Toronto high school to open Africentric program
Posted March 4, 2013 2:11 pm.
This article is more than 5 years old.
The country’s first high school Africentric program will open at Toronto’s Winston Churchill Collegiate Institute in the fall, Toronto’s school board says.
The Africentric program was created to target the high drop-out rate for black students within the Toronto District School Board (TDSB), which was at 40 per cent in 2009. That’s much higher than that of the general population, where 25 per cent of students leave without graduating.
The TDSB said the Scarborough school has space for 60 Grade 9 students in the Leonard Braithwaite program and hopes to expand in the coming years.
The school is located in the east end, near Lawrence Avenue and Kennedy Road, but the program is open to any student who lives in Toronto.
English, French, geography, math and science will all be taught with a focus on African heritage at the academic level.
The school’s website points out that though the program is academic; it is open to students in other streams. The province’s high schools offer applied, open and academic-level curriculum.
For example, some students may only need to complete one assignment to reach a particular expectation whereas another student may need to do four assignments to reach that same expectation, the website states.
The program is named after Leonard Braithwaite, who, in 1963, became the first black man to be elected to Queen’s Park.
The TDSB opened the country’s only Africentric Alternative School for elementary students in 2009. The school shares space with Sheppard Public School in North York, but students have their own wing.
Students at Leonard Braithwaite will be integrated into the school, according to the Winston Churchill website.
The Leonard Braithwaite was initially proposed for Oakwood Collegiate, but the idea angered some students and parents at the school. They argued an Africentric school amounts to segregation, and doesn’t fit in with Toronto’s multicultural values.
