Toronto — all-boy, all-girl, choir and sports academies— may be delayed after trustees put the brakes on public consultations until they see proof such schools help children learn.
Toronto District School Board trustees overturned plans to send a parent survey home this week with report cards to gauge interest until they receive a feasibility study from board staff, which they say was due in August but which board staff now says will be ready in January.
Also postponed were public meetings planned for Nov. 22 to 25 about the schools, which don’t make sense until the board has decided whether it even wants to run such programs, said Trustee Cathy Dandy.
“It would be irresponsible of us to ask what families think of the idea before we know whether we’re going to do it,” she said.
“What’s the point of asking if they’re interested if we can’t tell them how the curriculum would be delivered or how it will impact student learning or what kind of resources they would need and where those resources would come from?” asked Dandy.
Director of Education Chris Spence proposed one of each of these “programs of choice” in each of the city’s four corners — a total of 16, and staff recently unveiled 32 possibly school sites. Spence has suggested an all-boy school from kindergarten to Grade 3 could help address lagging achievement by boys, just as an all-girl school from Grade 4 to 8 could help bolster female students’ confidence.
The choir school and sports academy, both co-ed, are options Spence has suggested could help attract students to a board that loses some 4,000 students a year to falling enrolment. Such niche-market programs are increasingly popular in the United States.
Trustees will meet with Spence later this month for a briefing on the issue, but newly elected trustees don’t take office until next month and likely won’t make their first major policy decisions until the new year.
The two-page questionnaire was slated to go home with elementary students’ report card this week asking parents whether they were “interested,” “somewhat interested” or “not interested” in either a boys’ leadership academy, a girls’ leadership academy or a vocal music academy from Grades 4 to 8, all recommended by staff to be housed inside another school. Staff recommended the sports and wellness academies would be housed in free-standing elementary schools and would include all grades.
Trustee Gerri Gershon said trustees need to see a full feasibility study that tackles the “pros and cons…like whether such schools might draw away students from other schools so much it could affect their viability, or whether we would provide transportation to be equitable — but which we probably can’t afford.”
Said Dandy, “The feasibility study is going ahead, but if it’s a cool idea, it had better be based on some good research.”