Alicia Williams
The Magnetic Charm
Amy Hung
Seeing Red (and White and Blue)
Alicia Williams
Walking down the halls this year, you may have noticed that both the second and third floor have been painted red, white, or blue. A neat way to incorporate our school colours, if you're into that sort of tihng.
But at what price has this paint job come, and just where could that money have gone?
It's nice to think that we're improving our school, but, let's face it, it's only a superficial improvement.
What is the logic in painting our lockers, stairs, railings, and the 'oh so pretty' stripe along the wall, when Jarvis is in desperate need of textbooks, funding for additional teachers/support workers, and basic materials like chalk?
It's easy to point the finger at the Toronto District School Board (TDSB) for the seemingly unwise decisions made with school funds. However, according to the TDSB Funding Crisis Report of 2001-2002, the TDSB needs $420 per student for Grade 11 textbooks alone, but receives only $200 - less than half of what is needed.
Consider this: you are sitting in English Lit, and you have just been told that you must share a book with not one, but two other students because the school doesn't have enough books. In fact, you're being encouraged to buy your own book, just so that you don't have to share.
Now you do the math: 15 bucks a book x 6 books = 90 dollars, money that you might not have. "We should have to pay for the perks, you know, yearbooks and such, but not the necessities," Alana Hamilton, OAC, explains. "It's public school; it's supposed to be free. I don't care if my locker is brown."
So I pose this question to you: is spending $90 a year, on one class, free?
I didn't think so.
The trail of money - or lack thereof - led me to the office of Jennifer McIntyre, Communications and Public Affairs for TDSB. "Funding is based upon three things: enrolment numbers, grants that are given to inner city schools, and special purposes like special education programs."
Jarvis, being an inner city school and having approximately 1300 students enrolled, should have a large amount of funding, right? Wrong.
"We used to be able to raise or create taxes, but the provincial government has gotten involved and they are in control of the purse strings," McIntyre continued. In other words, the school board has no real say over what is sent to each school.
The Board submits a budget and the provincial government allocates a certain amount to the Board. It is then broken down, given out to schools under TDSB, and sent by the school accordingly... or so the story goes.
So what happens next? Where does it go from there?Is the principal at fault? Is it a department fumble?
Mr. Caldwell, the English department head, summed up the problem. "Unfortunately, we get funding that we have no choice about spending. It's either spend it on what we tell you or we take it back."
So then how is the funding allocated to the departments? "Normally, until the numerous cutbacks, it was a student-to-department allocation. Naturally, the Math and English departments would get the most funding, but now we're unsure of how much money we're going to get."
At the end of my interview with Mr. Caldwell, he raised an interesting issue I had not even thought of. "Another problem is that because the government is telling us how to spend, it's also telling us what to spend it on. We can only buy books that have - literally - the provincial stamp of approval on it, limiting us a great deal."
My pursuit of answers led me to the office of the principal, Mrs. McKenzie. I asked her why, if funding is so tight, have we painted the lockers? "Well, actually, you have to understand that the money comes from two different pots. I had to actually apply for it. I wrote a letter asking the LEEP Project - the Learning Environment Enhancement Program - to come to our school to paint our lockers."
But why can't Mrs. McKenzie use the funding for more practical improvements; the washrooms, textbooks, desks even? "Well, we get the money for 'facilities improvement' and much of it already divided into set categories that we must abide by."
In all fairness, Jarvis is doing the best it can with what little it is receiving. Ana Saravolac, Grade 12, agrees. "I think it [painting the lockers] is good, because we have to keep up the appearance of Jarvis." After a brief pause, Ana continued. "Making us pay for Drama fees and English Lit novels is justified."
In fact, some departments are not suffering from the cutbacks.
Mr. Sumi of the Math department summed up their situation. "Well, maybe it has something to do with the number of books they [the English dept] require. We're fortunate that we can purchase one textbook per grade."
Mrs. Archer of the Languages department explains, "I haven't had any problems getting the textbooks I have needed. So far, Latin and Classics students have what they need."
Other teachers aren't so lucky. Mr. Humphrey must force his students to share a textbook because he doesn't even have a class set. Students in both classes must share with another person in the class and are unable to take the books home, making it next to impossible to study for tests.
The irony however is that Mrs. Archer has only five students in her OAC Latin class, whereas the Classic Civ classes have ten times that amount.
"At the bare minimum, it would be nice to have my own textbook that I could read in class, even if I can't take it home. It's ridiculous; I end up getting so distracted when I share with someone else," Sarah Cram, OAC, vents about the predicament.
It's alarming how fast public education is becoming a Poor Man's institution.
And it's only going to get worse: the TDSB Funding Crisis Report of 2001-2002 says that "the Board is required to reduce its budget by another $150 million - permanently - by September 1st, 2003."
Where is the school board going to make up these cuts?
I get the sickening feeling that in the next 10 years, we'll see numerous schools across Ontario being torn down because of a lack of funding.
A popular suggestion is for each school to have fundraisers, but this places the onus on the school.
"I don't think that's a good idea, because that takes the responsibility off the government, and we need to push the government to find money for public schools," Ms. Beaudry of the History department states her concern.
If we are reduced to fundraising as a means to buy materials, ten inner city schools are, more often than not, going to be left out in the cold.
But there is no reason to fret, Jarvis. Even if you find yourself learning nothing at school, you can take solace in the fact that the lockers at Jarvis will look good.
That is, until the shoddy paint job starts to chip away. Wait... isn't that already happening?
The Magnetic Charm
Amy Hung
Or, umm, lack thereof.
It's Spring Fest 2002 and hundreds of students are lining up impatiently outside of the second floor Social Sciences' rooms. They're anxiously waiting to get their hands on the books that caretakers hauled to Room 410 a week earlier.
It's the Jarvis Magnet, of course, also - or rather better - known as the school yearbook.
Fast forward to a few days later: students everywhere are seen with the 2001-2002 edition of the Magnet. However, complaints are almost equal to the number of the silver-bound books.
In the Magnet Office, the yearbook staff acknowledges the negative critiques they are receiving for the yearbook. What they see is over a thousand students picking apart a monument that they spent hundreds of hours creating.
"They'll never know," mutters Vejetha Balasingam, editor of the 2001-2002 Magnet. "Students will never see how hard we worked on this book and all of the hours we spent, locking ourselves in this office, trying to make this book perfect." Her voice becomes somewhat resentful. "And now, all they have to do is complain. Every little thing - don't they know that nobody's perfect?"
This article isn't a yearbook executive's cry for you to pity us - partly because I know you won't and partly because I don't need you to.
This article is for you to better understand the Magnet Staff and all of the hard work that we do. It's also a retort to some of the common complaints that we receive annually, so perhaps you should use this as a guideline before you file any complaints to us in the future.
Firstly, let me give you a little information about the Magnet Staff.
Our job is to capture a year of memories and place them into a tangible monument for over one thousand students. It's not that easy, especially when you take into consideration that our staff is made up of only fifty students. That's less than four percent of the Jarvis population trying to represent the whole school. using a Pentium II processor with 128MB RAM. (That basically means that our computer sucks.)
It's up to this four percent to produce 176 pages and, on average, it takes approximately three hours to produce each page. Now imagine the fifty students fighting to use the Pentium II to meet their three deadlines: late October, December and January.
That seems like a lot of time to you, doesn't it? Well, you've almost forgotten all of the time that the Magnet Staff depends on you, the students.
For example, do you remember how those jerks from the Grads section only gave graduates three weeks to hand in their forms? Or how the Clubs section asked for forms to be returned only two months into the year?
"We give you deadlines and you don't meet them. We have a deadline. We have to meet it, even if it means without you!" says Elizabeth Ma, editor of the 2002-2003 Magnet.
You must be wondering why we give you so little time if it appears like the only thing we do is stick pictures and text on each page. Well, it's a little - who am I kidding, it's a lot - more work than that.
For every movement and placement of every picture, for even the smallest adjustment of every piece of text (even if we just wanted to bold it), an instruction page must be written to accompany the layout.
If you ask Jenny Trinh, an editor of the Mugs section past and present, she'll tell you, "It would be seven at night and the caretakers would have already turned off the lights to the whole floor and we'd be stuck in the office, just labeling where on a page each picture would go - and there were over a thousand of them!"
Think that's hard? Learn how cropping works from Gloria Seto, a Grads section editor. "We have to crop every picture to a certain ratio. So if the width is a certain length, then the height has to be a certain length. And we have to measure everything [by hand] to the half millimeter or else pictures get distorted." To add to that, "There are hundreds of pictures, four of us and only one paper-sized cropping table."
Now that you know some of what the Magnet Staff goes through, I'd like to reply to some key issues that tend to arise regarding the yearbook.
Do you remember how many of you looked at the cover page, or the artwork, or the whole book and said that it sucked? Then you may remember when the Magnet was asking for your help in each of these fields. And you must remember when you didn't consider doing anything at all for the Magnet.
And no, for those who claim it, you couldn't have done better. Since you didn't do anything and, you shouldn't bash those who did make an effort.
Now to your complaints of how we never put any pictures of you in the yearbook. It's ironic because you tend to be the same people who whine incessantly about how we better not put you in the yearbook when one of our photographers takes a picture of you. Hate to say it, but you told us so.
Finally I'll address the mistakes that we made with names and print. I won't deny it; we make mistakes, but we only have one editor and she can't catch every little error. However, you have to realize that not all mistakes are ours.
Even the yearbook company admitted to making some errors in the Grads section of last year's Magnet, which students initially and still blame on the Magnet Staff. But if the mistake is related to spelling something wrong in one of your blurbs, ask yourself a question: is your writing legible? Remember, nobody's perfect.
So before you complain or whine or storm into our office without knocking, you should know that we poured our hearts and souls into the creation of the Magnet. We work with the time and the resources we have. We also need the help of you, the students, and if we don't get much - or if we don't get it on time - then we don't have a choice but to use what we have, even if it "sucks".
If you're not going to assist in creating the yearbook - which is also your book - then the least you can do is give credit to those who do. As Ms Ancans, the Magnet Staff Advisor said, "What rocks my socks is that out of a school population of 1300, we're lucky to sell 500 copies. What are we killing ourselves for? Jarvis students: wake up and support your school!"
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