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..." 

 

Westmount blinks on traffic safety issues at Akiva School after parent hit by car

Aaron Akerman stands near the Metcalfe/Springfield intersection where he was hit by a car on May 22nd. With him is Alex Kuczma, part of the security team at Shaar Hashomayim/Akiva School. Green plastic bollards are newly installed. Photo: Beverly Akerman

 

Reported on June 18, 2012

After dragging its feet for months, the city of Westmount has begun addressing traffic safety issues at a problematic intersection near Akiva School, following a May 22nd accident in which a parent was hit by a car.

Akiva officially requested improved safety provisions at the Metcalfe and Springfield intersection four months ago, said the school's head, Cooki Levy. After witnessing several near-misses there involving children, local resident and Akiva parent Dan Wolfensohn started a crusade to improve pedestrian safety.

He’s pleaded with mayor Peter Trent and director general Duncan Campbell for a stop sign, crosswalk, and crossing guard during peak hours, amenities enjoyed by nearby Selwyn House, Saint-Léon, and Roslyn schools.

Wolfensohn calls the situation outside the school at peak periods “chaotic,” with parents double-parked or illegally parked, serious traffic bottlenecks, illegal u-turns, “delivery trucks and city vehicles speed[ing] their way up and down Metcalfe in frustration… Add to this a very busy driveway out of the synagogue parking lot with a blind turn, and we have a recipe for disaster.” Warnings and tickets hadn’t curbed the mayhem.

Westmount’s initial responses “didn’t really acknowledge the seriousness of the problem,” Wolfensohn said. But official inertia appears to have ended after a car backed into Aaron Akerman (full disclosure: Aaron is this correspondent’s brother) as he navigated the intersection with his children, ages 6 and 7, on the rainy morning of May 22nd.

Thrown to the asphalt and banged up but not seriously hurt, Akerman fired off an email in support of changes to the intersection the same day. “I think it’s a matter of luck that nothing more serious has happened,” Akerman said.

The first response Akerman received had him shaking his head: the committee wouldn’t assign a crossing guard, according to Campbell, because the intersection was “dangerous due to [poor] visibility and illegally parked cars.”

Further exchanges, however, led Campbell to inform Akerman by email of the decision “to increase the length of the loading zone on the south side of Cote Road (sic)” and install plastic bollards to enhance visibility at the Metcalfe/Springfield intersection.

On the morning June 11th, David Sedgwick, Westmount’s public security director, met the two Akiva fathers outside the school to inspect the new setup. Sedgwick, who patrolled Westmount for 25 years before becoming security chief, agreed with Akerman and Wolfensohn’s evaluation of the traffic safety conditions at the school, noting that 4 p.m. pickups were even worse. His primary goal, he says, is “to make things as safe as possible.” He’s hopeful that the improved visibility due to the bollards will be enough to tame the problem.

Neither Wolfensohn nor Akerman appeared completely satisfied, vowing to continue to press for a stop sign, crosswalk, and crossing guard if the bollards don’t do the trick.

“Our first thought is to improve visibility, and if we need to put in a crosswalk, we’ll put in a crosswalk,” Sedgwick responded. Traffic speed and volume counts had been done the previous week; the intersection is on the agenda for the traffic committee’s next meeting, June 19th.

When asked why the traffic situation had gotten so much worse over time, Wolfensohn said he thought the problem stemmed from Akiva having doubled its enrolment between 2002 and 2009. The Jewish parochial school now has approximately 350 students; another 100 or so youngsters attend the Shaar Hashomayim’s Foundation School day care in the same location.

Akiva head of school Levy says she’s “very grateful” for the new bollards. Following the accident, the school reiterated its drop-off guidelines in an email to parents, summarized here:

• Park only in prescribed “loading zone” spaces or legal parking spots.
• When backing into a parking spot, check carefully for pedestrians. Don’t rush.
• Using the designated crosswalks at Côte St. Antoine Rd. or Sherbrooke St. is safer than crossing at Springfield, which has no crosswalk.

Originally published on OpenFile.ca.

The Case Against School Uniforms

A few years back, my then-high-school-attending son received a detention. Not for inappropriate language or behaviour, but solely because his shirt-tail was untucked. Although I allow some room in his narration of his universe for embellishment and even, at times, truth-twisting, I believed him on this one. And that is because, over the several years previous, I had become acquainted with the Uniformists.

My children all went to public schools, and their elementary and high schools promulgated strict dress codes. From the outset, I was never completely in favour of all this uniformity. Being a child of the 60s, I was required to wear a tunic for precisely one year, which was abandoned after it was “recognized” that this “stifled self-expression and creativity.” I use quotation marks because the received wisdom in these Oh-Oh years is quite different – now, uniforms are supposed to “create an environment conducive to learning,” a sense of “community among students,” and, not least, a muting of the intense competitive consumerism that lurks among the bad memories of we who are now parents ourselves. Fair enough; the schools my children frequented were good schools, and they were fixed (fixated?) on uniforms. So I could hardly join these communities hoping to make them conform to my thinking. But that didn’t mean I couldn’t ask questions. And, with that detention fresh in my mind, the question became: How uniform is uniform enough? One of the schools insisted on a certain type of shoe, the other that white oxford-style shirts or t-shirts are no longer acceptable, only polo shirts, with the knit collars and the three buttons. There was always some newer affectation, for example that shirts be monogrammed with the school name/logo.

Our high school is blessed to have a devoted cadre of volunteers who organized and ran the uniform store, generating tens of thousands of dollars a year, all of which was spent on the kids. These monies provide many bits and pieces which are really the school board’s sadly neglected responsibility (new musical instruments, a paint job more often than once every seven years, equipment for classrooms, computers, libraries, etc., etc.) and some true luxuries (lavish graduation exercises, an unbelievable number of academic prizes for graduates, international exchange trips). So uniforms also functioned as an invisible school fee, over and above the taxes that we all contributed. Fair enough, but maybe we should be more up-front about this. Maybe, too, we should organize to demand more money from our governments, or for better use of the existing funds from our school boards.

Another thing about these uniforms really bothered me -- their monochromicity. Why should our schools be sensory deprivation zones? Why white and grey? Why can’t a shirt style be prescribed, but blue, pink or yellow versions be permitted as well, in addition to the white? I never used bleach before my kids entered school! And though it was a minor concern on balance, I regret the environmental degradation these white shirts necessitated.

The truth that surprised me most was that nearly every parent I spoke with felt blessed by uniforms: they were relieved to be delivered from daily arguments about appropriate dress, or from the need to replace each fashion fad their children Exhausted. School officials wanted the monogrammed shirts in part, it seemed, because many of the young women at high school routinely buy extremely tight, skimpy versions of the currently requisite button-down oxfords. No one ever adequately explained to me why, beyond colour and low-heel requirements, a particular brand of shoe was necessary.

Why can’t we parents face head-on the challenges that uniforms are supposed to address? If we have a problem with the sluttish dress of some of our daughters, or the exorbitance of the latest trend in jeans, we should face these issues forthrightly, not cover them over with grey flannel! Buck up, I say! Learn to say “No, that is not appropriate dress for school.” No further explanation is necessary. Our authority can be as arbitrary as “We are teaching you how to live up to society’s expectations. When you are a responsible adult, you can chose to conform or not, but at least you will know how to dress like a middle class prig.” If our kids will not obey our edicts concerning tattoos, body piercing or outlandish hair colour, are we really doing them any favours by abdicating our authority in favour of the school bureaucracy?

Finally, let me tell you about an unfortunate secret truth which lurks beneath the thrall of the Uniformists: it is the way it makes public schools and their students resemble, in the most superficial of ways, the exclusive private schools that pepper my Montreal neighbourhood. And that is a value that I do not share. We should be proud that our kids go to public schools, where all races, religions and socio-economic groups are represented and form a community, just like the real world to which they aspire. If there are improvements necessary in our schools to positively influence behaviour and comportment, let’s make these changes deep ones, not as superficial as the clothes on their backs, or colour of their hair.

My kids love their schools. And I’m grateful for all the hard work put in by the decimated custodial staff, the devoted teachers, concerned administrators and dynamic parent volunteers. I know by the middle of high school, my son shouldn’t be wandering about with his shirttail hanging out. But can you blame me if I wish the administration was more concerned with the originality of my kids’ minds, and less concerned about the conventionality of their dress? In the final analysis, shouldn’t their education be more about content, and less about form?

Bev Akerman, formerly a molecular genetics researcher, is now a Montreal writer. The Meaning of Children, her award-winning first book is available from Amazon)

(This essay was published in The Montreal Gazette, Maclean's Magazine, March 7, 2005, in Cynthia A. Bily, (Ed.) Students’ Rights. Introducing Issues With Opposing Viewpoints. Farmington Hills, MI: Greenhaven Press. 2009, and elsewhere)