It’s small — only six Grade 9 students so far instead of the 60 it was hoping for — but the province’s first public Africentric high school program has started at Winston Churchill Collegiate in Scarborough.

Toronto District School Board director Chris Spence admits a very late launch last June — months after Grade 8 students choose their high school for the fall — made it hard to recruit students to the program, which offers the Grade 9 curriculum taught with a focus on African and African-Canadian heritage. Spence said he hopes more students will sign up, but in the meantime, two of the three teachers who had been planning to take part have been re-assigned, due to the small numbers.

“The teacher will have the additional responsibility to do some recruiting as well,” Spence said Wednesday. “We are hoping to have more students for second semester. We got things rolling late, so we are hopeful we can grow it.”

The board originally had planned to wait until September 2013, but decided last spring to try a sort of pilot project this year. Teachers drafted new curriculum over the summer for the five compulsory Grade 9 subjects; math, science, English, French, geography. Classes will use, where possible, African and African-Canadian examples of poetry, inventions, novels, politics and philosophy.

Unlike Oakwood Collegiate on St. Clair Ave. W., which opposed hosting an Africentric program last year because some saw it as segregation, board officials said Winston Churchill, on Lawrence Ave. E. near Kennedy Rd., has been open to the concept.

The plan is to add a grade each year and be open to students from across the city, including the first wave of graduates from the board’s Africentric alternative elementary school, near Sheppard Ave. and Keele St., when they are ready for high school in September 2013.

That school now has an enrolment of 209 students, with 13 due to graduate from Grade 8 this fall, some of whom may choose to continue on to the Africentric high school program.

Unlike the Africentric elementary school, which has its own wing within Sheppard Public School, students in this program will use the same labs, drama rooms and gyms that Winston Churchill students use. The only subjects that will not have an Africentric focus are gym and technology.

The program is open to students of all colors and backgrounds from across the city, although its focus is meant to engage black students in particular, who drop out in higher numbers partly because some find the curriculum does not seem relevant. It has five boys and one girl, and all but one student is from the immediate neighborhood.

The program is named after the late Leonard Braithwaite, the first black Canadian to be elected to Queen’s Park. His son David is a math teacher at Winston Churchill Collegiate.