It’s a battle between the head and the heart, one school board trustee said.
The future of B. Davison, a London vocational high school, is at the heart of a dispute about where and how struggling secondary students should be allowed to learn. And it left trustees smarting at Tuesday night’s meeting of the Thames Valley District school board.
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Turns out, trustees will have little say in saving B. Davison – at least in its current form as an alternative to a typical high school – as the board leans into a years-long process to “de-stream” its system.
Under that model, which began rolling out in 2020, students at all schools are to have opportunities to prepare for one of three pathways once they graduate: college, university or the workforce. It also means students who need courses like those offered at B. Davison are instead directed to similar opportunities at their home high schools, based on where they live.
“My head and my mind accepts all of this information as truth. My heart has a completely different feeling,” London trustee Sheri Polhill said.
She called the staff presentation “convincing,” but said she worries about students who found a sense of community at B. Davison struggling at other schools, where they’re placed simply because of geography.
“How are we going to ensure that students who no longer have a home like B. Davison feel that same thing at their regular community high school?” Polhill said. “I really feel that’s a special feeling that students who have historically gone to B. Davison really, truly needed.”
Enrolment has been declining at the school for years, board staff said, though trustees and some Londoners are divided on whether that decrease is simply due to family choices or because the school board stopped sharing B. Davison as a viable option. Parents, graduates and community members raised the alarm last year about a possible closure of the school after they said enrolment was ceased.
The Trafalgar Street school will not be closed, board staff said repeatedly Tuesday, but rather considered for future “programming options” and “potential utilization” of its square footage.
There are now just 76 students enrolled at the vocational school, which offers courses in hospitality, welding, construction, auto mechanics, horticulture, and cosmetology, as well as co-op programs and some academic courses. Many of the courses help students enter the workplace directly after graduation.
“As a board we must challenge assumptions about what students are capable of, and the belief that some students are less capable than others,” associate director Riley Culhane told trustees on Tuesday.
He said families raised concerns about the variety of courses offered at their home schools. All schools now have a larger slate of options to cater to different learners, trustees heard.
TVDSB staff came prepared with answers that resembled sales pitches for the new system, dancing around numerous trustee questions about whether the current model at B. Davison can be saved and trustees’ power to direct a change of course at this stage.
Culhane and other school board directors argued that using “streaming” – filtering students based on abilities and academic success – is akin to discrimination, disproportionately hitting Black, Indigenous and other marginalized students, and potentially stunting their future opportunities.
There was little choice for trustees, who were receiving Tuesday’s presentation simply as an update, but will be able to make decisions on future uses of B. Davison when those options are brought forward as part of a larger package.
Londoners or groups can submit written feedback or apply to present to trustees about that programming at the Nov. 1 board meeting, though staff didn’t highlight the opportunity at the meeting. All written input and delegation requests are due by Oct. 21 at 4 p.m., according to the TVDSB website.
“We need to offer students choices that lead to the most ultimate success for them. Students are opting not to leave their home communities to go a single-track vocational school,” director of education Mark Fisher said Tuesday when asked by Polhill if trustees could still intervene to stop the changes at B. Davison.
“Single-track vocational schools do not best serve the needs of the students,” he added.
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