t.o Afrocentric school opens its doors

About 115 children from Toronto and its surrounding communities began an historic educational journey on Tuesday, September 8, 2009, as the first group of students of the Afrocentric Alternative School.
The students, some coming from as far off as Mississauga and Scarborough, are carrying a burden of hope on their tiny shoulders that their success confirm the importance of this institution of providing a well -rounded education and stemming the 40% dropout rate among Blacks.
Situated at the corner of Keele and Sheppard in Toronto’s west end, the school opened with a fanfare of African drums, songs and motivational pledges that included the eight-member all-female staff, and the students whose uniforms include a vest made of African kinte cloth.
They were joined by parents, community members, politicians and officials from the Toronto District School Board, all there to mark an historic moment in time and the culmination of more than two years of struggle to establish a school that would bring relevance to learning to Black students.
The Afrocentric Alternative School, an idea first proposed in an Ontario Royal Commission of Learning in 1994, met fierce resistance within and outside of Toronto’s Black community.
Detractors of the project tagged it as segregation and suggested that Black students needed to be in public schools with access to a more open and wide-ranging education. 
Afrocentric Alternative School Principal Thando Hyman-Aman has made it clear to the media that students will learn the same curriculum as all other schools in Ontario.
"The same reading, the same writing, the same mathematics will be there," she was quoted as saying. "What makes this school look different are the culturally-relevant resources that we use.”
"We definitely want to nurture a sense of belonging and community, but we also want to make sure that our standards are very high – where students can read, write, speak clearly and perform very well.”
The school, which serves students from junior kindergarten to Grade 5, has room for 150 students, and is expecting to be operating at full capacity soon.