By guest writer Courtney Farrow-Lawrence
Last September 2022, Surrey Place started a new program partnered with the Toronto District School Board. A classroom through the Education Community Partnership Program which challenged our conventional ways of both providing treatment and education, The Classroom Celebrating Neurodiversity. A classroom where we made space to uphold Indigenous understandings of healing and education. Our classroom also operates with the foundational belief that our children/youth are our teachers and community members with physical and/or neuro diversity have important gifts for us to learn from.
The Classroom Celebrating Neurodiversity supports youth from grades 10-12 who are diagnosed with FASD (Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder), or suspect they have FASD, who have not found success in the educational system and needed therapeutic support. Most of our students have been out of school for about 6 months prior to registering with our classroom and have significant trauma backgrounds and overlapping diagnoses. Our students finished off a momentous year: receiving excellent grades; attending school regularly and becoming leaders and teachers for our community.
In our classroom, there is a significant focus on Truth and Reconciliation. This year, our students had a ReconciliACTION challenge for us, they wanted to do an Orange Shirt Day project. A project that not only created awareness but created measurable change for at least one Indigenous family. A project that promoted accountability and responsibility as non-Indigenous and Indigenous community members on our journey together in Truth and Reconciliation. As a team, students developed and designed this T-shirt, created the project planning, and the milestones to execute the project.
Students named their fundraiser Housing is Sovereign Right with the goal of raising money to support an Indigenous family in Toronto with housing security. A social crisis they have all been impacted by and a social crisis many Indigenous community members have experienced due to colonization and residential schools. Everyone at Surrey Place is honoured that students have asked us to walk this part of their journey with them.
Please join us in supporting our students, the neurodiversity, and the Indigenous community by purchasing a shirt for Orange Shirt Day. As of the beginning of September, over 390 shirts have been sold raising over $4,500! Shirts will be shipped by the students on September 11-12.
More about Orange Shirt Day:
Orange Shirt Day is an Indigenous-led grassroots commemorative day founded by Phyllis Webstad, a Northern Secwpemc (Shuswap) from the Stswecem’c Xgat’tem First Nation (Canoe Creek Indian Band), who turned her residential school experience into a powerful tool for reconciliation through Orange Shirt Day. The orange shirt is a symbol of the stripping away of culture, freedom and self-esteem experienced by Indigenous children over generations. The day is an opportunity to create meaningful discussions about the effects of residential schools and the legacy they have left behind. It’s a day for survivors to be reaffirmed that they matter, and so do those that have been affected. - https://orangeshirtday.org/
