The competition for CSL’s students

The Montreal Gazette – By Janet Bagnall, Gazette education reporter May 20, 2013 6:06 PM

MONTREAL — The EMSB plans to open a public high school in a city that has been without one since Wagar school closed in 2005

It was standing-room-only at this month’s inaugural meeting for students, and their parents, interested in attending Wallenberg Academy — a hauntingly named Côte-St-Luc public high school that for now exists only on PowerPoint.

The future school has been named after Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, who saved as many as 100,000 Hungarian Jews during the Second World War and who was last seen at Moscow’s notorious Lubyanka prison.

Mona Weinstock, mother of four children — 16-year-old twin boys, their 12-year-old brother and a 7-year-old daughter — was at the May 8 meeting to learn more about what kind of new high school the English Montreal School Board intends to offer families in or near Côte-St-Luc, a predominantly Jewish borough.

So far, the Weinstock children have attended school at JPPS (Jewish Peoples and Peretz School) and, in the public system, Royal West Academy, Westmount High School and Edinburgh and Elizabeth Ballantyne elementary schools.

Looking around at the crowd of about 200 people, Weinstock said, “I see a lot of parents here whose kids are in the Jewish private system.”

Weinstock would like an option that is close to home; she’d like there to be Jewish heritage content; and she wants a public school. With four children, the fees involved in a private education impose too high a financial burden, she said. She also thinks her children would be better prepared for life in Quebec with more emphasis on French and less on Yiddish or Hebrew.

“If Bill 14 passes, there’ll be more and more French proficiency exams,” she said. “You have to keep up.” Bill 14, a proposed law brought in by the Parti Québécois government to increase the presence of French in school and in the workplace, would bring in mandatory French proficiency tests for high school and CEGEP students.

In this one, small, mid-week meeting, you could see the forces buffeting Quebec’s schools, public and private, with or without religious or cultural content. Public boards like the EMSB have been struggling to retain or even add to their student population. In 2011, of the board’s 1,727 Grade 6 graduates, 235 left for the private system; in 2012, the figures were 1,684 and 261. (This is on par with an overall shift from public to private at the secondary level in the province: More than 125,000 students go to private school across Quebec, with 6.7 per cent of elementary school students attending private school, and 19.6 per cent doing so at the secondary level.

With the proposed creation of Wallenberg Academy, the EMSB is taking steps to get some of those students back. But the question is whether there are enough families like the Weinstocks to bring the Wallenberg Academy to life in 2014. EMSB officials told the May 8 meeting that a minimum of 60 students must sign up for Grade 7 to get the school underway, and they’d prefer 100.

Demographic change enters into the equation. According to Jack Jedwab, executive director of the Association for Canadian Studies, Montreal’s Jewish population decreased by about 5,500 between 2001 and 2011, from 88,765 to 83,200. There was a drop of about 1,000 in the 14-and-under age group, down to 16,055. Within that age group, 3,585 youngsters claimed Yiddish as their mother tongue, suggesting, said Jedwab, that this is a group likely to be interested only in Orthodox Jewish schooling, not schools in the public school system.

Côte-St-Luc, home to a sizable English-speaking Jewish population, is also becoming more francophone, said Mordechai Antal, president of the Federation of Teachers of Jewish Schools.

“The Jewish system is no different from the English system overall,” he said. “The population of kids who are eligible for English education has declined and within the Jewish school system, because of immigration, the population has also shifted from English to French with French Jewish day schools seeing increases in enrolment.”

There has not been a public high school in Côte-St-Luc since 2005 when Wagar High School closed, a victim of declining enrolment. But at the May 8 meeting, board officials, including former Wagar principal and current EMSB school commissioner Syd Wise, told parents they believe the support is there for a new public school. The new school would condense the regular province-wide curriculum to allow most of the afternoon free to pursue sports, heritage or music concentrations. Which sports and what heritage would be determined by the students who sign up for Grade 7.

The May 8 meeting was just the latest in a series of temperature-takings since 2005 in which the EMSB has held out the prospect of restarting Wagar High School. EMSB’s gamble may rely, to some extent, on the troubles of Bialik High School, the board’s closest competitor for Côte St-Luc students. Bialik, a nearby private school, has been experiencing a decline in enrolment, was in merger talks two years ago with United Talmud Torahs/Herzliah High School. The talks led nowhere.

Glenn Nashen, a municipal councillor with Côte-St-Luc whose three children attend private Jewish schools, defended Bialik’s viability.

“JPPS-Bialik is a community Jewish school,” he said. As for a decline in enrolment, Nashen said, “It’s cyclical. In (Bialik’s) heyday, there were four streams (classes per grade level), now there are two and in a couple of years when my son reaches Grade 1, there may be just one, but that was the same as when I started.”

Nashen added, “They’re doing their best to make it economically accessible and they’re offering an advanced French program.”

jbagnall@montrealgazette.com

Twitter: @JanetBagnall

© Copyright (c) The Montreal Gazette

Read more: http://www.montrealgazette.com/life/competition+C%c3%b4te+students/8410269/story.html#ixzz2TsRcVdnk

Watch more on Global News: Côte Saint-Luc School | Global News Video.

Richler or Layton for CSL high school’s name?

Canadian Jewish News

Janice Arnold, Staff Reporter, November 29, 2012

 

MONTREAL — A literary battle of sorts between those in favour of naming a proposed new high school in Côte St. Luc after Mordecai Richler and those stumping for Irving Layton has taken on unexpected intensity.

 

The name-calling erupted after the English Montreal School Board (EMSB) launched a public contest to name the former Wagar High School, which it hopes to reopen for the 2014-2015 academic year.

 

The EMSB suggests Côte St. Luc Parkhaven (the street the school is on), Wallenberg, after the Swedish diplomat credited with saving tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews during the Holocaust, or going back to Wagar.

 

However, www.NameTheSchool.com allows for other suggestions, and Beverly Akerman, a research scientist, author and mother, fired the first shot by making a case for Mordecai Richler, who died in 2001.

 

Layton’s oldest son, Max Layton, who lives in Ontario, is dead-set against this, and wants the school named for his father.

 

The naming contest closes on Nov. 30.

 

Akerman, who thinks Richler was “the greatest English Montreal writer of the 20th century,” is running a campaign on Facebook. Notables who agree with her include Gazette cartoonist and Richler friend Terry Mosher (Aislin), Richler biographer Michael Posner of Toronto, and Mordecai’s cousin, Howard Richler.

 

Max Layton, a retired high school teacher, pointed out to The CJN: “Our family lived in Côte St. Luc throughout the 1950s and into the 1960s. It was during this time that Dad wrote many of the signature poems for which he later became famous.”

 

Montreal writer Glen Rotchin, winner of two Canadian Jewish Book Awards, is in the Layton camp.

 

Max Layton continued: “In fact, some of these poems specifically refer to Côte St. Luc, and it is at our little house, at 8035 Kildare Rd., that poets such as Dylan Thomas, Al Purdy, Milton Acorn and Leonard Cohen often met.

 

“Mordecai Richler had nothing to do with these gatherings or with Côte St. Luc.”

 

Max Layton suggests that Richler would be more suitably memorialized by naming something for him in the St. Urbain Street area, which he made famous.

 

“Naming a high school in Côte St. Luc for Mordecai Richler would be as completely inappropriate as naming a high school in the St. Urbain area for Irving Layton.”

 

After much public discussion, the City of Montreal last year, on the 10th anniversary of his death, decided to renovate and rename the gazebo on Mount Royal for Richler, a project that has yet to get underway.

 

The elder Layton, who died in 2006, also spent his final years in Côte St. Luc as a resident of Maimonides Geriatric Centre. The city already commemorated him. In 2007, Côte St. Luc named a street in a new development Irving Layton Avenue.

 

One EMSB commissioner, Julien Feldman, has proposed that the Bancroft campus on St. Urbain Street, near the former Baron Byng High School, be renamed for Richler. It currently houses both Bancroft Elementary and MIND High School, and enrolment is growing because of the influx of young people into the Plateau.

 

The Côte St. Luc EMSB campus is currently called the Giovanni Palatucci Facility for an Italian policemen who rescued Jews during World War II. It houses John Grant High School for children with special needs, Marymount Adult Education Centre and the EMSB’s book processing centre.

 

Whether there ever will be a mainstream EMSB high school in Côte St. Luc again still remains to be seen.

 

Two years ago, the board failed to garner much parental support for the project, despite having the backing of the city of Côte St. Luc, which is eager to attract young families.

 

Among its special features would be Jewish and possibly other heritage programs, as well as a sports concentration and enriched science curriculum.

 

Wagar High School, whose enrolment was at one time solidly Jewish, closed in 2005. In addition to the general decline in the anglophone population, the trend toward private education was cited as a major factor in its demise.

 

The EMSB plans to hold a public information meeting next spring for parents. The high school would only open if a “critical mass” of students register by that fall.

Related articles

• Mordecai Richler High School in Cote St. Luc? Help “make it so!” (beverlyakerman.blogspot.com)
• EMSB hopes new Côte St. Luc high school will slow exodus (gjnashen.wordpress.com)
• Mordecai Richler School in the Plateau? (beverlyakerman.blogspot.com)
• EMSB conducts survey to rename Wagar High (cbc.ca)
• Name the School (gjnashen.wordpress.com)

 

Marking Raoul Wallenberg Centennial

The Consulate General of the State of Israel, in conjunction with the Montreal Holocaust Memorial Centre, the Riva and Thomas O. Hecht Scholarship Program, Teaching of the Holocaust for Educators, the City of Côte Saint-Luc, the English Montreal School Board and the Office of Mount Royal Liberal Member of Parliament Irwin Cotler,will announce plans to mark the centennial of the birth of Raoul Wallenberg. This will take place on Friday, May 11 at Bialik High School (6500 Kildare Road) in Côte Saint-Luc and include some distinguished speakers.

Raoul Wallenberg was the Swedish diplomat who saved the lives of tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews during the Holocaust. While serving as Swedish envoy in the Hungarian capital, Budapest, from July 1944, Wallenberg gave Jews Swedish travel documents and set up safe houses for them. He is also credited with dissuading German officers from massacring the 70,000 inhabitants of the city’s ghetto.

Ron Meisel, a Holocaust survivor who was among the Jews saved by Wallenberg, will be in attendance. His video testimonial will be shown on the big screen.

The Nazis, who occupied Hungary in early 1944, launched mass deportations of Hungarian Jews to concentration camps such as Auschwitz with the collaboration of local authorities. Wallenberg disappeared after being arrested in Hungary by the Soviet Red Army in 1945. The Russians have said he was executed on July 17, 1947, but unverified witness accounts and newly uncovered evidence suggest he may have lived beyond that date.

Israel Consul General for Quebec and the Atlantic Provinces, Joel Lion, will formally announce plans for a Raoul Wallenberg Legacy Competition Project. Students from Bialik will be joined in the audience by their counterparts from a number of other local schools, including Marymount Academy in N.D.G., LaurenHill Academy in St. Laurent and Westmount High School.

Plans call for this to be an interactive project in which students from Montreal area high schools will seek to explain to their fellow peers in a three to four minute video how Raoul Wallenberg’s legacy and message is still relevant in their own lifetime. Students will have complete access to video files from different Holocaust-related websites.

Winners of the competition will receive a special certificate and be honoured at a breakfast hosted by the Consul General of Israel in December 2012 followed by a visit to the Montreal Holocaust Museum. All of the videos will be posted on the EMSB Vimeo site and made available to school teachers as resource teachers.

The legacy of Raoul Wallenberg will also be marked by the Montreal Holocaust Memorial Centre during their Holocaust Education Series next fall. On May 23 (5:30 p.m.) the Raoul Wallenberg Foundation of Montreal will hold a commemoration at the Monument at Raoul Wallenberg Square (600 de Maisonneuve).

The EMSB will work with The Riva and Thomas O. Hecht Scholarship Program, Teaching of the Holocaust for Educators, to solicit participation from English and French public and private schools in the Montreal area. Each year the The Riva and Thomas O. Hecht Scholarship Program, Teaching of the Holocaust for Educators, sponsors teachers to attend a Summer Session of the International Seminar for Educators at Yad Vashem. Past winners represent a natural connection to bring the Wallenberg story into the classrooms.

Côte Saint-Luc Mayor Anthony Housefather, working with City Councillors Mike Cohen and Allan J. Levine, proposed a local launch of the Wallenberg commemoration in their city for a number of reasons. First and foremost, Côte Saint-Luc is the home to a large Jewish community per capita in the world. As well, Wallenberg was inducted to the city’s Human Rights Walkway at Pierre Elliott Trudeau Park a number of years ago.

Speakers will include Consul General Lion, Côte Saint-Luc Mayor Housefather, Professor Irwin Cotler, Liberal MNA for D’Arcy McGee MNA Lawrence Bergman, EMSB Commissioner Syd Wise, Thomas O. Hecht, Bialik Principal Ken Scott and students Allix Caron and Tori Perlman. Peter Rona from the Raoul Wallenberg Foundation will also be on hand.