3 Priority Schools

Paul Bennett (2018) notes in his article, Stark inequalities: High performing and struggling schools in Halifax that twenty of the Halifax area’s 95 elementary schools were identified in 2014 by superintendent Elwin LeRoux and senior staff as priority schools, where students ‘consistently perform below provincial standards” in literacy and mathematics. The response to these results, which are consistent over multiple reporting periods, has been to provide enhanced learning resources and supports in literacy and numeracy, aimed at closing the achievement gap. The 10 lowest performing schools, comparing 2008-09 and 2015-16 student results, confirm the HRSB’s 2014 study findings that the struggling elementary schools tend to be located in disadvantaged neighbourhoods in ‘low income pockets” of Halifax region such as north-end Halifax, North Preston, Lake Echo/East Preston, Dartmouth North, Spryfield, and Dartmouth/Woodside. What Bennett doesn’t mention in his report is that all of these identified disadvantaged neighbourhoods have sizeable African-Nova Scotian populations.

In contrast “Three of the top five performing Halifax elementary schools, Sir Charles Tupper, LeMarchant-St. Thomas, and Inglis Street, are located in the city’s affluent South End, all near the downtown campuses of Dalhousie and Saint Mary’s universities. In all three schools, over 92 per cent of all students in grades 3 to 6 met or exceeded established standards in two critical competencies, reading and mathematics” (Bennett, 2018).

Beyond the obvious differences in student achievement on standardized test scores in literacy and mathematics, income inequality can play out in much more mundane and pragmatic ways. We may not have officially segregated schools in this province, but we do have de-facto segregated schools because we use catchment areas to determine a school’s student population. These catchment areas are determined geographically by means of their proximity to the feeder schools in their area.

Income inequality within and among school districts makes it difficult to fulfill public education’s promise of equitable schooling experiences for all students. When children come to school, they bring with them a lifetime of social learning and the effects of that learning. While a child may or may not be aware of such concepts as privilege and marginalization, they are very aware of these processes upon their own lives and upon their lived realities. We must, therefore, examine carefully and critically the impacts of poverty and income inequality on parents and children in the day-to-day processes and expectations of schooling. This involves everything from our expectations around appropriate school clothing and footwear, to the availability of school-sponsored breakfast and lunch programs (and the stigma that is often attached to those who use such programs), to the requisite school supply lists that get sent home in June for the following September, to the associated costs attached to school trips and extra-curricular activities. At the junior and senior high levels, these budget-straining costs often increase exponentially with the added costs of student and graduation fees, proms, course material fees, and participation in extra-curricular activities.

Even something as innocuous as a school fundraiser might look quite different in low income and affluent communities. Think about this: in many low-income communities, parents may not have the financial wherewithal to pre-buy a product that their children are then going to sell for a school fundraiser. And, if they did come up with the chocolate bars or the citrus baskets or whatever they’re going to sell, who are those children going to sell them to? In a community that is defined geographically, which communities usually are, and where most everyone is struggling financially, families often can’t afford to buy a case of chocolate bars to support their children’s school fundraiser. If I buy two chocolate bars from your child, it’s only because you’re going to buy two chocolate bars from my child. And that might be the most that any individual child gets to sell, two chocolate bars – not cases of them. And these lower-income communities can’t host a big money maker like a sit-down dinner or a Monte Carlo night because nobody has the disposable income to attend such an event. Everyone is struggling to put food on their own table. So we no longer have equitable schooling, even in something as commonplace as school fundraising We now have resource difference between two types of schools.