The trophy case in the front hall of Chester Le Junior Public School shows the winning faces of the elementary school’s soccer and basketball teams, whose young members are captured in photos wearing identical uniforms for the first time.

Both teams won citywide championships last fall, and they did so wearing brand-new uniforms, which were donated to the school by a corporate sponsor, replacing their mismatched jerseys with numbers taped to the back.

“They played with a sense of pride,” principal Michelle Fraser said of her students. “The kids were so excited.”

That sense of school spirit is something Fraser has tried to cultivate since first coming to Chester Le, near Victoria Park Ave. and Finch Ave. E., three years ago.

Fraser introduced fundraising then as a way to improve the daily life of her students and to engage parents, but not with the expectation that the school would make thousands.

The goal was to open the school up to a community of parents who are from diverse cultural backgrounds, says Keisha Gayle, who is in her second year as parent council chair. There was a feeling from parents that “I’m not represented here. I’m not welcome here,” says Gayle.

The school council raised just over a $1,000 during the 2012-13 school year, part of it through two pizza lunches.

Last year, the parent group upped the pizza lunches to once a month — although they lowered the cost per lunch from $5 to $4 — and also held the school’s first fun fair, which together brought in a total of about $3,500.

Some of the items purchased included cases for five iPads used by a special education class, colour pages for the yearbook, Grade 6 graduation gifts and some supplies for a dance-a-thon that was made possible by a production crew of grade 7 and 8 students from nearby Sir Ernest MacMillan Public School.

“I think for my school, it’s the small things we’re looking at to make the kids happy,” says Fraser.

At 59 per cent capacity, Chester Le is listed by the board for possible closing.

The school also rates high on the TDSB’s learning opportunities index (LOI), which ranks a school community according to factors such as the proportion of single-parent families, the percentage of families on social assistance, educational attainment and income.

“We are needy,” says Fraser. “We’re the only model school in our family of schools,” a designation that means Chester Le gets extra money from the board to bring in programming and encourage parent engagement.

The school relies on free outings to the Science Centre, which gives model schools one free trip a year, and the Royal Ontario Museum, which offers free admission to the first 100 schools on the learning opportunities index that apply.

The principal applies for an annual grant called the Bus Trippers to pay for transportation.

Unlike schools that can charge $200 for an overnight excursion to the board’s outdoor camp or $400 for a trip out of town, Fraser only recently decided to ask parents to pay $15 for an outing to Ripley’s Aquarium for her Grade 5 and 6 classes.

Without much fundraising, the principal says her small school operates on a budget of $36,000, which has to pay for items such as telephones, photocopy paper, books, classroom supplies, furniture and technology.

The money is used to “fill in the gaps depending on where the needs are,” says Fraser.

Last year, those gaps included new Grade 6 desks, because the kids could barely fit in the old ones, and three refurbished instruments.

Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading...

“Maybe at a small school you have $8,000 to $10,000 (out of the budget) to play with,” says Fraser, who started teaching in 1992. “Without fundraising, this is what we have to spend every year.”

The school wouldn’t have the team uniforms if the donation hadn’t been made.

“You probably wouldn’t have them, says Fraser. “Something would have had to give for that year.”