Peel's Welcome Centre offers immigrant students a soft landing

Peel board’s processing centre bustles on first day of school, assessing new students and helping parents with practical issues.

Thestar.com
Sept. 8, 2015
By Louise Brown

From a Syrian refugee child to the son of a Delhi stock trader and a fee-paying German teen, students from wildly different backgrounds flocked Tuesday to a Mississauga reception centre where the Peel District School Board boasts it “welcomes the world.”

Over the course of the day some 100 students passed through the Elm Dr. Welcome Centre to sign up for school and have their math and English skills measured, while their parents learned about practical things such as lunch boxes, gym shoes, and where to find a doctor.

The Welcome Centre’s bustle of families, teachers and settlement workers, many of them multilingual, presents a rare snapshot of the landing pad Canada offers children of the world.

“We don’t like to keep any child out of school longer than necessary, so we have teachers and support workers on site to assess them as quickly as possible so we can give them ‘the slip’ - the sort of golden ticket that means they can go to school here,” said Louise Clayton, coordinator of Peel’s three student welcome centres.

Omar Aljabari, 6, from Jordan, and his 8-year-old brother Ezeldeen did arithmetic tests in an airy classroom with the help of a teacher who assessed their skills. Their father, Rani Aljabari, has moved the family to Canada “because life here is better than in Jordan,” and settlement worker Nora Hachemi suggested ways they might find help for their 2-year-old daughter who has medical problems.

Down the hall, 16-year-old Naman Anand from Delhi struggled with trigonometry on a test designed to assess his skills in math and English - “it was a little more advanced than the trigonometry we did in India.” His father, Jasdeep Anand, a financial trader in derivatives, became a Canadian citizen in the mid-’90s but moved to Delhi, where he spent 20 years, before deciding to return here “because I admire Canada; it has such compassion for those who are less fortunate.”

In recent months, staff have helped refugee children fleeing the very turmoil Syrian 3-year-old Alan Kurdi was trying to escape when he drowned last week and washed up on a Turkish shore.

“We had a Syrian mother come in with her three children; they had been trying to flee their home in a taxi when she heard the driver saying he might rob her to steal her passport, so she ran out of the cab with her children in her bare feet,” Clayton recalled.

In Peel, both immigrant children and fee-paying international students are on the rise - the board processes some 5,000 newcomer children a year, said Clayton. The Toronto District School Board has accepted an average of about 7,000 students from outside Canada each year over the past four.

While the number of fee-paying students in the TDSB and across Canada is rising, thanks to rigorous recruiting - an international student pays $12,000 a year tuition for elementary school and $14,000 for high school in the TDSB - Toronto’s ranks of immigrant students are slipping as new Canadians seek more affordable housing in the cities around Toronto.