Miriam: Why do you think the CLC is important to students at James Lyng?

Allannah:

I think it's really clear that there's a disconnect between what we do in school and what the kids experience in life, and if they're going to take us seriously we have to make it more real for them and it has to have some application outside our doors. Um to come to school and read and listen to teachers without any particular sense of continuity is doomed to fail and I think one of the research outcomes that we've seen is that if parents are involved, if the community is involved, then students tend to be much more engaged and active in their own learning. It's almost impossible to see going back now.

Miriam: Can you describe a few of the initiatives that you organized in your capacity as the community learning coordinator?

Allannah:

A few of the initiatives that we've started have to do both with youth and with their families. So in terms of families we've started a family resource centre, we have a room that's in the process of being set-up for parents to come in and to be comfortable in the school, to meet with one another, to meet with teachers. We wanna have resource materials available to them, use it as a centre to do some parenting workshops if they choose - that's one thing. We also offer week-end courses in French for parents of kids who are in the EMSB schools uh and that was great we had about 35 or 40 people coming every week with their kids, we offered them babysitting, it was a networking thing as well as a French language thing, it was pre-employability.

In terms of the healthy lifestyles we've been doing some afterschool programming uh, in sports, karate, hockey. We had a literacy through hip-hop program. We were able to work with the Atwater Library and Computer Centre for a digital literacy project, which had double benefit - giving the kids some pre-employability skills as well as working on the literacy and education outcomes.