School named after francophone advocate
Micheline Saint-Cyr committed much of her life to fostering community for French-speakers
Micheline Saint-Cyr did not get a warm reception when she arrived in Toronto from Hull, Que., with her husband and five kids in 1966.
People threw eggs at Saint-Cyr’s family, lit fires in their garage and scrawled graffiti on their walls with slurs like “Frogs live here.” For francophones in Toronto at the time, this kind of hostility was not uncommon.
Against this backdrop, Saint-Cyr sought to foster a community of francophones in the city, building institutions focused on education and the arts.
More than five decades later, a French elementary school has been named after the woman who committed much of her life to francophone education.
École élémentaire Micheline-Saint-Cyr will have its inauguration ceremony Friday, after it opened in south Etobicoke last September. The school has 80 students ranging from kindergarten to Grade 6.
“She started right at the beginning, trying to improve French services in the city,” said Claire Francoeur, a spokesperson for the Conseil scolaire Viamonde, southwest Ontario’s French-language school board. “She was up front making sure francophones had their rights, especially on the cultural side.”
School options for parents who wanted their children immersed in French were also very limited, but Saint-Cyr worked to change that. She organized other francophone parents in the city, and École secondaire Étienne-Brûlé, the first French public school in the city, was founded in 1969. All of her children attended.
“People were being bussed from all over the GTA to go to that school,” said her son Renaud, executive director of Alpha-Toronto, a literacy and essential skills centre that Micheline started in 1988.
“Not everyone was thrilled with the school, which regularly received bomb threats for years.”
In 1968, Saint-Cyr created La ChasseGalerie, a cultural centre for francophones in the city. It had an art gallery and art classes, film screenings, concerts and a bookstore. It lasted until 1980.
“My mother believed language, culture and education went hand in hand,” said her daughter, Chantal Hébert, political columnist for the Star. “It was to give us an opportunity to have access to music, art and films in French as we were growing up in Toronto that she went down the road to creating a cultural centre.”
The elementary school picked its name last May, after getting input from parents. A selection committee picked Saint-Cyr unanimously.