Last grads make final walk from Greenbank
Wednesday is the final graduation day at Greenbank Middle School, as rows of shiny shoes and fancy dresses attend the bittersweet end of a 50-year era, if not an entire educational concept.
Opened in 1968, the “middle” school of Grade 7 and 8 students will close for good Friday, sending students and most of the 20 teachers to Sir Robert Borden High School in September.
“It’s an amazing school, that’s why it’s bittersweet, right?” said principal Dennis Paré, 41, moving to Broadview next year. “We’ve had great opportunities for kids, an incredible teaching staff, an amazing office staff. It’s hard to break that up.”
It has been weeks of “breaking up” — box by box — the logistical miracle of moving an entire school.
And so, an old drama room now has boxes four rows deep of packed supplies — instruction stickers to Mr. Simpson’s or Ms. Ferris’s new room at SRB; walls are stripped of teaching visuals, labs cleaned, laptops locked away in containers; plans are being made for the bandsaw and drill press in the basement, the pile of hand-tools, the annual Science Fair trophy; just as Paré is moving his Hammond organ and Beatles poster.
“It’s more than closing a school. We’re relocating a school but simultaneously having another school move in. And it’s all finished by June 30th.” And they still have to teach.
It is an especially sad week for Jim Walsh, 60, who has taught here for 25 years. Not only is he retiring, but he’s freshly back from a funeral in New Brunswick, where father Albert died at age 92. (A remarkable-sounding man, a Second World War veteran, his father went back to school to earn a high school diploma at age 58, Jim said.)
“He grew up without running water and now we’re sending people to Mars.”
Walsh, a math teacher, is a fan of middle schools because of the special needs of ever-changing adolescents. He’s not convinced of the educational merit of putting graduating Grade 6ers — in sweatpants and playing with “Ninja Turtles” — in the same student body as Grade 12s driving cars, courting girlfriends and holding jobs. “I don’t know. I’m torn.” Teaching, he said, is significantly “more complicated” than when he began in 1979. Greenbank, for instance, is a “triple-track” school, meaning it has early and middle French-immersion streams and the regular English track.
While it sounds great in theory, the practical effect is that the stronger language students gravitate toward French immersion, leaving English as a catchall for the rest: regular Anglo kids mixed with the learning disabled, new immigrant children and those weaker academically, which creates, as an unintended consequence, an imbalance of boys.
“The teachers in the English stream are working much, much harder than those in the immersion stream.”
Walsh said the school, with about 390 students, has become ethnically diverse, reflecting waves of immigration to the city, including Syrian. A couple of years ago, he said, there were students from 23 language groups in his homeroom.
“I think maybe the greatest accomplishment of Greenbank school is it has acted as a welcome mat for people,” a kind of “United Nations” in west-end Ottawa, adding proudly:
“We have never in 25 years, ever, had an ethnically-based issue in this school.”
And so this week marks an end of sorts for him.
“I love my job. I love the kids. It’s been a wonderful career, but it’s time to do something else.”
The beauty of having congregated Grade 7s and 8s is the programming that numbers afford. This year, for example, 16 students took a 10-day trip to South Korea.
There is a “garage band” program in which even novice kids can join one of five or six rock bands (with supplied instruments) and learn enough music to put on a concert in May. There is a regular band program with up to 80 students.
And so on Wednesday, for the last time, a group of grads will make an actual but symbolic walk south on Greenbank; middle to high school; adolescence to every other thing they’ll ever learn.