Sharon Hirshenhorn, Bruce Elliot and Brian Sambourne comment on the fall of enrolment at Midland Avenue Collegiate Institute in the 80s and 90s. Solutions were possible but the news of the closing put an end to all alternatives.
00:00Finally, I talked with some teachers of the final decade, who gave me yet a different
00:13perspective. Sharon Hershenhorn invited me to her house on East Queen. And then, through
00:19Brian Sanborn, teacher-librarian, and Sassikaran Loganathan, both of whom were at David and
00:25Mary Thompson Collegiate, I was able to film a discussion that included Bruce Elliott,
00:29another Midland transfer to Thompson.
00:31Bruce Elliott, I was a business studies teacher at Midland. I was there from 1990 to the closing,
00:40and now I'm teaching here at David and Mary Thompson. Well, I was there, I guess, a total
00:45of about eight or nine years. I took a little bit of a trip in the middle of it and went
00:54to Mowat in an acting position. And then it was my choice, and I came back to Midland.
01:01After that, it was enjoyable. It was almost like a family. I got to know, of course, the
01:06staff very well, staying there for nine years. You get to know the core staff. We had a lot
01:11of people come in and out during that period, but it was a very solid group of people. And,
01:15of course, they had a strong dedication to the students and to the community that they
01:20were part of. You would walk through the community, as I did every day, and you'd always greet
01:27people. They'd say hello. They'd ask you how the school was. A lot of new Canadians. A
01:32lot of people, we had a very good ESL program that allowed a lot of new Canadians to integrate
01:39into the school. And I remember many instances where I had students who came in at maybe grade
01:47nine or grade ten with very little language ability. And by the time they finished at Midland,
01:53they were ready to go to university. And not only ready, they were ahead of many people
01:57because many of them had received higher-level scholarships from U of T, York, and offers from
02:03other universities around the province. I think when you make that kind of a progress in
02:08such a short time, it shows that, first, you have the energy, and secondly, you have the
02:13support necessary to do the job. And I see that Midland was very good at that. They did
02:20a good job of encouraging people to aspire to their abilities and to their objectives and
02:28goals. And that was one of the real strengths, is that it was a stepping up institution. It
02:34allowed a lot of people to move from where they were when they came into the country so
02:39that they were ready to enter mainstream society and education by the time they got through it.
02:44My name is Sharon Hershenhorn, and I was a teacher and head of Modern Languages at Midland
02:49Avenue Collegiate between 1990 and the year 2000 when the school closed. I'd been a teacher
02:56for about 27 years, 19 of those years in the former Scarborough Board of Education, which
03:04was then amalgamated into the Toronto District School Board. When I came to Midland in September
03:111990, it was my very first promotion. I became a head of department at Midland Avenue Collegiate,
03:16so I was very excited to be there. It really was an exciting time for the school and for
03:23me professionally. I made a lot of wonderful friends. I could not believe the students there.
03:29A very small school, even when I first arrived, always under a thousand. We had adults. We had
03:36special needs students. We had a lot of English as second language students. Many, many different
03:42nationalities, many different languages, both in the classroom and in the hallways. The students
03:48seemed to function as their own peer helpers. So if there were two students in my class from
03:53Afghanistan, they would make sure that they sat together and they would help each other. I taught
03:58a beginner's French program there and I learned a lot about the students and their former countries
04:05and why they came to Canada. And this was all sort of subliminal to teaching them French. I was learning,
04:12they were learning about French, they were learning about Canadian culture and I was in turn learning
04:17learning about them as people as recent immigrants to Canada, as new students at Midland, how they were trying to acclimatize themselves to their new country, how they were learning about French as the second founding culture of Canada, their new adoptive country. We had two citizenship courts run right in the school, in the auditorium, where students who had been studying, um, and
04:44civics actually took the oath to become Canadian citizens. And those ceremonies were opened up to Midland staff. And although I was born and raised in Canada, I retook my oath and staff members at Midland. When I came there, my colleague said, are you sure you really want to go to Midland? It's a really bad school. And I said, what do you mean by bad school?
05:10It's a really bad school. Very violent school. Really, really bad kids go there. And I found it to be exactly the opposite. Kids were, quote, normal, what I would have expected at any high school, anywhere, in any of the city schools. It was an inner city school, but there was no more violence than I had been exposed to at any other school that I taught at. And prior to coming to Midland, I taught at
05:39in the school school school school for other collegiate, four other collegiate in the former Scarborough Board. It's no different.
05:45We had planned as a committee, before school closure was even an idea, I think, to, um, draw students to us by our international focus. We had considered, uh, international baccalaureate.
05:59baccalaureate and I was part of the team that went out to do some research on
06:04schools which were schools in Ontario not just Toronto but in Ontario that
06:08were offering the IB program and Midland was well along in the process we had
06:13written our proposal we had gone to the community we had gone to the board
06:16former Scarborough board but at that time the guillotine dropped and we were
06:23on the closure list of 138 schools and this was 98 yeah everybody backed off we
06:30had received approval from the IB committee to proceed with our
06:35application the United Nations had granted us its flag and they've only
06:41done that I think twice before in North America and we flew that flag very
06:46proudly on our on our flagpole out front of the school I had received verbal
06:53confirmation from Glendon Glendon College which offers programs in French and
06:58in Spanish at the university level they had expressed interest in our IB
07:03proposal and it said they would love to offer programs at Midland which would
07:07grant our students advanced placement when they eventually got to Glendon I
07:11know there were other initiatives in the work but those are the ones that I can
07:15speak about from personal experience I felt the future was bright for Midland I
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