Canada's largest school board is poised to go boy-crazy, with boys-only classes, "boy-friendly" instruction and an all-boys grade school among ways the new director hopes to help young males do better in school.

In a sweeping blueprint unveiled Tuesday on everything from closing schools to curbing violence and hiring a marketing whiz to drum up more students, Toronto District School Board director Chris Spence is urging the board to make boys a priority and work to boost their skills and lower their dropout rate.

"The last thing I want to do is demonize our boys, but all around we see great concerns about their learning," he said, citing lower test scores than girls and more acting out, so to level the playing field for boys "might require differentiated treatment."

In "A Vision Of Hope!" – an ambitious report based on 200 meetings with staff and community members – Spence is calling for more single-sex classes, programs and even schools.

Next September, he wants the board to open a Male Leadership Academy for boys from kindergarten to Grade 3 as a sort of alternative school or "school of choice," and add a grade each year, with many if not all teachers being male. Moreover, he wants to launch 300 "demonstration classrooms" across the city to showcase the best ways of teaching, including classrooms he calls "boy-friendly."

"Boys thrive in environments that are hands-on and where there is opportunity to move around," he said, citing portable desks that let children be more mobile, and clipboards rather than notebooks so students feel less tied to a desk.

"When every bone in a boy's body says, 'Move!' we're usually saying, 'Sit down.' "

The focus on boys comes as little surprise from this former CFL player who has made mentoring boys a trademark of his career as he moved from teacher to director of the Hamilton-Wentworth District School Board, where he was when Toronto hired him this spring after a year-long search.

One of his first teaching assignments in the 1990s was to run a boys-only class at Toronto's Oakdale Park Middle School, where many boys had little contact with their fathers and showed little interest in school. Spence made a point of shaking each boy's hand every morning – which took only 20 seconds, but offered a touch of the mentoring he champions to this day.

"I would say, 'Tyrone, today is your day; I believe in you and I need you to focus,' " he told the Star earlier this year. The boys thrived and Spence still keeps in touch with many of them, calling it the "most impactful thing" he has done as an educator. He went on to pioneer a renowned mentoring program called Boys To Men.

The Toronto board has a handful of single-sex classrooms and a small all-girls high school for students at risk, Heydon Park Secondary School, but Spence wants to expand the model, which he promoted at two schools in Hamilton.

Yet the jury is out on the benefits of single-sex schools. Serge Demers, an acting vice-president at Laurentian University who has studied the issue for Ontario's Literacy and Numeracy Secretariat, says if anything, girls benefit more.

"It's not the magic bullet," he said. "In some instances it does work out quite well; but in fact it works out better for girls than boys – which is the reverse reason of why folks try to implement it." Having a few classes where girls and boys are segregated seems to have better results than single-sex schools, he said.

The advocacy group People for Education has raised concerns about specialty schools "because of the tendency for that to divide populations, as opposed to bringing populations together," said spokeswoman Annie Kidder, citing research in Britain and Canada that shows a system of specialty schools can lead to "a fair amount of social segregation."

Toronto board chair John Campbell said he expects Spence's plan to meet with little resistance next week when it comes up for approval by trustees. "We went through a long search to get a very capable agent of change, and we got one."

However, Grade 9 student Bowen Pausey gives a thumb's down to all-boy learning.

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"Boys and girls were put on this earth to be together, obviously," said the student at Malvern Collegiate. "If you're stuck in a boys' class from kindergarten to Grade 12, you won't have the social skills to relate to girls, and that could affect your life."

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