Mordecai Richler School in the Plateau?

Following last night's CBC broadcast of my Facebook quest to name a proposed new school in Cote St. Luc for Mordecai Richler, I heard from Julien Feldman, an English Montreal School Board Commissioner. He's been working on a plan to rename a building on St. Urbain Street, right near the original Baron Byng High School that Mr. Richler made famous by its fictional alter ego, Fletcher's Field High.


Here's the exchange, which is ongoing...

Beverly Akerman:

From Julien Feldman: "This is a good initiative, but I've actually spoken to Richler's family about re-naming the Bancroft building on St.Urbain, just up the street from Baron Byng. The school governing boards who operate the building will be asked to consider the proposal very soon."

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  Beverly Akerman Julien, how many kids in the school? I understand it recently had a near-death experience. How likely is another such experience to occur in the not-too-distant future? How much support does the proposal have from parents? Are they not concerned about the possible reaction from the French communities?

  42 minutes ago · Like
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  Julien Feldman The Bancroft building is actually two schools - Bancroft Elementary and MIND high School, for a total of about 300 students. The elementary school is the fastest growing in the EMSB, thank to its incredibly successful bilingual program and the growing influx of anglos into the the Plateau. It's bucking the trend to declining enrollment.
  Last year there was an EMSB administration proposal to move kids to a different building, but that was unanimously rejected by the EMSB council of commissioners because of its rapid growth, so it was no real "near-death" experience.
  It's quite uncertain whether the Cote St. Luc high school will ever happen. Two years ago it flopped because of lack of demand. Only a couple of dozens kids said they'd enroll. Part of the problem is that its proponents have pre-defined as a religious school.
  The Cote St. Luc building is not Wagar, but in fact the "Palatucci Centre". The proposed high school would start off as a few classrooms inside the Palatucci Centre, if there's sufficient demand. The last effort only attracted a few dozen students and was cancelled.
  As for reaction form the local community, there is considerable support from the local borough and its Councillors and Mile End is the most mufti-cultural in the city.

  25 minutes ago · Like
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  Beverly Akerman so the proposal is to name the building, is that right? 300 students in both schools? how fast is the "fastest growing in the EMSB"? and i don't think the CSL proposal has anything to do with religion, btw.

  20 minutes ago · Like
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  Julien Feldman That's correct. Michael Applebaum and Marvin Rotrand baptized the Fletcher's Field gazebo, but a building on a major artery is obviously more appropriate and more substantial than a few classrooms in the West End.
  The CSL high school proposal is for a "heritage" program, which is in fact a euphemism for a religious component. The basic idea is to attract Jewish day school students back into the public system.
  If you'll recall, this new proposal emerged from the the failed effort to move Royal Vale from NDG into the Palatucci Centre, affecting hundreds of kids currently attending Royal Vale building in elementary and high school.

  8 minutes ago · Edited · Like
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  Beverly Akerman Julien, I led the Royal Vale fight to keep the school in NDG a few years back. And you unkindly misrepresent the heritage program. Cote St. Luc has one of the oldest populations of a Quebec municipality. Now they're trying to attract new younger families with new developments, and a public high school--and wonderful new aquatic facilities--is part of that strategy. I can respect that, and also the absence of coercion this time.

  8 minutes ago · Like
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  Beverly Akerman And their persistence. Please don't condescend to me.

  5 minutes ago · Like
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  Max Layton Again, a Richler high school in the St. Urbain area is absolutely appropriate because that's what he wrote about and where he lived. But a high school in Cote St Luc should be named for my father, Irving Layton, because that's where we lived and he wrote many poems about it. Surely, Montreal is a big enough city to have room for two great writers -- and two schools!

So there you have it: Plateau? Cote St. Luc? Richler? Layton? How about Leonard Cohen? You can vote at www.nametheschool.com until November 30th.

 And you can schmooze here or on Facebook.




Please also see my OpenFile.ca article about the EMSB's 2011 attempt to move the high school component of Royal Vale School into the old Wagar building, now officially known as the Giovanni Pallatucci facility.

Who was Giovanni Pallatucci? 

"Giovanni Palatucci saved the lives of 5,000 Jews destined to die in death camps during World War II. From 1938 to 1944, Palatucci was first in charge of the Office of Foreigners and later Chief of Police of Fiume, a city in northern Italy..."

Mordecai Richler High School in Cote St. Luc? Help "make it so!"

Here's the CBC Local Montreal News segment from Nov.15th. Also on their website: 

From what I understand, the Cote St. Luc civic administration has teamed up with the English Montreal School Board to try to promote the creation of a new EMSB high school in Cote St. Luc (at the site of the old Wagar High).

 

Now, at www.nametheschool.com, the EMSB is soliciting names for this new, projected, high school. So I’ve started a campaign to have it named in honour of the man I think was the greatest English Montreal writer of the twentieth century, Mr. Mordecai Richler.

I started a Facebook campaign which you can find here--please join us! http://www.facebook.com/events/384004745016654/

BARD WARS:

The response includes suggestions from Glen Rotchin and Max Layton that the high school, instead, be named for Irving Layton who apparently actually lived in, as well as wrote about, Cote St. Luc. Others have suggested a different sort of compromise: The Layton-Richler Academy. Or noted that if it was named Mordecai Richler Institute, it could be called, for short, MRI. 

In other words, we’re having fun with this!

I’d just like Montrealers (and those who have Montreal in their hearts) to know about the “name the school” campaign and hopefully vote to have the school, if it actually comes to be, named after Mr. Richler. My interest in his work is of longstanding—here are links to a couple of pieces I’ve written, one at Rover Magazine, the other for Maisonneuve Magazine's blog. 

I think I've got more MR elsewhere on this blog (but I actually don't have time to look it up because I've got to get ready to see David Bezmozgis at Blue Emet!)

I guess the clincher here is the article I saw a few days back that shows one in five EMSB elementary school grads are going to private schools for high school. We clearly need to change things if we want to keep these students in the public sector. Royal West Academy can only take so many of them (a whole 'nother story). Maybe this new school is the start of bringing students back to the public sector.

“Last year, among the English Montreal School Board’s 1,727 Grade 6 graduates, more than one in five left the board altogether. Rather than sign on with EMSB high schools, the majority of the 382 pupils who left went to the private sector for their secondary schooling.” (from Janet Bagnall’s Montreal Gazette column, Oct. 31st)

 

Please pass the word along!

Notable supporters so far:

CBC's Nancy Wood
Terry Mosher (aka Aislin)

Michael Posner

Paul Vermeersch 

Linda Leith

Mikhail Iossel

Arjun Basu

Andrew Phillips (Toronto Star)

Ray Brassard (Montreal Gazette) 

Howard Richler

Karl E. Jirgens

Lally Cadeau
Ken McGoogan...and LOTS of other wonderful people! (Thank you all)

Will update as things progress...

PS EMSB, a new building would be nice! 

PPS I would have preferred a library, perhaps. But you know Montreal: "one island, one city, one snow plow, one library..." 

 

Blatch vs. Gopnik: Why The Walrus owes Christie Blatchford an apology

I keep trying to get beyond my feminist programming. It makes me touchy and it surely is a hindrance to my getting ahead in the world. I do know all this but, try as I may, on paging through the front sections of the morning papers--old school print: The Globe & Mail, The Montreal Gazette, and La Presse--I can't help but notice how few of the articles feature women. And by 'feature,' I mean women as newsmakers, the central subject of the article.

As opposed to the usual silicone & stiletto eye candy.

Some days, particularly in The Globe, NONE of the A section articles feature women...my heart collapses just a little more each time.

But recently, it was The Walrus that got me.

Their crime was in their treatment of Christie Blatchford in the November 2011 back page, "Chalk It Up," in which they tore a (comic) strip off her for having criticized the late Jack Layton when his body was barely cold. Blatch's "Layton’s death turns into a thoroughly public spectacle," a National Post Full Comment article, was published on the day Layton died.

The NERVE of Blatchford to criticize Saint Jack! She took on the CBC for overplaying the story: "...even serious journalists like Evan Solomon of the CBC repeatedly spoke of the difficulty 'as we all try to cope' with the news of Mr. Layton’s death.

"By mid-day, after Prime Minister Stephen Harper had offered a few warm words about Mr. Layton’s death...Mr. Solomon even expressed sniping surprise that 'Jack Layton wasn’t the sole focus' of the Prime Minister’s remarks."

The NERVE of Blatch to take a swipe at the emperor's nakedness, as reflected in Jack's final communiqué:

"And what to make of that astonishing letter, widely hailed as Mr. Layton’s magnificent from-the-grave cri de coeur?

"It was extraordinary, though it is not Mr. Solomon’s repeated use of that word that makes it so.

"Rather, it’s remarkable because it shows what a canny, relentless, thoroughly ambitious fellow Mr. Layton was. Even on Saturday, two days before he died, he managed to keep a gimlet eye on all the campaigns to come."

For these crimes, Blatch was portrayed by Jason Sherman and David Parkins as a cross between a bat, a gargoyle, and Cruella Deville. And, for good measure, a "c-word," and an "ugly glasses-wearing soldier lover," in the eyes of Jack's NDP faithful.

Blatch goes on: "Who thinks to leave a 1,000-word missive meant for public consumption and released by his family and the party mid-day, happily just as Mr. Solomon and his fellows were in danger of running out of pap? Who seriously writes of himself, 'All my life I have worked to make things better'?

"The letter was first presented as Mr. Layton’s last message to Canadians, as something written by him on his deathbed; only later was it more fully described as having been 'crafted' with party president Brian Topp, Mr. Layton’s chief of staff Anne McGrath and his wife and fellow NDP MP Olivia Chow."

Frankly, I don't think Blatchford went far enough. I think Layton should have resigned when he first became ill. He didn't, maybe not so much because of his ego as because he knew what happens to a cult of personality when the personality in question exits stage left.

I also have a problem with his having died of a 'new' cancer that's remained nameless to avoid depressing cancer sufferers more (as if!).

But maybe that's just me...and I digress.

Contrast the treatment of Blatchford with the treatment of Adam Gopnik in the following month's issue, the positively fawning article by Daniel Baird "The Observer, Observed."

Okay, Adam's a big success, writes for The New Yorker, and just released a treatise on winter:

"At fifty-five, Gopnik stands at the peak of his career. He has written six books to date (two of them for children), including the acclaimed Paris to the Moon and Angels and Ages: A Short Book about Darwin, Lincoln, and Modern Life, as well as countless articles of varying length for The New Yorker. This fall, he is publishing two new books, The Table Comes First: Family, France, and the Meaning of Food and Winter, which he is delivering across Canada this fall as the 2011 CBC Massey Lectures."

Listen, I'm as admiring of Gopnik as the next person, but he moved away from Canada 30 years ago for NYC. And Paris.

And he's prancing across Canada lecturing CANADIANS about...WINTER??!

SERIOUSLY?

And that photograph of Gopnik by Jody Rogac--what were they thinking? He looks like Snoopy impersonating a vulture.

Baird's final paragraph is, albeit possibly unintentionally, hilarious:

"...[Gopnik's] son Luke appeared, a lithe and handsome seventeen-year-old with thick brown hair. He went to the kitchen and came back with a dog treat, as Butterscotch [the little dog that now obsesses Gopnik after a lifetime of refusing to have dogs] practically spun in circles on her hind legs. Then he began slowly waving the treat over the stack of unsold copies of Through the Children’s Gate, and soon Butterscotch followed, leaping with her stubby legs fully extended, with surprising grace, over the wall of books, back and forth, back and forth. Gopnik looked on, rapt, amazed, and absolutely beaming."

All I can say is, where is Mordecai Richler when you need him?

This is most of what Baird has to say about Winter: "..a diffuse and eclectic book, straining at times to sustain its theme with no chance to fall back on the quirky, heartwarming personal narratives that propel Paris to the Moon and Through the Children’s Gate. But in the end, Winter is also deeply personal: it is about finding a sense of home and rootedness and meaning in a fragmented postmodern world; it begins with and ultimately returns to the city of his formative teen years and early adulthood, Montreal. 'Practically everything important that has happened to me happened in Montreal,' he said: 'The first time I fell in love, the first time I fell out of love, the first time I made love.'"

Frankly, The Walrus owes Blatchford an apology. I think Blatchford is amazing, not least because she actually stayed in Canada, not to mention travelling halfway round the world, to bring us Canadian stories. And, for the record, as a kneejerk leftie, there are many of her positions I disagree with.

I know, I know: "Chalk It Up" is supposed to be satire. Still, Blatch is a writer of stature in this country, a writer of gender, a feminist writer. She deserved better than to have her appearance slagged and to be called a 'c-word' in what passes in Canada for The New Yorker.

Maybe Gopnik's next book will be a series of lectures about the essential Montreal.

As a Montrealer, let me tell you how much I'm looking forward to that.

Fate of Royal Vale School has communities squabbling

Screen image from a video of a Nov. 23 march against a proposed move of Royal Vale's high school from NDG to Côte Saint-Luc. (http://youtu.be/sZxqzjYbNaQ)

Reported on

December 5, 2011

Against a backdrop of declining English Montreal School Board enrolment, attempts to re-establish a public high school in Côte Saint-Luc are getting ugly.

A resolution to transfer the high school component of Royal Vale School to the former Wagar High School building, renamed the Giovanni Palatucci Educational Centre, was proposed in April 2011, to be voted on early in 2012. Wagar, Côte Saint-Luc’s last public secondary school, was closed in 2005 due to low enrolment.

But Côte Saint-Luc Mayor Anthony Housefather said his is the third largest city on Montreal island, with thousands of kids eligible for English schooling but no public high school. He points out that Côte Saint-Luc citizens pay school taxes and have been lobbying the English Montreal School Board for a new school for years. “I believe we have the right to a mainstream public high school in our community,” Housefather said.

The Palatucci facility is near Côte Saint-Luc’s new $18 million Aquatic and Community Centre, in an area featuring arenas, a gymnasium, and an auxiliary branch of the renowned civic library. It’s ideal for student activities, according to Housefather, who’s even pledging to resurface the school’s six tennis courts to sweeten the deal.

But Royal Vale parents and students are massively against a move says Karen J’bari, a Royal Vale School governing board member for about seven years. Her son graduated from the high school in 2010.

J’bari says her board voted unanimously against the proposed move because 88 per cent of parents and 75 per cent of students reject it. The parents’ survey had a 37.5 per cent response rate, which she calls “good for industry standards.”

She also says Royal Vale principal Chantal Martin has worked hard the past few years to improve the cohesiveness of the school’s kindergarten to Grade 11 program. “It blows my mind that they are thinking of splitting the school,” J’bari said.

In addition to rending the Royal Vale School social fabric, J’bari calls the school board’s proposal fiscally irresponsible, and lacking in costing or market analysis. Last spring’s attempt to gauge demand for a new Côte Saint-Luc public high school garnered interest from only 45 families, she points out.

Housefather is convinced that, to paraphrase W.P. Kinsella, if you transfer it, they will come. Local school commissioner Syd Wise concurs. He says the English Montreal School Board must meet the challenge from private schools in the area. The best way to do that is “to present parents with an enriched program like Royal Vale’s.” Wise says a school board consultation showed Côte Saint-Luc parents are looking for a more challenging curriculum than a regular high school provides.

Housefather agrees that the high school at Royal Vale “is just what parents in Côte Saint-Luc want.” He lists the fact the school accepts students regardless of where they live, has French immersion, and math and science programs.

J’bari insists that “there’s no proof a new high school would attract families” from the private schools.

On Nov. 7, Montreal’s Côte-des-Neiges/Notre-Dame de Grace borough council voted unanimously against the school board’s proposed move of Royal Vale high school. Public discussion subsequently took a turn for the worse after borough Mayor Michael Applebaum, was quoted saying, “I can tell you that we wield a big stick. … If [the move] happens, there will be consequences.”

School board chair Angela Mancini demanded an apology, calling Applebaum’s remarks “inflammatory, offensive and threatening.”

The school board’s commissioners are to hold public consultations on more than 10 major school change resolutions Dec. 5 to 8; the Royal Vale School discussion is scheduled for Dec. 6. Resolutions will be voted on Jan. 11. All meetings will take place at the English Montreal School Board’s Administration building, at 6000 Fielding Ave., at 6 p.m.

Beverly Akerman was involved in a parent movement to prevent the EMSB relocating Royal Vale School to Wagar in 2005. She is the author of The Meaning Of Children

Originally posted at OpenFileMTL.