The Chris Spence we knew
“In the community I grew up in around Dufferin and Lawrence — Jungle — he was one of the only black male role models I saw that was successful, and it wasn’t the success of being a basketball player or rapper. He was successful in a humble position, giving back, helping out the community.”
DEXTER MORRIS WHO WAS MOTIVATED TO BECOME A TEACHER BY DISGRACED TORONTO DISTRICT SCHOOL BOARD DIRECTOR OF EDUCATION CHRIS SPENCE
Earlier this month, Chris Spence, director of education at the Toronto District School Board, was discovered to have plagiarized sections of an op ed piece in the Star. As many more incidents of plagiarism surfaced, Spence resigned.
The day after Spence fell from the top job in Canadian education, a motley parade of teachers began to arrive at a Jane-Finch high school. It was Saturday morning.
All black, all male, all from hardscrabble neighbourhoods, they gathered in an emotional circle in the staff room at CW Jefferys Collegiate to share, with almost revivalist fervour, the many ways in which the board’s suddenly disgraced director of education has inspired generations of at-risk children.
In this edited excerpt from her Star Dispatches eRead, reporter Louise Brown talks to black teachers and community leaders who say they owe Chris Spence a great debt.
With his grizzled grey beard and natty dreads, Grade 8 math teacher Ishaka Williams has known Chris Spence the longest of all 10 men gathered at CW Jefferys on a Saturday morning.
Don’t call him ‘Mr.;’ he uses “Ras,” an Ethiopian title used by Rastafarians. He is the elder statesman of the group that has rallied this morning to talk about what the loss of Chris Spence means to schools in Toronto’s most turbulent corners.
As Canada’s largest school board embarks on its quest for a new leader and Spence ponders a new course in life, these front-line educators paint a picture, one by one, of the legacy he leaves behind and point to the gaps they worry may not get filled in his absence.
For a man whose academic integrity lies in tatters, their praise is all about his strength of character. This may be the most baffling part of the plot line — how a man whose character propelled him to the top was felled by what seems an inexplicable character flaw.
Their stories shine a light on how Chris Spence rose to the top, and the scope of what is lost with his fall.
Williams was a community worker at Oakdale Park Middle School back in 1991 when Spence arrived as a Grade 8 teacher.
Williams admired the rookie; he seemed keen to become a strong role model. Three years later Williams became a teacher at Brookview Middle School, another part of the Jane-Finch family, where Spence had moved as department head of the Grade 6 staff.
“The school was a labelled ‘hot spot’ that had trouble getting substitute teachers to even go there,” recalls Williams, “but during those years our achievement scores improved. We were a very effective team.”
Fast forward to 2009 and Williams, now head of math at Brookview, was starting a student club called RISE that taught kids cooking, life skills and Africentric cultural history. But he wanted to do something else no other club did — rent a bus and take 50 students to tour sites of the Underground Railroad around Windsor and over to Detroit. It would mean a one-night stay-over; the cost would be $9,000. No one at the board would pay. Then Williams remembered his old pal Chris Spence had just landed as director of education. It was a long shot, but he fired off an email.
“Dr. Chris Spence took five minutes to respond and he has now funded this for years, sometimes from his own pocket. The program has grown and we were able to take another school with us on the trip last year, visiting the sites of the Underground Railroad. The effect that that has had on these kids is amazing,” says Williams.
“They write about it, they tell their parents about it and now there are parents who are asking to go so they can learn for themselves. This is a big piece of Canadian history that is not taught in many schools.” And that, says Williams, “is why I got out of my bed this morning, without even any breakfast, to come here; because no other director would be doing what he’s doing for these children in Jane and Finch.”
Williams doesn’t deny plagiarism is wrong and that Spence “made a mistake — I would tell him that. He admitted that. But no one was willing to even give him a chance and that was, to me, a politically antagonistic, vindictive response. I’m saying trustees should not have accepted his resignation; his contract is coming up at the end of the summer, so at least let him run out the course of the contract and in the meantime take a more rational look at what has happened.” When Toronto Mayor Rob Ford faced multiple allegations of misconduct, “he was allowed to stay until the final decision is made,” says Williams. “He’s allowed to hold his office. Now this same mayor is talking against Dr. Chris Spence. I feel this is like the Obama syndrome, where people were there waiting for him to make a mistake to get rid of him. That is how I feel.”
Williams fears for the future of his RISE club without Spence, and for many grassroots programs the director nurtured. “There is no replacement that I can think of in this system who will do what Dr. Chris Spence is doing. Those before him have been invisible.”
He also worries this will set back the prospects for candidates of colour. Is Williams being overly skeptical? “These things are important to us, you know,” he explains. “It’s very, very important because we have always been on the receiving end of the power structure and sometimes it’s hard for other people to understand how we see things.”
AS A BOY
in the Jane-Finch corridor, Steve Morrison was obsessed with basketball. He kept hearing about an after-school program at Bathurst Heights Secondary School in the neighbourhood they call Jungle, around Lawrence Ave. W. and Allen Rd. Morrison, now a teaching graduate looking for work, has just popped into the Jefferys staff room on a break from coaching in the gym, and recalls joining the Bathurst Heights program and meeting a coach named Chris Spence.
“He was always around and the culture he built up was a culture of basketball and academics, right? And at the time I’m kind of going towards the streets. I’m a kid from Jane and Finch probably going to go down the wrong path. But what he was doing in that Lawrence Heights community had an impact on us in Jane and Finch. We heard about how it mixed sports and academics and as a kid, I’m like, I want to be part of that experience.”
Morrison was so good he got a full basketball scholarship to Weber State University in Utah.
“The first year I’m there, I’m approached by some agents, right? They want to give me some money — they want to pay you just to get you on their side” — something that’s forbidden and would lose a player his amateur status if caught. “So I call home and talk to my old teacher and then I get on the phone with Chris Spence who starts talking about ethics and ‘How would you feel as a man if you took that money? Is this the right thing to do?’ ” Basketball has since taken this Jane-Finch son to Turkey and China, Africa and Switzerland, “but if you look at it, it’s all through a program Chris Spence started.” “So you can write what you want in the paper, but as a man, in my experience with him, Chris Spence is a standup guy.”
MATTHEW MORRIS
can’t stay — his girlfriend is texting that he’s late — but he wanted to take this detour to pay tribute to Chris Spence. Growing up in a lower middle-class neighbourhood near Markham Rd. and Eglinton Ave. E., he set his sights on being a gym teacher because that’s what he figured athletic black boys could be. “But at teachers’ college you do a lot of self-reflection and I came across some books by this guy named Chris Spence — a black guy who played sports and was interested in education. As I started to grow as a man and as an educator, I started to read about who he was as a person and he was someone who inspired me and also inspired me to inspire other people.” Morris, who now teaches Grade 6-7 at Maryvale Public School in Scarborough, said he had never met many black males in education “other than a gym teacher here and there, but he kind of changed my perception of what I wanted to offer. I didn’t really want to be the black male gym teacher in the school; I wanted to be that person who taught language, taught history, whatever — and I’m a homeroom teacher now so I’m fortunate I can teach everything for my class.” One day two years ago while still at teachers’ college, he fired off an email to Spence, the director of education, telling him what an inspiration he was. To his shock, Spence emailed back with an invitation to drop by his office. “That went a long way. Here he is at the top of the food chain in education and he gets thousands of emails a day and for him to be like, ‘You know what? Come to my office’ really made me see that regardless of the issues that are surrounding him right now, when it all boils down, he’s someone who actually does care, period. For me, that’s the bottom line.” Spence’s message to Morris was that sports can take you a long way, but it’s good to prepare for other careers as well. “I remember in one of his books he said there are some black males who all they do is play basketball because they want to be Michael Jordan. There’s white guys who want to be the next president and they work on other skills. If they don’t become president, they still have tools they can go out with and be successful, but if you don’t make the NBA, he said your jump shot isn’t going to help you. “At the end of the day, I don’t know if those were his words or not his words, but they came from him and I read it because it was coming from him, period.”
WHEN DEXTER MORRIS
was in Grade 7 at Lawrence Heights Middle School, he joined the Boys 2 Men after-school mentoring program created by then-principal Chris Spence. “It was a sports and safety net with adults you could trust, and there were many life skills we were taught, like, somebody’s upsetting you or you’re in a confrontation with your teacher and how do you solve that in an effective manner where you’re not going to get yourself suspended?”
You always knew you had someone to talk to about real problems, said Morris, now a teacher. It helped you make the right choices.
“In the community I grew up in around Dufferin and Lawrence— Jungle — he was one of the only black male role models I saw that was successful, and it wasn’t the success of being a basketball player or rapper. He was successful in a humble position, giving back, helping out the community.”
That’s when Morris decided he wanted to be a teacher, a career he has now been in for four years.
“It’s because of the things Chris Spence and another teacher did — they went the extra mile and it changed the whole community. There were so many kids I grew up with — some are dead now, some are in jail. But through the Boys 2 Men program Chris Spence steered me to the right path because I was one of those on-the-line borderline kids.”
“I could have made bad choices and gone the wrong way like my best friends — a lot of them did. I’m one of the few that finished school and am where I am today.” JORDAN MACFARLANE came into the Boys 2 Men program with Devon Jones as his mentor. “I was once one of those kids who would have ended up as a statistic, but now I’m a mentor myself. If it wasn’t for Dr. Spence there wouldn’t have been the chance for mentors like Devon Jones to mentor boys like me.”
DEVON JONES
was deciding between law school and teachers’ college when he heard Chris Spence speak at a conference.
“A lot of us decided we wanted to be teachers because of the example this guy set, he saw teaching as more than standing in front of the class delivering curriculum, you know what I’m saying? His progressive outlook on education transcended that. His message that day was how much impact you can have as a teacher through building relationships in and outside the classroom.”
Jones went on to run one of the first Boys 2 Men clubs back in 1999. He knows Chris Spence didn’t invent mentoring, “but he was one of the pioneers and he inspired us to give young men context — not the context they’re exposed to on the streets, or racism and poverty and violence, but the larger social context of achievement and positivity and inclusion.
“To juxtapose what they’ve lived all their lives with hope and responsibility — that’s amazing, right?”