Education Action: Toronto's
Online Clearing House


June 18, 2013

The Somali Community Fights Back
Nailing Down the Money for Poor Kids
A School Closing Story
School Governance in Ontario
The Campaign for Commercial Free Schools
Childcare: More than the Sum of its Parts
A Victory Against Standardized Testing
Building Elementary Teacher Activism
Queer Matters
Green School Hubs Revisited

Dear Friends,

As has been evident over the last few years – like so many of our newest citizens – Toronto’s Somali community have found themselves traumatized by the contempt and lack of care they and their children have experienced in the TDSB. This everyday personal humiliation is as damaging as the broader social class and racist structure of streaming now applied to Somali children – the dissociated curriculum, the standardized testing, the official profiling, and the bottom-stream programming with its attendant lack of resources and (where possible) its racial and social class segregation. Over the last few years, it’s evident the Somali community has had enough and are beginning to learn the political landscape of their adopted country.

From the Somali community on Queen’s Plate Drive in Rexdale we have seen remarkable new mobilization for over two years to regain their neighbourhood school after being arbitrarily evicted some 15 years ago and placed in a much more remote, and as they experienced it, segregated school. (See our EA:TO Messages of May 19, 21, June 17, 29 and July 7 from 2010 in the back issues section of our website: www.educationactiontoronto.com In this struggle, community leaders faced an unimaginably contemptuous and opaque Board administration as well as the direct and aggressive hostility of the local trustee. But they persevered. They didn’t win their school back – there was too much slippery legal territory to negotiate with complete success – but they did force the Board into a compromise of a closer and less segregated school. In the process, they not only managed significant and powerful demonstrations at the Board, but they also effectively threatened a serious Human Rights case with one of Toronto’s top human rights lawyers. Most importantly, they gave notice that this community would no longer tolerate the racist past practices of the Board.

Now a much broader representation from the Somali community – over 100 Somali mothers – is before the Board with a set of clear minimal demands to change the situation they and their children now face at the Board. As you can imagine, Board officials aren’t happy with this new militancy, but they are now obliged to pay attention. They are currently busy trying to split the community in various ways while setting up public consultations and advisory structures designed to dampen or bury genuine community voices. These mothers, however, are having none of this bureaucratic maneuvering as the attached deputations to the Board on June 5 – by Anyan Yusuf and Nasteeha Dirie – make clear. Janet Bojti’s article, also attached, provides further context to this Somali struggle.

The issue of the TDSB’s diversion of provincial money allocated (but not sweatered) for disadvantaged children is still front and centre at the Board’s Inner City Advisory Committee (ICAC) and is increasingly getting a major public airing. In his article below, David Clandfield takes us by the hand into the financial belly of the TDSB beast and gives a running account of how he and researchers from Social Planning Toronto nailed down the extent of this redirection of funds – the current rate of diversion, if extended back to 1998, means that “the aggregate amount taken out of poor kids’ education for other Board purposes would be about $1 billion” – and forced Board officials to fess up to it. Don’t miss this account; it doesn’t come often.

There are a least three disturbing aspects of the story David tells: The first is the continuing provincial austerity agenda that results in major underfunding of education paired with a refusal to “sweater” (legally insist) that monies allocated for disadvantaged children get spent on disadvantaged children. The second is the Board’s redirection of these funds away from poor and immigrant kids, rather than insisting that the money be spent as allocated and letting the chips fall on provincial shoulders for the problems experienced elsewhere because of underfunding. The third disturbing aspect of this situation is the extended cover-up by Board bureaucrats when presenting budget figures to the trustees and citizen activists dealing with this issue – a cover-up that has now been revealed publicly.

Following David’s article, you’ll find four documents related to the major underlying issue of provincial underfunding of education. There’s a strong letter by Trustee Chris Glover telling his constituents in Etobicoke Centre why he’ll be voting against the current “balanced” budget at the TDSB, a Toronto Star editorial coming on board with the issue of under-funding poor kids, a fact sheet on the unconscionable rise in Ontario’s university tuition fees, and an analysis of the latest Ontario budget by Hugh Mackenzie and Trish Hennessey – a budget still focused on a destructive austerity agenda. Finally, John Campey from Toronto Social Planning (which is leading the current fight to replace the funds originally earmarked for disadvantaged children) offers you a chance – see below – to sign a petition demanding a return of these funds to their proper recipients. We hope you will sign that petition. While it now appears the TDSB is agreeing to set up a task force to investigate how it spends these allocated funds, it needs all the pressure we can muster to actually do something about it.

Another dimension of this provincial underfunding is the continuing pressure on boards to close local schools and sell them off. It’s a catastrophic policy. It’s directly hurtful to local community building, and, in the long run, it makes no economic sense as new (and expensive) schools will have to be built for a growing school population. And sometimes, as Janet Bojti shows in her article on the closing of Brooks Road P.S., it makes no sense at all; it's just a disaster for everyone concerned. We’ve also added Bill Temperman’s argument from the Sarnia Observer that “falling enrolment does not justify closing schools.”

The ability of the provincial government to impose its austerity agenda on education as well as a hard-edged neo-liberal thrust in curriculum, testing, profiling and streaming demands much more centralized control. Which is what we have in spades these days at the Mowat Block. Viewed generally, this policy of increasing control is experienced as an oppressive set of bureaucratic mechanics that get in the way of a decent education for children. At the local school and board level, it's also experienced as an institutional madhouse, where administrators and teachers are assumed to be mindless implementers of government policy directives. In an article below, Dudley Paul, a former principal at the TDSB, leads us through the history of this centralization – a centralization that takes the view that “qualities deriving from human interaction should be turned into bureaucratic function.” The Ministry, he writes, “seems incapable of trusting that people can be competent, given the checks and balances that have existed in schools and their boards for generations.”

Jayme Turney from the Campaign for Commercial Free Schools has written us to let us know of a new initiative from the campaign, asks all our subscribers to help out wherever we can, and sends along “a draft literature review of the scientific evidence highlighting the negative impacts of advertising on children.” It’s well worth your time to read it.

For the last couple of weeks, we’ve been hearing a lot in the press about a recent study showing that Grade 3 school results didn’t seem to be affected significantly by enrolment in full-day kindergarten. And the big question is: Is this research telling us that full-day kindergarten may not be worth the time and the money? In the article below, Martha Friendly argues that these commentators miss the point. “School readiness” isn’t what good early childhood programs are primarily about; what counts is the full development of the child. And what we need is a seriously integrated childcare system to make sure that happens.

There’s some good news out of Seattle, where, says Democracy Now, “after months of protest, teachers, students and parents have won their campaign to reject standardized tests in reading and math. In January, teachers at Garfield High School began a boycott of the test, saying it was wasteful and being used unfairly to assess their performance. The boycott spread to other schools, with hundreds of teachers, students and parents participating. Last week, the school district backed down, announcing that the Measures of Academic Progress — or MAP test — is now optional for high schools, but those refusing the test must find another way to gauge student performance.” Democracy Now spoke to Jesse Hagopian, a high school history teacher and union representative at Garfield High School, on this struggle. You can reach that interview at Jesse Hagopian. We are also attaching a recent article in the Globe and Mail, which is surprisingly even-handed on this issue of standardized testing. Could it be that the Globe is backing off its previously ferocious support of this kind of testing? And – we might add – does the recent shift in Alberta away from its old focus on standardized test scores suggest some kind of national trend? We live in hope.

We were glad to see Kathleen Wynne give Ontario’s elementary teachers a catch-up raise of 2 per cent in 2014 for the 2 per cent they lost for hanging tough – unfortunately while separated from the rest of the province’s teacher unions – in 2008. The current government generosity is a reflection, of course, of the premier’s desperate need to hold on to her old teacher allies. It also reflects, as ETFO’s president Sam Hammond says, the ongoing impact of elementary teachers’ militancy during the fight against contract imposition through Bill 115. In some schools labour peace has still not been restored, and a lot of bitterness remains in the schools where teachers have resumed their extracurricular activities. Wynne clearly doesn’t want any more serious eruptions from the elementary sector.

The recent elementary teacher raise was more than we imagined (see our April 3, 2013 posting in the back issues section of our website: www.educationactiontoronto.com) and it gives some credence to Hammond’s behind-closed-doors strategy to call off his members’ job actions against the imposition of Bill 115. We still think a more democratic approach would have secured a stronger membership commitment to an activist union. But the carrot of that extra 2% must have been pretty appealing to a president without an obvious exit strategy for a long-drawn out struggle – a struggle that the union was starting to lose on the public opinion front. We remain committed, however, to our view (see the April 3, 2013 posting) that this most recent protest/strike was missing “a coalition of students, parents, teachers and community activists that took on a much broader program of school reform (including fair bargaining practices, but not neglecting curriculum and testing reform and proper funding) and organized politically, starting at the neighbourhood school level.” It’s crucial that our teacher unions move beyond their current focus on wages and working conditions and reach out on a much wider range of educational issues to the communities that surround our schools. This is the point Nigel Barriffe and Maya Bhullar make in the article below in which they call for a new level of elementary teacher political activism on key issues of community involvement that arose during the Bill 115 struggle. Sitting back with a strategy of “strategic voting” in coming elections just won’t do the trick.

For a long time, Rethinking Schools has been writing fine articles on gender and sexuality and on a number of educational issues affecting the LGBTQ community. They’ve now collected a number of these articles, some of them free and some of them available only to subscribers. Below you’ll find the list of these articles. We strongly recommend you subscribe; Rethinking Schools is an extraordinarily valuable classroom teacher magazine.

Last month, we posted an update of Elise Houghton’s “Green School Hubs for a Transition to Sustainability.” Following further research, Elise has added a few details to this piece, and we are attaching her most recent version. For those of you maintaining a file on Green Education, this is the version you should keep. And for those of you who haven’t read it yet, we hope you do; it’s a very solid analysis of the issue combined with very helpful descriptions of good work in the field.

Have a great summer. We’ll be in touch in September.

In solidarity,

George Martell, David Clandfield, Faduma Mohamed, Dudley Paul
Education Action: Toronto Editorial Board


1Elise Houghton’s article was originally in The School as Community Hub: Beyond Education’s Iron Cage, ed. David Clandfield and George Martell, Ottawa, (Our Schools/Our Selves, Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives), Summer 2010.

The Somali Community Fights Back
Our Families are experiencing a Crisis in the Schools

Anyan Yusuf


Good afternoon. Thank you for this opportunity to speak to you today. My name is Ayan Yusuf. I am a community worker. I am a single mother of four children all born in Canada. My two oldest boys are enrolled in postsecondary education. My daughter is in grade 10 at York Memorial Collegiate and my youngest is in grade three. I’ve lived in Canada for twenty-four years.

First I’d like to tell you a story. One day when my second son was fifteen and in grade 10 at Runneymede Collegiate, he was hauled out of his gym class, handcuffed, shoved into a police car and taken to 11 Division. I got a call at work from a detective telling me my son was being held at the station. The school never called me.

I rushed to the police station to learn my son was being fingerprinted and photographed and that the police wanted to ask him some questions. I demanded to see my son and told the police he was not going to tell them anything and that unless they were going to charge him formally they had to release him at once. I waited at the station for hours until finally at five o’clock he was released. No charges were laid.

Click HERE to download and continue reading:
Anyan Yusuf – Our Families are experiencing a Crisis in the Schools

Ten Recommendations for Change
Nateesha Dirie


In May, our organization sent every school trustee a letter stating our misgivings about the Somali Task Force and our own list of 10 actions we would like to see implemented by the TDSB. For those trustees who are telling us they’ve never received this letter, I will reiterate those 10 recommendations. Then I want to tell you why you may have to vote down the budget on June 19th…

… Members of Women for Change have attended several of the public meetings as well as some working meetings held by the TDSB’s Somali Task Force. We are aware we will not see a first report until the fall of 2013. So far we only have our own observations to inform us but as things stand, we are skeptical. TDSB officials have indicated our organization’s participation is not welcome. We’ve observed that TDSB officials prefer talking to us rather than listening to us in public consultation meetings. They also controlled the discussion and meeting format in such a way as to inhibit the parents from expressing themselves freely. These observations, together with our unsuccessful past experience in trying to reach out to the TDSB, make us less than optimistic for an effective outcome for the taskforce. Nevertheless, if there are further opportunities for input, we will be sure to participate…

Click HERE to download and continue reading:
Nateesha Dirie – Ten Recommendations for Change

Somali Moms Get Organized
Janet Bojti


TDSB lookout. Here come the angry moms. They arrived as immigrant children and teens to Canada in the early 1990's. Now they're adults and mothers. They want a better deal from the public school system for their kids than they got themselves.

In the words of a parent attending a TDSB Somali taskforce meeting in Lawrence Heights, "When I was in grade 8, I was pushed toward applied courses. My English held me back because I'd only been in Canada three years. I was a top student in Saudi Arabia, but here my teachers told me, 'No, you should go to community college and be happy with a pass.' I'll be very sure this doesn't happen to my child."

Click HERE to download and continue reading:
Janet Bojti – Somali Moms Get Organized

Nailing Down the Money for Poor Kids
David Clandfield


… Everything depends on what is meant by “considerable latitude.” It is a politician’s dream at both the provincial and local levels. The Ministry can say we are generously funding the education of disadvantaged children. But the money goes into general revenues for the Boards, who can say in turn that they can spend it on anything they like. It is what is called an “unsweatered” grant. So Boards feel free to use it to balance the budget for programs and services that affect all board schools regardless of privilege or disadvantage: topping up teachers’ salaries (?), heating costs (?), additional vice-principals (?), extra transportation costs for French immersion programs or gifted classes (?), and so on. Since there is no accounting needed for the spending of these funds, it could be anything. Indeed, a brief internet search will soon produce evidence that the LOG is considered by school board officials as their flexibility money. The provincial advocacy group People For Education has also pointed out this tendency in their Annual Reports of the last two years, and it is well documented by Hugh Mackenzie of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives in his paper No Time for Complacency (November 2009)…

Click HERE to download and continue reading:
David Clandfield – Nailing Down the Money for Poor Kids

Why I must vote against the Budget
Chris Glover


Dear Etobicoke Centre Constituents:

I was elected to serve as TDSB Trustee in October 2010. I am honoured by the people who elected me, and I made a firm commitment to uphold and maintain the integrity of a system that would ensure success for all students. Now, I am writing to explain the dilemma I face as your Trustee.

As you’ve probably seen in the media, the TDSB is facing a $55 million funding shortfall in its operating budget this year. This comes after a $110 million shortfall last year, and a $55 million shortfall the year before that. Over the past two years, the Board of Trustees has cut almost 1500 staff positions (about 4% of our staff). About one half of these cuts can be explained as having some relation to declining enrolment. The rest are due to additional funding shortfalls from the provincial government, largely due to full-day kindergarten.

The board is running out of places to cut. To balance the budget this year, the recommendation from the senior staff and provincial advisors at the board include cutting itinerant music instructors, reducing school budgets (textbooks, computers, sports teams), and information technology…

Click HERE to download and continue reading:
Chris Glover – Why I Must Vote Against The Budget

Disadvantaged kids are being short-changed in Toronto Schools
Toronto Star Editorial


Money for disadvantaged kids is being raided by Toronto public schools to balance their books — but that isn’t the worst scandal. Even more outrageous is that this is considered business as usual in Ontario’s education sector.

It’s been going on for years. There’s nothing illegal about it. Indeed, Ministry of Education officials help make it happen through the loose way they structure assistance for students facing “demographic” barriers, especially poverty.

Click HERE to download and continue reading:
Toronto Star Editorial – Poor Kids are being short-changed in Toronto Schools

Ontario Tuition Factsheet
CCPA Ontario


Not your parents’ education.

Students go to university on a promise: Get an education and the jobs will come.

That worked for many students’ parents, but something shifted. The cost of university went up. Secure jobs are harder to find. The average student debt load is much higher than it was a generation ago. University should broaden students’ options, not limit them. Ontario is falling short on that promise.

Click HERE to download and continue reading:
CCPA Ontario – Ontario Tuition Factsheet

Ontario Budget 2013: Four More Years of Austerity
Hugh Mackenzie and Trish Hennessey


All budgets are political in nature, but Ontario’s 2013 budget – tabled by a minority government with a new leader – stands out as a case in point: it is carefully designed to survive a non-confidence vote.

It extends a few olive branches to the opposition NDP. A promise to reduce auto insurance premiums by 15%. Increases in spending on home care, youth unemployment and infrastructure in rural areas and the north. Restructuring the Employer Health Tax to claw back the small business reduction from large corporations.

It hugs the curvature of tax cuts and low public spending enough to counter opposition Conservative complaints.

It takes baby steps on several files, such as social assistance, poverty reduction, and movement toward a solution to Toronto’s gridlock woes.

And its tone is a kinder, gentler version of the last budget Dalton McGuinty tabled a year ago, which launched Ontario into a year of austerity battles with labour.

But, in substance, Budget 2013 doesn’t shift from the agenda its predecessor set in 2012: Ontario’s government is still waging austerity, it continues to drag its feet on poverty reduction, it tinkers at the margins of the Lankin-Sheikh social assistance review, and as for economic growth, it continues to rely on the good people of Ontario to drive GDP with whatever money’s left burning in their wallets.

Click HERE to download and continue reading:
Mackenzie and Hennessey – Ontario Budget 2013

Sign the Petition for Poor Kids
A Letter from John Campey


Dear Friends,

I’m writing to ask you to lend your voice – where it can make a real difference – to help Toronto’s neediest students. This is an issue that has been a compelling issue for me for many years, and I would personally appreciate your support.

Social Planning Toronto has been leading a campaign to get the Toronto District School Board to direct the funds it receives to support students in need to actually use the money to do that, rather than filling the gaps in its budget. Right now, some of this money is used to buy computers and other resources for the richest schools in the system! This funding is touted by the Province as part of their Poverty Reduction Strategy.

Please take one minute to sign the petition, and another minute to forward it to friends and colleagues. The link is http://togethertoronto.ca/campaigns/education.

Attached find a one-pager highlighting this issue, and asking people to sign our TogetherToronto.ca letters to local Trustees. The Board votes on their budget on June 19, so timing is tight!

Click HERE to download and continue reading:
John Campey – Sign the Petition for Poor Kids

Brooks Road P.S.: A School Closing Story
Janet Bojti


Brooks Road. P.S., empty for nearly a year, is posted as a property for sale on the Toronto Lands Corporation website. It was a sacrificial lamb in the rash of Accommodation Reviews in 2009-2010 in Toronto. That year saw the closing of 9 schools which brought the Toronto District School Board’s total to 12 school closures in two years- 8 of them in Scarborough.

The majority of school closings had taken place in low-income, high-needs communities. Brooks Rd. P.S., however, was located in a middle-income neighbourhood and number 239 on the Learning Opportunities Index. That put its community’s rating a little above the midway mark - neither rich nor poor.

This school closing was bitterly contested by the community…

Click HERE to download and continue reading:
Janet Bojti – Brooks Road P.S.: A School Closing Story

Falling Enrolment does not justify closing Schools
Bill Templeman


Across Canada public school enrollment is dropping.

This scenario is playing out across the country…

For education planners and school boards, this means excess capacity and an opportunity to build more efficient alternatives. The conventional wisdom is to close half-empty schools.

The preferred code words for "school closure" are "school consolidation." Small neighbourhood schools with falling enrollment are being closed with their students being bused to much larger consolidated schools. Busing kids to school is seen as a worthwhile trade-off in order to provide more modern facilities that can offer a larger range of courses.

School consolidation is assumed to be a way of creating greater efficiencies while providing enhanced opportunities for students. Both these assumptions are wrong. Closing schools doesn't save money and the resulting large, bus-fed schools produce inferior academic and behavioural outcomes. Researchers in the U.S. have shown that the cost savings touted by proponents of school consolidation rarely materialize once the small neighbourhood schools are closed.

Click HERE to download and continue reading:
Bill Templeman – Falling Enrolment does not justify closing Schools

School Governance in Ontario
Dudley Paul


… I think this is the fundamental problem of the thinking behind governance in Ontario these days. It’s the idea that qualities deriving from human interaction should be turned into a bureaucratic function. The Ministry seems incapable of trusting that people can be competent, given checks and balances that have existed in schools and their boards for generations. It is as though someone woke up one day and said: “Oh my God they’re all doing something different. They have different report cards, different hiring practices, different curriculum priorities, different kinds of trustees, different methods of supervising teachers. This is out of control! The world (this is before the financial meltdown) demands something clear and predictable. We have to do something right away.”…

Click HERE to download and continue reading:
Dudley Paul – School Governance in Ontario

The Campaign for Commercial Free Schools
Jayme Turney


Attached is a draft literature review of the scientific evidence highlighting the negative impacts of advertising on children. It includes a scan of regulations in Toronto and elsewhere. A quick read (12 pages of content).

... Also, if your group or anyone in it wants to make recommendations to Trustees about the new advertising policies, I recommend a total ban on advertising - or failing that - I recommend a) a ban on junk/fast food advertising, and b) that the new policy maintain an element of the old policy that gave School Councils authority to narrow/ban advertising in their local school if they deemed it necessary. The new recommendations seek to take away this authority, and instead leave it up to the principal. I am also attaching a document that explaining that and what you can do about it.

Click HERE to download and continue reading:
Jayme Turney – The Campaign for Commercial Free Schools

Full-Day Kindergarten – More than the Sum of its Parts
Martha Friendly


A few weeks ago, a study of Ontario kindergarten children’s “school readiness” was in the news. It was no surprise that some commentators immediately linked the study to the new full-day kindergarten program (even though the study pre-dated its introduction), to challenge it even before its full roll-out. Some concluded that—as the study didn’t find that how all children “scored” in part-day kindergarten predicted how well they achieved in grade three—there wasn’t much point moving from part-day to full-day kindergarten after all. In my view, these are narrow and ethnocentric conceptions that fail to consider how full-day kindergarten can fit into a broad early childhood education and care program. They also fail to take account of the reality that full-day kindergarten-like programs are well entrenched and well understood in many countries.

Click HERE to download and continue reading:
Martha Friendly – Full-Day Kindergarten: More than the Sum of its Parts

The Debate over Standardized Testing in Schools is as divisive as ever
Rachel Giese and Caroline Alphonso


… the nature of standardized testing – a constant concern to teachers and parents across the country, as well the youngsters put under the microscope – is in dispute to such a degree that at least one province is having second thoughts.

Last month, Alberta announced that next year it will begin to phase out its renowned Provincial Achievement Tests (PATs), one of the older and more comprehensive of the exams conducted in Canada.

The move by the nation’s top performer in international rankings has reignited the national debate over standardized testing, which critics accuse of encouraging rote learning and forcing teachers to tailor their efforts “to the test.” In response, supporters argue that there is no better way to ensure that schools perform properly and the education system remains accountable.

Parents are caught in the middle, trying to weigh their children’s angst (and often that of teachers) against a natural curiosity to know just how well schools stack up against each other – an exercise that has caused problems in the United States and Britain, even as it provides real-estate agents with a valuable sales tool…

Click HERE to download and continue reading:
Giese and Alphonso – The Debate over Standardized Testing

Building on the Bill 115 Struggle
Nigel Barriffe and Maya Bhullar


Putting it simply, ETFO Election Readiness should mean Teacher activation. We have to build on what we fought for in the Bill 115 struggle.

During the mobilization around Bill 115, we met many teachers who had never been to a political rally. If we make our new messaging about 'strategic voting', in the aftermath of the Bill 115 mobilization, our biggest danger is disengagement of members from politics since neither the NDP nor the Liberals took a position that was unequivocally supportive of our position. Asking our members just to turn out and work for one of these parties won’t take us far and won’t get much member support. In order to turn out our members, and to beat Hudak, we must continue the momentum gained by our issue activism. Fortunately, it is likely that we have at least one year before a provincial election. Therefore, we have time to build.

Click HERE to download and continue reading:
Barriffe and Bhullar – Building on the Bill 115 Struggle

"Queer Matters" and other free LGBTQ resources
From Rethinking Schools


Dear Friend of Rethinking Schools:

June is Gay and Lesbian Pride month.

At Rethinking Schools, we've been writing about gender and sexuality for a long time, including issues affecting the LGBTQ community.

We're pleased to highlight these articles that have graced the pages of our magazine over the years. We hope you continue to find wisdom, insight, and of course great teaching ideas from these pieces…

Click HERE to download and continue reading:
Rethinking Schools – "Queer Matters" and other free LGBTQ resources

Green School Hubs Revisited
Elise Houghton


With even a brief look into our environmental predicament we find scientists, environmentalists and social commentators describing our record-size human population’s ‘ecological footprint’ on the planet as nothing short of a crisis. How then, it would seem timely to ask, can schools contribute to involving kids in creative environmental problem solving?

In this article we will explore how local schools can – and indeed already do – play an emerging role in the transition to a healthy, sustainable future. We will highlight some of the many ways that schools – teachers, students and staff – are interacting with parents, community members, organizations and local culture to create “green community hubs.” Through the introduction of environmental programs, projects – and more recently, more extensive partnership-based initiatives – schools are demonstrating their unique capacity to provide hands-on learning, new kinds of community interaction, and models of environmentally sustainable practice.

Click HERE to download and continue reading:
Elise Houghton – Green School Hubs for a Transition to Sustainability

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