Call Your Local Councillor And Demand They Allocate Funding

To community based literacy programs. Let's start by taking the money to be spent on city hall renovations, then have each councillor give up $3-4 thousand out of their office budgets, then chop a couple of the environuts on Miller's green team, then ask CUPE to get school janitors to donate some time to keep schools open and the list goes on and on.......

Small cost to nurture literacy
February 16, 2007
Carol Goar

Several hundred Torontonians will show up for work a bit bleary-eyed this morning. They stayed out late last night at the Book Lover's Ball, an annual celebration of reading featuring the recipes of celebrity chefs, interviews with award-winning authors and a fashion show inspired by literature.

The $350-a-ticket gala, a fundraiser for the Toronto Public Library Foundation, is one of the highlights of the social calendar. It marks the culmination of Keep Toronto Reading, a month-long series of events designed to make literacy fashionable and fun.

It would be tempting to say that Toronto has come of age as a city of letters. But there is a problem.

The feeder systems that produce the readers of tomorrow are languishing.

The volunteers who teach literacy classes in community centres and church basements have been cut adrift by penny-pinching governments.

The immigration workers who see newcomers struggling to read a medicine bottle or fill out a job application have fewer lifelines to offer them.

The pioneering programs developed in this city to pull families and communities together around stories and songs are on the chopping block.

One of those is the Toronto District School Board's family literacy program. For 26 years, parents and grandparents and caregivers – many of whom don't speak English and can't read in any language – have been bringing their pre-schoolers to the board's 54 parenting and literacy centres.

The generations learn and play together. The adults listen to stories and sing and recite the alphabet with their children. There are books in many languages that can be borrowed. Even if parents can't read them, they are encouraged to take them home and tell the story using the pictures.

"We believe the parent is the first and most important teacher in a child's life," says Ruth Sischy, manager of the school board's early years program.

Families can come as often as they choose and stay as long as they like. There is no charge.

For new immigrants, the centres – located in elementary schools – are a welcoming place. For parents who dropped out of school, they offer a second chance to develop literacy skills. For educators, they provide a way to reach out to families who normally feel excluded from the school system.

Toronto's family literacy program costs $2.8 million a year. It does not qualify for provincial funding. Under the grant structure adopted by the Ministry of Education eight years ago, only classroom spending is eligible.

The school board has kept it alive by dipping into its reserves and juggling its $2.2 billion budget. But each year it gets tougher. As things now stand, the family literacy centres will lose their funding at the end of June.

Perhaps they'll get a reprieve as they've done before. Perhaps another branch of the provincial government – the Ministry of Children and Youth Services would be the logical candidate – will step into the breach.

But for a city that prides itself on its love of reading, there is something unseemly about this frantic scramble for $264 per child.

The families who use the literacy centres long to be part of the world of books and libraries and learning. The school board wants to open doors to newcomers and low-income parents. The program, initiated by trailblazing educator Mary Gordon in Regent Park, has been replicated in schools from South Africa to Japan.

To school board trustee Chris Bolton, the uncertain fate of the literacy centres is symptomatic of a government compulsion to compartmentalize every aspect of a child's life, as if his or her home life had no impact on what happens at school, as if a parent's reading skills had no influence on the child's success, as if every youngster arrived at the kindergarten door ready to learn.

"We need a new understanding of what education is about and the parenting and literacy centres are one of the kernels," he says.

Bolton visits one or two of the literacy centres each week to tell stories. He watches once-isolated parents become part of a learning community and once-disadvantaged children become outgoing and confident.

These are the kids who will one day walk through a library door, write a poem, use a cookbook, design a computer game, get a job that requires strong communication skills, read to their children, maybe even attend the Book Lover's Ball.

It is false economy to skimp on them now.

Carol Goar's column appears Monday, Wednesday and Friday.