Athletes boot

>> Despite pleas, EMSB business school
refuses to allow kids to use gym

by KRISTIAN GRAVENOR

Photos by JASON FELKER

It’s four in the afternoon under the glass and cement of the Vendôme metro as a team of the city’s finest looks for signs of youthful trouble-making. A group of six knapsack-lugging 15 year olds stands around smoking, talking in subdued tones. “The police are always down here looking around. It’s pretty exaggerated,” says one. “Yeah, there’s not much going on here,” says another.
The kids congregate here daily because, according to them, “It’s the place where people meet.” A boy whose knapsack is covered in decorative patches says, “If there was a skate park we could go to, that would be awesome,” his eyes lighting up.
Although the kids aren’t making the link between their loitering and the lack of west end recreational facilities, others, like Linda Scott, are less hesitant about it. Scott, president of the Oxford Park Association, which supervised the after-school use of the gym, blames the Shadd Business Academy for locking out what she says are 30 to 50 children who used to play in it after school.

“Some of the kids hanging around in the metro after school were our kids,” says Scott. “They came to the gym every day for years to play basketball and cosom hockey.” But the youth became persona non grata after June 2001, when the English Montreal School Board closed the longstanding John XXIII Elementary School on Old Orchard and handed it to Shadd Business Academy, a vocational school that offers secretarial and bookkeeping courses to adults. Principal John Hachey has repeatedly refused requests to allow children to use part of the gym, noting that half of it is now devoted to a cafeteria while the other half is used as a meeting space.

Marcel Tremblay, city councillor for Décarie, has been trying to persuade the EMSB to overrule Shadd’s refusal to let the kids play. “We have problems at the metros because the kids have no place to go,” he says. “The government of Quebec is cutting down on phys-ed classes even though around the world the trend is to give them 150 minutes of phys-ed per week. In Quebec, we’re giving 60 minutes. How can [Hachey] accept that these kids become more and more obese and have nothing to do?”

Hachey did not return calls from the Mirror, but at an open house at the school last week he unveiled a plan to open an onsite daycare in the school to encourage more students to enroll. With 75 more students, the school would receive $1-million in additional government funding, he said.

Meanwhile, EMSB higher-ups don’t appear anywhere near reversing the ban on kids in the gym. “It’s a valid request, but by the same token we have the need to serve our students. And the adult students are members of our community also,” says Rosario Ortona, the EMSB’s director of Adult Education.

City councillor Jeremy Searle, a frequent critic of the dearth of west end recreational facilities, is among those who’d urge the EMSB to reconsider. “The poor can’t afford to join fitness clubs. They’re cut out entirely from recreational facilities,” says Searle. “Providing recreational services for young people enables them to better themselves.” :