How one family is learning to adapt on the first day of school in Canada

2016/01/06 2 Comments

Good account of integration in action (Canadian schools score extremely well in the OECD’s comparative PISA education scores for immigrant integration):

At 8 a.m. on a frigid Monday morning, six children of the Al Rassoul family are lined up inside the door of their new Scarborough house, all ready for the first day of school in their adopted country.

The boys shuffle their new winter boots as their mother and two aunts tug on their toques and scarves. Their five-year-old sister, Mariah, the class clown of the group, bounces around in her Minnie Mouse jeans and purple backpack, trading high fives with anyone who will play.

How this morning will go, no one can say for sure. The family arrived in Toronto barely more than two weeks ago. Forced to give up their old life in Homs, Syria, by fighting that raged within a stone’s throw of their house, they spent four years in Lebanon before being offered a chance to come to Canada as refugees. None of the kids got any formal schooling in their exile. None speaks more than a few words of English.

How on earth are they to cope with the new ways of the Canadian school system? How on earth will the schools cope with them?

The answer in both cases: pretty well, considering. Apart from one little drama – an epic tantrum by little Mariah, who makes an impression by hurling a sneaker at the school principal – the kids have a good first day.

Their father, Mahmoud Al Rassoul, and his wife, Isaaf Al Omar, have eight kids in all. One of them, Malek, 15, has to wait for an assessment of his language and academic skills before he gets assigned to a high school. Another, three-year-old Maaly, is too young for school.

That leaves six. Two of the boys go off to middle school, driven there by the family’s well-organized Canadian sponsor group. The four younger kids get a lift to Iroquois Junior Public, a strikingly diverse elementary school of around 270 students near Finch Avenue and McCowan Road.

Iroquois welcomes them with a minimum of fuss, just as it has welcomed countless other new kids from far-flung places. After a few minutes milling around the office, where Mariah admires the aquarium and learns the word “fish,” the kids are dispatched to their various classrooms. That’s how it works at this level. No preliminaries. Straight into the deep end, where the water at least is warm.

In Christina Fan’s kindergarten class, Mariah takes her place on the carpet, learning to sit with her legs crossed like the others. “Good morning, Mariah,” her classmates sing out together, clapping their hands in welcome. When Ms. Fan asks who wants to be Mariah’s friend, hands shoot up.

The numbers for Toronto:

Iroquois is well-used to absorbing newcomers. According to its website, all but 30 or so of its students listed a primary language other than English. Most are from South Asian or East Asian backgrounds. Chinese and Tamil are two of the most common home languages.

Of the quarter of a million kids in the Toronto District School Board, 22 per cent were born outside of Canada. Last year alone, the TDSB took in 5,676 new-immigrant childrenkids. Guidance counsellors, English-as-a-second-language teachers, social workers and special-education instructors are ready to step in if a kid falters.

Source: How one family is learning to adapt on the first day of school in Canada – The Globe and Mail

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Grad rates jump for Toronto Somali students thanks to programs geared to help

2015/10/14 Leave a comment

Despite the earlier controversy by some in the Somali-Canadian community, appears that this kind of targeted program can work:

The plan runs the gamut: Nudging Somali-speaking teens into taking leadership roles at school; ensuring their culture and faith are part of their courses; training their teachers; reaching out to their parents.

And over an eight-year period, those efforts have paid off: 80 per cent of Somali teens now earn high school diplomas, a jump of 27 percentage points between 2005 and 2013.

While the community still struggles in the school system — results on the Grade 10 literacy test and standardized math tests continue to lag, as well as the number of credits teens earn in Grades 9 and 10 — the increase in graduates means the plan has almost closed the gap with the Toronto District School Board’s overall rate of 83 per cent.

“When we have such a high-level of buy-in from students and the community, inevitably we trend toward improvement,” said Jim Spyropoulos, executive superintendent in charge of equity and inclusive schools. He predicts Somali youth will soon surpass the board-wide graduation rate.

He attributes the boost to programs funded by Ontario’s Ministry of Education that help schools in at-risk urban neighbourhoods, as well as board initiatives geared toward providing social, emotional and academic support specifically for Somali students, plus training to help educators create a classroom that reflects the diversity of the city.

Improved grad rates were being achieved even before a task force to help Somali teens — vehemently opposed by a vocal group in the community — was set up.

Spyropoulos said the task force’s 2014 recommendations, which include mentoring and university planning, were built on the previous initiatives.

“The kids were telling us what’s working,” and those initiatives were included in the task force plan, he said.

The community has changed over the years, he added. Twenty years ago, many of the Somali teens in Toronto schools were recent arrivals from a war-torn country. Today, they’re mainly Canadian-born kids who face different stressors — including trail-blazing for the next generation.

“Eighty per cent of them are now born in Canada,” added Spyropoulos. “We need to be effectively plugged into the community as to what are the realities of today, coping with second-generation stresses.”

Part of the focus will be on post-secondary education, which the board is tracking, because “these kids are pioneers… when they go (on to post-secondary), they change the world for generations after” who will then be more likely to go to college or university.

Among Somali teens who graduated in 2005, 24 per cent were accepted into an Ontario university and 13 per cent to college. Among the 2013 group, 41 per cent went to university, and 20 per cent to college. The university enrolment rate is lower than that of the board as a whole, which is 50 per cent.

Source: Grad rates jump for Somali students thanks to programs geared to help | Toronto Star

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Toronto school fundraising raises questions about equity in public-education system

2014/11/04 1 Comment

Given that one of Canada’s strength in education, as measured by the OECD’s PISA studies, is with respect to equity in education, the funding disparity suggests that this may diminish over time:

Schools in Toronto’s most affluent neighbourhoods are fundraising 300 times more money per student than needier schools, using the cash for field trips and playground renovations and raising questions about equity in the public-education system.

Fundraising figures for elementary schools provided by the Toronto District School Board and analyzed by The Globe and Mail found that children in those affluent neighbourhoods are getting almost as much as $900 each in educational extras, from new playgrounds to Scientists in Schools. The money is raised through events such as fun fairs and pizza lunches. Some schools in lower-income neighbourhoods raise as little as $3 a student.

Canada’s largest school board provides special grants to schools in high-needs communities to help compensate for the vast differences.

But it still cannot catch up to the hundreds of thousands of dollars schools in the city’s richest neighbourhoods raise. Blythwood Junior Public School, situated around Mount Pleasant Road and Lawrence Avenue East, a wealthy neighbourhood, raised almost $700 a student in the 2012-13 academic year. Thorncliffe Park Public School, located in an area that serves as a landing pad for recent immigrants, raised about $45.

The board can’t afford to fully make up the differences, according to Carla Kisko, associate director of the TDSB. “It’s a serious concern because there are significant differences between communities,” she said.

Certainly nothing like the US system, where much of school funding is by neighbourhood in contrast to the block funding in Canada, but still something to watch.

Toronto school fundraising raises questions about equity in public-education system – The Globe and Mail.

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