Perhaps if we did, my Amazon wouldn't be among the last.

Last week The Toronto Star (registration required)reported that the “equity boss” of the Toronto District School Board wants to establish a pilot project for an all black school in Toronto for at risk black youth:

The new equity boss at Canada's largest school board says he's in favour of creating a black-focused school as a pilot project for black teens on the brink of dropping out.
(..)
Lloyd McKell, newly minted "executive officer of student and community equity" for the Toronto District School Board, says city schools don't do enough to make students of all backgrounds feel valued.

"I would like to see principals holding community meetings before there are complaints about suspensions. I'd like to see an adult at every door greeting each student with a handshake and a guarantee that they'll do everything in their power to make the student feel part of the family," said McKell, 60, whose new job is believed to make him the most powerful equity watchdog at an Ontario school board.

"We know there are whole groups of students who are not doing as well as others — and I understand many families' impatience about this. We need a clear, focused plan of action."

McKell says he believes a black-focused pilot school for students who are too alienated to remain in the system would be helpful, offering more black teachers, an Afro-centric curriculum and a more nurturing environment.

But he doesn't support expanding beyond that to a separate system of schools for black students, preferring to keep public schools for students of all backgrounds. "We have to start creating a positive attitude; a sense of family in our schools," he said. "And family members don't turn their back on each other."

The Premier has chimed in with a definitive “No”.

My knee jerk reaction is “Hell no, my children won’t go.” My mind automatically rejects the idea of a race based school and segregation education. I am not reassured with the feel good quotes from the equity boss about schools being families and a nuturing environment. Most of my conflicts in the elementary school environment have revolved around teachers who opted to attempt to pass on their values to my children rather than reading, writing and mathematics. I have yet to neither perceive the colour of mathematics nor comprehend what would make science Afro-centric.

But that’s the knee jerk reaction and if I am honest there was a great deal in the early childhood of my children when it was very afro-centric; from the dolls special ordered from the US, to the books we read to the children, to the magazines that were brought into the home and the movies we viewed. Every year we still bring out the black version of The Night Before Christmas on Christmas Eve to read and my preschooler’s version of the bible was illustrated with only black people. Now that the youngest child is a tween and the other two have both officially entered adolescence the afro-centric focus is gone not because I lost interest or motivation but because their own focus has broaden to extend the wider world and culture around them.

The Last Amazon entered into the provincial public education system in junior kindergarten. Before the first day of kindergarten the Last Amazon knew how to write her first and last name, about ten or fifteen other words and was reading simple picture books. By her first report she was “failing to develop” in junior kindergarten. The teacher refused not only to meet with me to discuss my daughter’s progress but she never returned my telephone calls. All attempts to set up a meeting were exercises in futility.

By the second “failing to develop” in all areas report card we decided that our child would be transferred to a local Catholic school in our neighborhood. It was always our intention that once the children reached grade 1 we would transfer them to a Catholic elementary school though not necessarily to one in our downtown neighborhood. The reason the Last Amazon was in public school was that her very excellent daycare (which was located quite far from our downtown home) only escorted children to public school.

On the last day of elementary school her teacher finally called me. She advised that since the LA was leaving to attend a Christian religious school she would meet with failure and a hostile academic environment if I did not dissuade my daughter of her notion that Jesus was a black man. I was literally floored and could not think of anything to say but a puzzled “Wasn’t he?” The teacher promptly hung up on me.

We were in a bit of a bind. The only way to remove the Last Amazon from an out of district public school was to send her to the local Catholic School in our the downtown neighborhood. We thought at the time that a big disadvantage would be that that our local Catholic school was also a feeder school to three of the toughest housing projects in the city but we consoled ourselves with the fact it was also a pre-dominantly black school (70%) with the balance of the students from Asian backgrounds and less than 5% white. The bias we felt she had experienced in public school would be less likely in an environment where children of minority ethnic backgrounds were in the majority.

Mid-way through grade 1 the Last Amazon had won her first Canada-wide essay contest and the school did their best to keep her engaged even when her classmates academic achievements were not operating in the same zone as the Last Amazon. I credit some remarkable older teachers who viewed teaching as a calling and not a job, a lovely common-sense principal, and the Sisters of Saint Joseph volunteers for picking up any slack. The thing about this particular school is that it consistently scores low on both the provincial EQAL and CAT tests but it also has a large percentage of both gifted and academically and behavioral challenged students.

But the school hasn’t been good just to my daughter. My oldest son had many problems initially with language. It did not help that he had a remarkably poor memory for the names of not just people, but things too. So the “See and Say” method that was all the rage in teaching language at that time did not work for him and the other programs offered by the board never fit my son’s learning issues. One of those remarkable older teachers advised me about a learning system that was used primarily in the US utilizing a phonics based system using Orton phonograms. I started initially on my own and then shared our progress with the school. The principal did the necessary work to institute this system in the school special education class and two years later my son was out of special education classes and not only the top of his regular class in math and science but language as well - even if his penmanship still looks like he’s writing in ancient Egyptian. Would the principal have been so receptive to my suggestions if he was not the principal of a school that did not have such an ethnic mix and have to travel each day to a school whose location showed so graphically the consequences of academic failure? I just don’t know.

My youngest son showed a gift for mathematics early and one of the Sister’s of St. Joseph’s started to work with him and by 7, he was multiplying double digits. I should note that for whatever reason the Sister’s have mostly left the school now and it seemed to coincide with the retirement of my favourite principal and our local priest, and I do think the school is poorer without the sisters’ influence and aid. To this day the children think my characterization of nuns of belonging to Sister Mary Elephant mold is a product of my imagination and not experience.

But is not just academically the children have thrived in this environment. One of the issues that my children have had to face is to resist the pressure to “be Black” via the MTV and New Jack City culture that is so pervasive and insidious within the Black community. As the Last Amazon so succinctly puts it; black is something she is, not something she has to work at being.

The Last Amazon never aspired to be somebody’s “hoochie momma” or wear gangsta fashion, or speak in Patois, and she decidedly loses patience with me when I met friends from the Jamaican community that want to pass the time about the goings in JA and I slip into Patois. She doesn’t listen to rap and hasn’t nothing but contempt for those young men who think that gangsta culture is the key to capturing her eye or holding her attention.

My son Montana has never fussed much with his clothes but he can’t bear the idea of walking around with the crotch of his pants hanging down around his knees or the hair of his head braided in corn rows. His idea of dress clothes is a US Marine dress uniform. He refuses to go out with his friends in public if anyone insists on wearing what he calls gang clothes. He fell in love with Johnny Cash, Hanks Williams, and opera. Oddly enough, he is not shy on sharing that knowledge or love with his peers. He judges people by their acts alone and he has developed a rather discerning habit when faced with young teachers with exceeding liberal views who insist on sharing or attempting to influence his thinking philosophically by advising them that they wouldn’t say that if he wasn’t a black - which does work as a sure conversation stopper. I have had more than a few rattled teachers who felt compelled to call home in order to explain to me that they aren’t a racist and share their non-racist bona fides with me - which usually amounts to rhyming off how many race based sensitivity workshops they have attended and the naming of all the ethnic backgrounds of their friends.

But would the children have felt the same freedom to be different and to excel in an environment if they spent their early years where they were a distinct minority? I don’t honestly know and I can’t answer. I do know that academic failure is not created solely in secondary school and has its roots firmly established in both the home and elementary school. Or it could be that the faith-based school offered a viable rationale that united these visible minority children to the wider world around them that was not based on race, ethnicity or class but a core belief in God. Or maybe not.

What I am sure of is that for an ever growing percentage of black students; graduating from High School is not a goal, and the wider implication of that is frightening. Perhaps the time has come to put our fears and bias aside and try it for those at risk students and see what happens.