Vaughan Road Academy and the erosion of the "neighbourhood school"

[King of Kensington]

TDSB voted tonight to close Vaughan Road Academy, due to dwindling enrollment. In many respects the damage was already done as enrollment was down to a few hundred students. Some of this was pure demographics - the area right now has a lot of seniors and young children, but few teenagers.

http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2016/12/05/tdsb-optional-attendance_n_13352910.html

Jason Kunin, a teacher at Vaughan Rd., attributes much of the problem to "optional attendance" - which allows students to attend schools outside the catchment area. Hence more affluent parents in less "desirable" areas fight to send their schools to certain "prestige" schools - like Forest Hill or Lawrence Park - because they don't want their kids going to Vaughan Rd. or John Polanyi.

This policy is justified on the grounds that it keeps the affluent professional classes invested in the public system rather than opting for private schools. But it is also contributing to ethnic and class segregation.

 

[Johnny Au]

Goodbye, my high school. My name is on the list of VRA's Ontario Scholars. Believe it or not, I used to live just one block away from VRA (within 50 m).

It had to finish for good on its 90th anniversary.

By the way, here's the full report.

Read and weep.

It's unfortunate that VRA acquired the reputation as "American Inner-City High School North"

Vaughan Road Academy may end up being used for Degrassi, especially given how many VRA alumni are Degrassi cast members.

Many VRA students would be transferred to Oakwood Collegiate. Speaking of Oakwood Collegiate: https://www.reddit.com/r/toronto/comments/5h2yn0/toronto_teen_arrested_after_planning_attack_on/

 

[King of Kensington]

You can really see how "optional attendance" did Vaughan Rd. in:

"Note that a large number of Cedarvale CS graduates already choose Forest Hill CI over Vaughan Road Academy. Since 2012-13 an average of 11% of Cedarvale CS graduates have elected to attend Vaughan Road Academy. An average of 51% has been able to access Forest Hill CI."

 

[Johnny Au]

Forest Hill CI would have been my second choice back when I was a middle school student.

By the way, my middle school was Arlington Middle School. Nowadays, it became a private Jewish day school.

 

[King of Kensington]

Forest Hill CI would have been my second choice back when I was a middle school student.

By the way, my middle school was Arlington Middle School. Nowadays, it became a private Jewish day school.

VRA once had a large Jewish student population, but today Jewish kids in the public system go to Forest Hill CI.

The old Hungarian House at Winona and St. Clair (which are being turned into condos now) was a synagogue until the 1960s.

 

[Johnny Au]

VRA once had a large Jewish student population, but today Jewish kids in the public system go to Forest Hill CI.

Interestingly enough, VRA had a PA day coincide with Passover, given how many staff and students would otherwise be absent.

 

[Palma]

Interestingly enough, VRA had a PA day coincide with Passover, given how many staff and students would otherwise be absent.

once upon a time it had a large italian student population. Obviously there was a decline in enrolment at Forest Hill due to less young kids around that school allowing students outside the area to attend.

Lawrence Park only accepts students within the area due to the high enrollment. My nephew went there 4 years ago and prior to gr 9 there was an open house and parents were told that if they did not live within the boundaries, the school was closed to them. The only reason my nephew got in was he was able to get into the french immersion middle school which feeds into Lawrence Park as they also have french immersion there in addition to english.

Its a cycle, the young grow up but if people continue to live in houses as the kids get married, there will obviously be less students available for those schools but eventually the tide swings as those older people start to age and either pass away or need to go live into an assisted living space and then young families move in and the kids then come

 

[Johnny Au]

Much of the Italian population that used to attend VRA now live in Woodbridge.

Much of the Jewish population that used to attend VRA either remain in Cedarvale or moved north along Bathurst.

Some of the Afro-Caribbean population that used to attend VRA either remained in Five Points or Little Jamaica or moved to Pickering or Ajax.

 

[bobbob911]

I am certain that optional enrollment played a factor in this school closure, but this article seems to suggest it also leads to overcrowding at desirable schools:

https://www.thestar.com/opinion/com...endance-is-killing-neighbourhood-schools.html

Isn't optional enrollment subject to capacity? In other words, you can't enroll outside of your catchment if the school is already at capacity, can you?

 

[W. K. Lis]

Sending students outside their neighourhood schools to "desirable" schools also mean an increase in school buses. Which only add to the costs that the property taxpayers have to cover. Want to reduce costs: reduce the number of school buses, and make neighourhood schools the first choice.

Just remember the problems with school buses at the beginning of the school year.

 

[King of Kensington]

I am certain that optional enrollment played a factor in this school closure, but this article seems to suggest it also leads to overcrowding at desirable schools:

https://www.thestar.com/opinion/com...endance-is-killing-neighbourhood-schools.html

Isn't optional enrollment subject to capacity? In other words, you can't enroll outside of your catchment if the school is already at capacity, can you?

The report on VRA noted that Cedarvale kids moved on to Forest Hill by a 5-1 margin.

 

[lead82]

Optional attendance may have had an impact but overall there are less children of high school age in the area. It's better to have schools over 80% full than <20% full. Especially since VRA is an older school and has expensive maintenance.

 

[Johnny Au]

Optional attendance may have had an impact but overall there are less children of high school age in the area. It's better to have schools over 80% full than <20% full. Especially since VRA is an older school and has expensive maintenance.

Not just that, but VRA is in the former municipality that has a declining population!

When I was in VRA during the early 2000s, some of its textbooks were dated from the early 1980s! Back when smartphones were a thing of science fiction, the Soviet Union showed no major signs of collapse, USENET was the only form of social media (and was only accessible to governments, militaries, and universities), Pluto was a planet, video games were primarily played in the arcades, the Jays were an expansion franchise with numerous losing seasons, very much every popular cartoon was for children, cable television and microwave ovens were novelties, the Scarborough RT was under construction (with Kipling and Kennedy stations being considered brand new stations at the time), the SkyDome was in the planning stage, and yes, the textbooks were so old, even compact discs were considered a novelty and most teens listened to LPs. The textbooks predated me.

One of the textbooks, Vive le français (1980), featured a rock star named Marcel Météore. There were numerous photographs of him, audio recordings of him in LP and audio cassette forms (compact discs were only invented one year earlier, but were not released to the public until two years after the publishing of the textbook), and was stated to be famous throughout the Francophonie. Unfortunately, he left no records of himself, vinyl, photographic, or otherwise, even in the age of Google and Wikipedia.

 

[Palma]

Sending students outside their neighourhood schools to "desirable" schools also mean an increase in school buses. Which only add to the costs that the property taxpayers have to cover. Want to reduce costs: reduce the number of school buses, and make neighourhood schools the first choice.

Just remember the problems with school buses at the beginning of the school year.

these are high school. What school buses are you talking about? Any students doing buses are doing TTC buses

 

[Palma]

Sending students outside their neighourhood schools to "desirable" schools also mean an increase in school buses. Which only add to the costs that the property taxpayers have to cover. Want to reduce costs: reduce the number of school buses, and make neighourhood schools the first choice.

Just remember the problems with school buses at the beginning of the school year.

those were elementary students