Shrove Tuesday and Public Schools
Sitting in a North End eatery on the weekend, I overheard a conversation between a few parents about the difficulty of deciding on schooling options for their young children. One of the parents was a resident of the neighbourhood, and was very happy with most things about where their family was living, but was frustrated by the school district boundaries and the available educational options. With no children of my own, I tried my best to empathize with their concerns. Getting into a French Immersion program would be ideal, but there weren’t enough spaces. There were issues with backtracking on their commutes to certain schools, adding time and money spent on gas to their budgets. These seemed like matters of practicality, though certainly of a privileged sort. But it was hard to continue to listen with a generous ear when I heard one of them mutter that “the local elementary school is out of the question.”
The local elementary school is Joseph Howe Elementary.
On Shrove Tuesday in 1995, the grade primary classes at the predominantly white and upper-middle-class Sir Charles Tupper Elementary School took a bus to the North End to have pancakes with the much more racially diverse grade primary classes at Joseph Howe Elementary School on Creighton Street. The children there seemed nice, pulling tiny chairs out from tiny classroom tables for us to join them, sharing maple syrup. The teachers were welcoming, and boisterous, in my memory. The walls were colourful, with paintings and student artwork tacked up on bulletin boards. I think we learned some songs, but the words and tunes are long gone.
I wonder if that would happen today. It makes me sad to think that it probably wouldn’t.
I haven’t set foot in Joseph Howe Elementary School for exactly twenty-one years. I don’t know what condition the school is in today, but I do know that the neighbourhood has changed. Rents and property values continue to skyrocket, and in many cases whole blocks have been cleared of their former residents. The black population in the neighbourhood has been declining, dropping by 7% over the course of the five years between 2006 and 2011.
While there are still children attending Joseph Howe, there certainly aren’t as many as there were when I was a kid. Where many families have been priced out of the neighbourhood, others have arrived to take their places. It’s not that there aren’t young children in the North End…it’s that often, their parents are sending them to school in other parts of the city. While the observation is purely anecdotal (I have no more reliable data on this than what I’ve gathered by eavesdropping and paying attention to my own experience), it says a lot about the consequences of “redevelopment” in the North End.
Responding to the fear that the local school in a historically lower-income neighbourhood will disadvantage your child by enrolling them at a private one instead betrays a void where there ought to be a presence. For all of the talk about “community” amongst newcomers to the North End, the inability to identify with one’s neighbours remains a pervasive problem. While that is quite concerning, I’m as concerned with the structural impacts of those choices as I am with the individual moral dimension of the problem. While we can certainly say that exposure to socioeconomic, racial, and cultural diversity makes children more interesting, open-minded, and conscientious adults, diversity strengthens our communities and the institutions within them as well.
What happens to the public institutions of a particular neighbourhood when a generation of better-off children grow up in an enclave, close to but separated from their peers? Interpersonally, children are deprived of the opportunity for encounter with each other. They don’t get the chance to make friends with people whose lives may be fundamentally different from theirs, to learn how to practice empathy across lines of race and class, to have their own view of the world challenged and enriched by difference. Denial of the opportunity for such connections represents a significant loss to our broader community. In terms of structural issues, public schools in neighbourhoods with declining enrolment wind up on the chopping block. Since they receive funding according (among other factors) to the number of pupils enrolled, as enrolment drops, it becomes harder and harder for these schools to offer additional programming and keep consistent teaching staff. When declining student outcomes and enrolment coincide, these community hubs are threatened with closure. The municipality ends up with an empty building, and students and their families end up without a school.
Last spring, I attended a discussion on White Ignorance and Gentrification, hosted by the Radical Imagination Project at the Army Navy Club on Maynard Street. Many of the members of the black community present at the event emphasized the importance of connecting with people who had lived in the North End for a long time, of listening and learning from people with deep roots in the neighbourhood — that being part of the community means sharing more than a postal code. It strikes me as an enormous problem that families who are happy to share in the real estate values in a neighbourhood that seems like a good place to invest are not willing to send their children to local schools. While I hope that the parents I encountered in the midst of their schooling deliberations were not aware of their potential contribution to the loss of an important community hub and the segregation of the next generation, I’m not sure that’s a fair assumption. The less hopeful part of me thinks that young families in the gentrifying North End aren’t just missing the point, but have an intimate understanding of the rules of the game, and are playing to win, community be damned.
In the Christian calendar, Shrove Tuesday is a day of indulgence — Mardi Gras for the last night of eating fatty foods before Lent. Pancakes are a way of using up the butter and bacon so that they won’t go rancid over the course of the next forty days. It is also a day of preparation for the Lenten season — a day when Christians consider what wrongs they need to repent, and the areas of life they must ask for God’s help in amending. Thinking back to the Shrove Tuesday I spent at Joe Howe more than twenty years ago, it strikes me as a small but beautiful celebration of relationship and of difference, bringing children who normally wouldn’t cross paths together to feast on pancakes in the middle of the day. At the same time, there is some darkness in my anecdote: in many ways, that feast helped to gloss over the real power imbalances that divide my community. While that gesture of friendship planted a seed in me, I can see that there is still much to be amended.