Author: Jacqueline Ronson

The Vancouver School Board will close schools for 10 additional days next year in order to partially offset a $17M budget deficit. Longer holidays will hurt vulnerable families and further stretch community resources.

Around 50 community members met Thursday to discuss education cuts at a town hall meeting hosted by Jenny Kwan, MLA Vancouver Mt. Pleasant, at the Strathcona Community Centre.

Some parents came with young children. Kwan announced in English and Chinese that translation could be made available those preferring to listen in Mandarin or Cantonese. A small group gathered in the back corner of the room for a whispered translation session.

Tom Barker of the Strathcona Parental Advisory Council said that the Strathcona Community Centre currently runs a Holiday Safe Space program over Christmas Holidays and March Break. The program serves 120 kids who are identified by their schools as “at risk,” and offers them structured activities while schools are closed.

One study found that while children from higher income families increase their learning over extended school breaks, the learning levels of children from low income families actually decrease, Barker said. Children from all income groups showed similar rates of increase in learning while school was in session.

“Inner city children are most vulnerable during extended school breaks,” Ron Suzuki from the Strathcona Community Centre said. “The saddest times of the year are Christmas and Spring Break.”

Suzuki said that the community centre will have to fundraise an extra $26,000 to cover the cost of additional programing during school closures. This funding could otherwise have gone towards needed renovations to the childcare centre or towards offsetting the Food Security Program budget deficit, Suzuki said.

The 10 additional school closure days were proposed as a one-time measure that will save the school board $1M. However, Patricia Badir of the Strathcona Community Centre worries that closures will continue indefinitely.

The Strathcona Community Centre has an amazing volunteer board of directors and an amazing staff that will find a way to put on great programming for the 10 extra school closure days, Badir said. “We solve these problems. We see a leak, we patch it up. We jump into the crisis and we solve it. But that just means that things will look okay to the school board. There will have been no disaster in Strathcona, and I’m worried about what that will mean for the next year.”

A camper van with barber shop candy stripes was parked Saturday outside the Temple of the Modern Girl Boutique on Main Street. In front of the van, a sign read, “Trim ya locks fo whatever ya gots.”

The Mount Pleasant Business Improvement Association was hosting a street party on Main Street between Broadway and 12th Avenue. Young families bought vintage purses, sampled artisan bread and perused the stands set up by local businesses and community organizations. Free valet bike parking was available.

A crowd gathered to watch Tom Farmer cut hair in exchange for food, clothing, beer or just about anything. One customer traded for a pair of cowboy boots. Farmer said that it’s weird having everyone watch you while you work, and that it can be exhausting always being the centre of attention. Still, the business relies on an element of performance.

Business has been good, Farmer said, and things have just snowballed since he set out on this adventure about five months ago. It took 34 cans of red and white spray paint to convert the van into a mobile barber shop. Farmer wears a nozzle from one of the cans as a pendant around his neck.

Farmer previously worked four years as a graphic designer in Melbourne, Australia, before losing his job in the economic downturn. A friend convinced him to come to Canada to help start the haircuts for trade business, Farmer said.

The mobile barber shop was not an official participant in the business improvement association’s Autumn Shift Festival. Simon Conway from the association said that they were none the less welcome to be there and offer their services.

Their presence has not always been so welcome. About six weeks ago, the team was cutting hair at Main and Broadway. Farmer said it was great, everyone loved them and they payed $7 a day in rent. However, they were asked to leave by the City of Vancouver. Farmer said he thinks that a local barber shop called to complain.

Conway said it would be fair for a regular tax-paying business to be upset, although it’s not nice to think of someone calling up city officials to complain.

Looking back, Farmer said that being forced to move on was for the best. They drove north to Nelson, where Farmer said his best memories of Canada were made. Near Kelowna, they made just enough money picking grapes to pay for fuel and food to get back to Vancouver. Farmer said he dreams of heading south to the United States, where it’s warmer.

When Pastor Joe Russell from the New Beginnings Baptist Church found out that Woodland Park was already booked for Saturday Sept. 19, he saw an opportunity.

The park had been booked by the Grandview-Woodland Community Policing Centre for their annual event, Cops, Kids and Commercial Drive.

By hosting the church’s community day in the same space, both New Beginnings and the community policing centre had the chance to reach out to people who might not otherwise come to their event.

From noon until 3 p.m., community policing centre volunteers led the activities. Kids could ride bikes through a traffic safety course, learn how to call 9-1-1, and meet a police dog.

The community policing centre hoped that by bringing families to Woodland Park, parents would feel safer coming back with their kids, Adrian Archambault said. When a parent complains that they feel uncomfortable in a park because there are “people hanging around,” it often says more about the person making the complaint than it does about the safety of the space, Archambault said.

A row of tables split the park two. From one table hung a banner that read “Everyone Welcome!” and in smaller print, “Aboriginals 4 Jesus.” Behind the tables, two grey-haired men gave Christian-themed books to children who stopped to look.

At 3 p.m. Cops Kids and Commercial Drive volunteers lowered tents, while churchgoers erected a small stage on the other side of the park. The congregation of New Beginnings, mostly aboriginal and poor, gathered.

Davie Paul rode up on a bicycle and was greeted with an embrace from Russell. Silver and black hairs strayed from under his backwards baseball cap. He asked, “Pastor Joe, are you going to feed us some good food today?” Paul turns 57 next month.

A girl asked Russell why the potato sack race hadn’t started. Her face was painted with a pink butterfly and decorated with sequins. Her wide grin exposed two missing front teeth, and the teeth on either side of the gap were capped in metal.

Dr. Don Bartlette came to the Baptist Church event as a guest speaker. Born with a cleft palate, Bartlette had spent 12 years as an outcast from his aboriginal community before finding God, he said.  Bartlette waived his usual $2000 speaking fee, Russell said. “I came to speak to my people,” Bartlette said.

The Baptist Church had encouraged its congregation to participate in the community policing centre’s event. “In our church we teach that cops are our friends,” Russell said, “even if there are some bad cops.”

Local band Legally Blind played Friday at a fundraiser for the legal defense of Vancouver activists arrested at this summer’s protests of the G-20 Summit in Toronto.

The lead singer resembled a young Johnny Rotten as he dedicated Pink Floyd’s We Don’t Need No Education to Premier Gordon Campbell. Next the band played original tune No G-20 on Stolen Land, formerly No Olympics on Stolen Land.

A banner over the stage at the Royal Canadian Legion on Commercial Drive read “Business as usual kills! Stop the tar sands,” and to the left of the stage hung of portrait of Queen Elizabeth II.

To the right, a slide show of photos from the G-20 protests were projected onto the wall. One depicted a person dressed in black throwing a rock through a Tim Hortons store front. Another showed a young man with dreadlocks embracing a young woman in front of Toronto’s Old City Hall.

The crowd mostly gathered near the bar at the back of the room, sipping beer. A few young women stood closer to the stage, moving their feet to the tempo of the music.

Outside, the thumping bass and drums were just vibrations coming through the walls, and friends gathered for conversation.

Lliam Brander said he spent most of the G-20 protests “trying not to look like an activist.” He went to Toronto in show of solidarity with activists who came west for protests against the Olympics earlier this year.

Brander was arrested while walking with a friend a block away from a planned anti-prison demonstration, he said. After being put under arrest, police searched his bag and found a few articles of black clothing. He was told that he was being charged for “disguise with intent.” His charge was later changed to “conspiracy to commit an indictable offense,” and was eventually dropped, Brander said.

Brander paid $300 out of pocket as a result of his arrest. $200 went to legal fees, while $100 went to a judge-mandated contribution to a charitable donation, Brander said. Friday’s event will help with those fees.

But the event was not just about raising money. Dawn Paley, a journalist who covered the protests in Toronto with the Vancouver Media Co-op, said, “A lot of people were really traumatized [at the G-20 protests]. It’s really good to have social space where we can talk about what happened and where we can celebrate the victories and where we can figure out where to go from here.”

Team Leader and mom Helen Spaxman had the best view of the action Saturday as over 200 volunteers gathered to build a new playground at Britannia Elementary Community School. Her station overlooked a sea of volunteers in red, and U2’s Beautiful Day blasted from speakers out over the crowd.

On top of a mountain of mulch, a small girl whose T-shirt fell to her ankles used a rake twice her size to move the wood chips at her feet onto a tarp so they could be hauled to the playground site. A blond boy handed screws, one by one, to a man who drilled them into the wood planks of an outdoor stage as two smaller children hovered over the action. The brightly painted play structure reflected the colours of the day: red shirts, yellow sun, blue sky.

Spaxman wore a red sequin visor and a purple jersey as she prepared wooden cut-outs of flowers, bees, butterflies and leaves to be painted by the children. The art was to be mounted on a fence overlooking the playground. The mural will tie into a larger conversation about the importance of bees and pollination. This lesson could be taught in the school’s new outdoor classroom, complete with blackboard, also erected yesterday. Students might also get the chance to care for a colony of live, kid-friendly mason bees in outdoor bee boxes.

In the planning stage, students were invited to draw their perfect playground. Many of their drawings included tire swings, so a tire swing was added to the design. As Spaxman explained, “we are literally building the playground of the students’ dreams.”

The view at Britannia Elementary has not always been so bright. Because of the proportion of students coming from poor families, the school has “inner city” designation. 60% of the students at the school are aboriginal. Parent Advisory Council  Chair Roxanne Gray, who is part aboriginal, said, “some aboriginal parents don’t even want to come in the building.”

But Gray is hopeful. She sees herself as a bridge between aboriginal and non-aboriginal communities at the school. For her, the new playground represents a turning point towards a brighter future. Gray’s eyes lit up as she spoke. “Come back and talk to me at the end of the school year. You are going to see big changes. You are going to see more parent participation, and happy, healthy, enthusiastic children. I’m really positive about this. I’m going to do everything I can to make it happen.”