It started with pizza crusts.

That’s all a child in a poor Oshawa neighbourhood brought to school one day for lunch, and his early childhood educator was still upset when she got home to her school trustee husband.

“My wife was in tears to think that’s all a student would have for lunch — leftover pizza crusts with the bite marks on them,” said Michael Barrett, who represents Oshawa on the Durham District School Board.

“I thought, holy crap — we have to do something. We’ve got to feed these kids.”

For Barrett, it was a wake-up call to child poverty, which hits Oshawa twice as hard as the rest of booming Durham Region. One in 10 Durham preschoolers lives below the poverty line, but in Oshawa, that figure jumps to one in five. Flanked by the middle-class subdivisions of Whitby, Ajax and Pickering, Oshawa — especially its south end — is a hot spot of economic need on the GTA’s eastern edge, bruised by the loss of 8,700 car-related jobs in the past decade and lower levels of education.

It’s a tale of blue-collar woes in an increasingly white-collar economy, and it hurts more than kids’ stomachs — it side-swipes their learning and their future, as it does in poor communities the world over.

Roughly one-third of children in Oshawa’s hardscrabble neighbourhoods change schools every few months when their families get evicted for not paying rent, although principals say winter is more stable because landlords are less likely to throw families out in the cold.

Children here can start kindergarten knowing up to two-thirds fewer words than their more affluent peers because their parents often work shifts and don’t have the time or energy to talk with them. Principals struggle to keep in touch with families who can’t afford the Internet and change cell phones often.

The 12 hardest-hit areas bear the telltale watermarks of generational poverty; low grades, high dropout rates, little parent involvement.

While Queen’s Park does give extra funding to schools in poor neighbourhoods, and school staff in Oshawa’s trenches were making valiant efforts to fight the demographic odds, Barrett was haunted by those pizza crusts and the grim academic odds they represent. He took bags of them (produced by his family) to Oshawa City Council in a plea for help for low-income kids — maybe free passes to city pools. It didn't work.

So he, his fellow Oshawa trustees and a clutch of committed educators decided to go public about child poverty — to call it by its name — and sound a call to action against the hurdles poverty throws in the way of learning.

“People always talk about poverty but they dance around the issue, so when politicians said ‘Let’s put the name of poverty on the table and call for a targeted, strategic plan’ — it was visionary,” recalls Durham school superintendent Lisa Millar.

“The statistics were clear: If you don’t do anything about poverty in the early years, you can predict the low graduation rates and mental health issues that will come later in life. You get the best bang for your buck if you target the early years.”

With a team of partners from the community, the Durham District School Board launched a pilot project to raise the academic bar across the city’s 12 most needy schools, based on the expectation these kids can do as well as any others, with the right help.

This “Make a Difference — An Initiative to Address Poverty” campaign would include more breakfast programs, but more importantly, would try to smash the stubborn cycle of low expectations of children in poverty.

“It’s not just about breakfast programs; you’ve got to feed the soul, the mind and the community if you’re going to end the cycle of poverty,” said Barrett, now chair of the Durham board. “It takes more than a sandwich. At the end of the day, if we’re expecting less of them because of low socio-economic levels, we’re truly not ending the cycle.”

In edu-speak, it meant changing a “culture of care” at school to a tougher “culture of high expectations.” No free pass to failure because you’re poor.

“We can’t have a Crayola curriculum or inflate marks and think that’s going to help kids,” said superintendent Silvia Peterson at a recent symposium on children and poverty. “If we leave the bar down, that’s all they’ll attain. They need to earn true A’s and develop the real problem-solving skills that will get them great jobs in the future.”

The board sent in swat teams of speech and language pathologists to help boost kindergarten kids’ word power. There was free tutoring — in one case by the principal herself — and mental health counselling for tweens. Schools cracked down on student swearing and demanded the same “self-regulated” behaviour expected at highly academic schools. But they eased up on penalties for those whose family circumstances can make them show up a little late.

As the pilot project enters its third year, the results are so promising — soaring test scores, fewer absences, more involved parents and budding student pride — the Durham board has now produced a Blueprint for Addressing Poverty to help other boards.

Said Millar: “Education is the great equalizer.”

Bridging the Vocabulary Gap

They may not speak much. They’ll shrug to answer a question.

If you ask them to make a story from three pictures — a snowball, a bigger snowball and a carrot nose — they may respond simply “Snow, more snow, carrot.”

And at the age of 4, they may not understand prepositions like “between” and “beside.”

For kindergarten students living in poverty, who tend to have heard only one-third as many words at home as classmates from more educated, wealthy families, schools must help build their oral vocabulary before they tackle the ABC’s, said Principal Sue Simeson of Clara Hughes Public School in Oshawa. It’s one of 12 high-needs schools in the Durham school board’s Make a Difference pilot project to counter the pitfalls of poverty.

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“Our kids aren’t as experienced with books as kids in some other schools are, and about 30 per cent are not where you want them to be with oral skills,” said Simeson.

Speech pathologist Nancy Sarlo warns that weak language skills in kindergarten, if unchanged, can lead to weak literacy skills in the higher grades and ultimately high dropout rates, mental health issues and even higher chances of incarceration.

So the pilot project gave two schools, Dr. C.F. Cannon and Glen St. Public School, a speech and language pathologist for a half-day a week over several months to share the trade secrets of oral language: vocabulary, story-telling, producing sounds, “social language” and an awareness of what letters make which sounds, said Anila Punnoose, Durham’s chief speech and language pathologist.

“We have teachers ask more open-ended ‘wh’ questions (who, what, where, when, why) because you want to make sure our kids are all on the same playing field.”

At Clara Hughes Public School, in another high-needs neighbourhood, kindergarten teacher Jennifer Hill and early childhood educator Diane Hollywood model proper, grammatically correct sentences out loud all day long across the classroom: “Hey Mrs. Hollywood! I was thinking if we tried to build a tower with those wooden blocks, we should put the big blocks on the bottom …”

Said Hill: “People aren’t born with vocabulary. We learn it day by day.” If kids haven’t learned it at home, school can bridge that gap.

It’s the same can-do attitude expressed by Simeson, who, like all her staff, works each week with a small group of struggling young readers to help build their skills and confidence.

“We know some of our children live in abject poverty, so how do we meet their needs? We hand-picked staff with a passion for working with high-risk students, and we set high expectations. There’s no reason they can’t do as well as students at any school in the board.”

Success scoreboard

Standardized test scores have gone up in Oshawa’s high-need schools with the extra help of the Durham District School Board’s Make a Difference anti-poverty campaign.

At Clara Hughes Public School, extra training for teachers, extra help for students and parenting outreach are paying off.

On the Grade 6 EQAO math test, the school went from just 27 per cent meeting the provincial standard three years ago to 64 per cent on the most recent test.

On the Grade 6 EQAO reading test, the school went from 49 per cent meeting the standard three years ago to 85 per cent.

On the Grade 3 EQAO math, the school went from 41 per cent meeting the standard to 87 per cent.

On the Grade 3 EQAO reading test, the school went from 45 per cent meeting the standard to 89 per cent.

At Dr. C.F. Cannon Public School, extra coaching for struggling math students over five months worked wonders.

Only 60 per cent of Grade 3 students earned a Level 3 (B) in Number Sense and Numeracy on their February report card, but this jumped to 75 per cent on the June report.

Only 42 per cent of Grade 6 students earned a Level 3 (B) in Number Sense and Numeracy on their February report card, but this jumped to 60 per cent in June.

A team of speech and language pathologists helped kindergarten teachers at Dr. C.F. Cannon with their oral language skills, and saw a 22 per cent increase over six months.

A focus on attendance and better contact with parents led to 100 fewer absences in the first few weeks of school.

At the start of a mental health counselling program at Dr. C.F. Cannon Public School, only 43 per cent of students said it was important to “be aware of what I am feeling” – but after the four weeks, 67 per cent agreed.

At the start of the mental health summer program, 65 per cent said it was important to eat healthy foods. At the end, 92 per cent agreed.

At the start of the mental health program, only 32 per cent of students said “I can deal with stressful things” but that rose to 58 per cent by the end.

At the start of the mental health program, 62 per cent of students said “I go to people I trust if I need help,” but that rose to 75 per cent by the end.

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