You wouldn’t know to look at them — they don’t wear uniforms or have their own wing — but 19 teens at an east Toronto high school are part of what may be the boldest education experiment in the country.

This little clutch of Grade 9 students makes up the first Africentric program at a public Canadian high school.

PHOTOS:A look inside Canada’s first Africentric high school

Despite early cries of “segregation” and angry pushback from the first site suggested, Scarborough’s Winston Churchill Collegiate welcomed the proposal two years ago as a way to support black students who may be disengaged. However, the Toronto District School Board was so cautious about spreading the word, it took a year to drum up enough students for a class.

Now, halfway through its first year and accepting students for this fall in grades 9 and 10, the Star got the first look at how the program is working. Africentric students take core subjects together, but share gym, drama and other options with students from Winston Churchill.

“On TV basically everyone’s white, so you want to know if people from your background ever did something good other than Martin Luther King or Nelson Mandela,” said Carl Exina, 14, who wants to be a pediatrician.

His class took a field trip last fall to Buxton, near Chatham, an early settlement for freed slaves. “No other class would learn what I’m learning,” he said.

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Video: Africentric Assembly

Open to students of any background — one member of the class is white, as are several teachers — they take the regular Ontario curriculum but use lesson plans often drawn from African or Caribbean culture in a bid to make school more engaging.

“We’re trying to address the ‘opportunity gap’ facing some of the kids who aren’t achieving, so the class has an education assistant to provide support,” said principal Bill Papaconstantinou. “We’re aiming at a high academic level; we want kids to earn 16 credits by the age of 16,” a pass-rate proven to reduce the chance of a student dropping out.

The class has students at every skill level, an example of the kind of “destreamed” Grade 9 class called for in a new report. They all study the same material, but assignments vary by ability. Stronger students might do one assignment worth 50 per cent of the term mark while weaker students could do more small assignments, explained the principal. At the end of the course the teacher grants each student the level of credit (academic, applied) he or she has earned.

The variety of abilities has led to some behaviour problems, noted English teacher Dayo Baiyewu, but after a fall leadership weekend, students began to bond and now often help each other, he said.

When the class read the short story “My Grandfather and I,” set in a part of Jamaica near where student Shanoya Spencer grew up, “I liked that,” she said. “It’s good to learn more about people with black roots.”

Baiyewu had the class read a gripping South African play about apartheid called My Children! My Africa! by Athol Fugard to get them excited about drama before introducing them to Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, with its Elizabethan language.

“They couldn’t wait to sign up each day to read the different characters’ lines,” said Baiyewu, who found many had not heard of apartheid, which ended before they were born.

“It’s not so much about having all black teachers,” said Baiyewu, who is black. “You need teachers who are comfortable using materials that are more culturally diverse than what they’re used to, and you don’t have to be black to do that.”

Student Blake Perryman calls himself “a kid who usually doesn’t like to read, but when the teacher told us to read up to page 50, I just kept going and didn’t stop till page 80.

“It’s a really cool play. Everyone should be learning this stuff, not just our class.”

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His mother, Nicole Blake, was initially “troubled” that her son chose the Africentric program because “I didn’t want any kind of segregation.

“But then I realized they’re just trying to make sure the curriculum speaks to a lot of black males who aren’t completing high school — and you know what? That sounded good,” said Blake, noting the program is named after former MPP Leonard Braithwaite, the first black Canadian elected to Queen’s Park, who fought racial segregation in Ontario schools.

“It’s a pioneering program, and I would love to see it expand.”

A group of 11 students now takes some Africentric courses at Downsview Secondary School in the west end, near the Africentric Alternative Elementary School that opened in 2009 and now has nearly 200 students.

At the Leonard Braithwaite program, science teacher Narmatha Maharaj let the class veer from the usual Canadian focus on bio-systems to study the coral reefs of the Caribbean, where so many have their roots. She taught them about ‘blood diamonds” of the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

“You don’t want to use examples of places like Algonquin Park where many of these kids have never been,” said Maharaj. “At the end of the day, we have this program to promote a sense of belonging.”