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Vol. 72/No. 10      March 10, 2008

 
Toronto school board approves
‘Afrocentric’ school proposal
 
BY MARK GRIEVE
AND JOHN STEELE  
TORONTO—Working people here are discussing a January 29 decision by Toronto District School Board trustees to set up an alternative school with an Afrocentric curriculum as a pilot project they claim will help keep Black students in school.

According to the Globe and Mail, 40 percent of Black students do not complete high school, compared with 25 percent of students overall.

The school board voted 11-9 in favor of the Afrocentric school and set the opening date for September 2009.

“We’re opening ourselves up for real change in the system,” said trustee Michael Coteau after the vote.

“Black school is segregation,” said Loreen Small. She was one of 20 speakers who addressed the trustees during the discussion. About 200 people packed the meeting. “It’s not right,” Small said.

Small is the mother of Jordan Manners, a 15-year-old student who was shot and killed in the hallway of C.W. Jeffreys Collegiate Institute last May. Politicians used the killing to generate hysteria about “Black-on-Black” violence in the school system.

A poll found 82 percent of people in Toronto oppose the Afrocentric school decision, while just 14 percent support it.

Ontario Liberal premier Dalton McGuinty has said he won’t provide extra funding for the pilot project. “Instead of separating schools and making them only for Blacks, they should fight to put Black history in all the schools,” Junior Varciana, a worker at a Chrysler casting plant who is Black, told the Militant.

“I don’t agree” with establishing separate Black schools, George Brown, a young butcher who is Black, told the Militant. “Black heritage and culture should be taught to everyone.”

“If you implement this course on a mass scale you get back to a school system divided by the color of your skin,” said Michel Prairie, a leader of the Communist League, in a February 9 public talk. “It’s in the interests of the working class to fight for a single, secular, public school system.”

“We support affirmative action measures, like hiring more Black teachers, to overcome the inequalities inherited from centuries of discrimination,” added Prairie.

Susan Berman, Annette Kouri, and Katy LeRougetel contributed to this article.  
 
 
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