Sanchayan Sivanathan lives in a ward without French immersion and rather than bussing his children to a school offering the program, he is having them tutoured at his home in Scarborough, Ont.J.P. MOCZULSKI/THE GLOBE AND MAIL
If Sanchayan Sivanathan wanted to send his two children to an English elementary school, he’d only have to worry about a short 10-minute walk from his home. If he wanted to send them to a French immersion program, it would only be accessible after a 30-minute bus ride from his home in the northeast corner of Toronto.
“Some communities are privileged, and some aren’t,” he said, a sense of frustration in his voice. “It’s a real disparity, to be frank with you.”
In an attempt to equitably distribute programming, his school board plans to open four new French-immersion sites in underserved areas next fall.
But there are lingering questions about whether that is enough in the Toronto District School Board to serve racialized children and newcomer families, who are often overlooked when it comes to French programming. Instead, some parents and school-board trustees are calling on the board to redistribute French-immersion locations – now concentrated in more-affluent neighbourhoods – using existing resources so that it could serve a broader group of students.
What that amounts to for Canada’s largest school board is the challenge of balancing demand in certain areas of the city with cultivating opportunities for marginalized communities.
French immersion, like other specialized programs, has a higher proportion of students who are white, who are born in Canada and are from higher socioeconomic backgrounds. At the TDSB, almost half of French-immersion students are white, whereas 29 per cent of all students at the board identified as white, according to the most recent data from 2019.
In TDSB elementary schools, more than 60 per cent of students in French immersion are from higher-income families, and around 83 per cent of students in the program have parents with a university-level education. Further, an October, 2018, French-program review found that roughly 10 per cent of students in immersion are born outside of Canada.
Colleen Russell-Rawlins, the board’s director, told trustees at a meeting in November that while the four new sites are a first step in addressing the barriers that some students faced, she would bring forward a plan early in the new year with strategies on how to achieve equity and access for underserved communities.
A report on the new French-immersion sites that was presented to the board, “paints a picture of where we are right now,” she said, “but not where I want to be a year from now.”
Ms. Russell-Rawlins did not make herself available for an interview with The Globe and Mail despite ongoing requests.
In many parts of the country, French is taught in a variety of ways in school, including French immersion and core French, in which students learn the language as a subject. The program has grown in popularity over the years among families who want to give their children fluency in a second language. The enrolment surge has also left school districts across Canada struggling to reconfigure classrooms and find qualified French-language teachers.
At the TDSB, two of the new sites are in Scarborough, and another is in York-South Weston. The fourth site will be at Fraser Mustard Early Learning Academy, a kindergarten school in Thorncliffe Park, a community that serves as a landing pad for immigrant families. (The TDSB is also changing the way it delivers French programming. Early immersion will begin in junior kindergarten, not senior kindergarten. Students can also enroll in French immersion in Grade 4.)
Parthi Kandavel, a school-board trustee, who represents a ward in Scarborough, criticized how the program expanded over the past few years in certain areas of the city only. A couple of French-immersion programs in Scarborough have as many as 14 elementary schools feeding students into them. This is compared with more-affluent areas of the city, where a French-immersion program takes in students from one or two surrounding elementary schools.
He has spoken with families in his ward who wanted to expose their young children to another language but were uncomfortable having them spend up to an hour on the school bus each day. Mr. Sivanathan’s children, who are 8 and 6, are privately tutored in French because he wanted them to be fluent in the language. He was born in Sri Lanka and grew up in Africa. In his Scarborough community, he said, there is an “appetite” from French programs.
“A beneficial program shouldn’t be predicated on your postal code,” said Mr. Kandavel, who has stressed in board meetings that redistribution of French-immersion sites was promised by a previous director and should be considered.
“We need to gradually move to reconcile the various geographical tensions in our city. This is one of them. We need to be cognizant … that there is inequity in our schooling and this is a big one.”
Lynne LeBlanc, a parent co-chair of the board’s French as a Second Language Community Advisory Committee, said she and others on the committee have grappled with how to improve accessibility in certain areas of the city. It’s not as simple as picking up a program at one school and moving the teachers, supports and students to another part of the city.
“Don’t get me wrong, there’s certainly areas that can be improved,” she said. “I think it’s just where do we start, and what can we do?”
For Ms. LeBlanc, expansion of French-immersion sites is a step forward in making the program more accessible to families in different communities.
Gillian Parekh, an associate professor in the faculty of education at York University, said the challenge of how to redistribute programs, such as French immersion, and serve different communities has been raised frequently among colleagues.
“We know school or program choice creates a stratification of opportunity for students. We also know that school or program choice is connected to larger structural issues, such as academic streaming, but we’re not sure how to address this,” Dr. Parekh said.
She said that while putting programs in certain communities was important, there should also be a commitment to eliminate the notion of who belongs in the program, because “there will always be communities of students who face exclusion,” even if the program were in their neighbourhood.
In the Thorncliffe Park neighbourhood, Nosheen Khan, the vice-chair of the parent council at the Fraser Mustard school, said that the board should reach out to families, many of whom are newcomers nervous about their children learning French before being fluent in English.
Ms. Khan has twins attending the school, a short walk from her home. Her older children have taken the school bus to French-immersion programs outside her community.
She was always interested in her children learning French, and her experience has been that the younger they are, the easier it is for them to grasp the language. Over time, she believes that parents will enroll their children if the program is in the community. They always hesitated at the thought of putting their five-year-olds on a bus.
“I wish they [the TDSB] had done it a long time ago. I wish they had done it years ago,” Ms. Khan said.
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