Miriam: What is the basis for this idea that the community needs to be more engaged in students’ development? What are the two groups getting out of it?

Allannah:

See this is where we get to my own philosophy perhaps not being completely in touch with the received wisdom. I would like to think that the school system is based on education, but at heart I think it's more of a socialization process. I have sometimes said that particularly in our community we're not necessarily in the business of generating graduates with diplomas, but we're in the business of keeping kids off the streets for 5 years and giving them social and citizenship skills.

Given that, the community learning centre becomes even more important because we're not necessarily talking about math and geography and history, we're talking about life skills what do you need to do to be a successful and independent person in life - and if you're not going to have that transmitted to you in your home life, or in your regular day-to-day existence. Then there's a good place for the school with a community-learning centre to fit in offering those skills.

Mir: Can we talk a bit here about the class background of the students here at James Lyng?

Allannah:

We have a whole range of statistics that define our students at James Lyng and some of them are frightening. I think something like 69% of our students come from single parent families, more then half are living below the well whatever they call the poverty line now. I know that's not the phrase that they use. There's some phenomenal number, I think it's 35 to 40% of them come from families where neither parent has completed high school, umm another enormous number from families where there is no working person, 48% of our kids arrive with learning skills 3 to 6 years below grade level. Many of them have identified learning difficulties.It's an extremely disadvantaged population.

We've never been able to put our finger on whether the learning difficulty in the community is what keeps it economically disadvantaged or whether the economic disadvantage creates the learning difficulty. But we know that our kids arrive without too many life experiences that are defined as middle class. We're playing catch up in a lot of ways. Our kids don't necessarily have the experience of going on trips, exposure to other cultures, um movies that are educational, a variety of books. It's not a rich background that comes to us so... we like to think that we have an opportunity here to provide some of that stuff, and it's very interesting.