Talk:Midland Avenue Collegiate Institute

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I attended this school in 1983-1985 (I then switched to another high school for academic reasons). When I went back to visit it, it seemed to have been been a haven for a lot of gangs or other miscreants. This is likely what lead people to decide not to send their kids there, and thus lead to poor attendance. I wonder if anyone else might shed light on this. --Qed (talk) 07:44, 2 October 2009 (UTC)

what actually led to the demise of the school was probably people like you, who thought they were too good or better than the people that went there. I remember that in the 1980's, people would be switching schools and moving around to different high schools, as if it was a fashion trend. When I stated in the mid 80's many people wanted or already made the decision in grade 8 to go to other nearby schools especially... Winston Churchill, or David/Mary Thomson. Students in the area should not of been allowed to go to other schools, unless they were specializing in an academic area (which some school specialized in)....which was my case.

The school was located in a lower economic bracket area, and this was one of the issues. Eppleworth, and 675 Kennedy is the Public housing that was near by. It was a very safe unassuming housing complex until recently (later 2000's).

The school died because no one wanted to go there, even going back to the 1980's. By the mid 1990's it became an immigrant school, because no one wanted to go there...because it was mostly immigrants in the school. Immigrants, tend not to participate vocally when they are in a new country...they went unheard, and no one came to their and the school's rescue. They were steam rolled by the the new Toronto District school board, which was now centrally based in downtown and central north york. The Scarborough board of education was top notch in Canada...and was way better than the toronto board of education.

The joke is, the Toronto district school board is now renting space from Midland (bond college), in the repair hangar, to run alternative student education.

Ok, as to the shot at me for leaving Midland, my parents were the primary influence in that decision. I would have preferred not to have left the school which most of my friends attended. But either way, if people are leaving because they thought there were better schools, the question is how did Midland gain a reputation for not being good enough for their students? Are you saying there was some sort of elitism disease that all the nearby people were suddenly willfully afflicted with, and therefore its their fault? Did a bunch of other schools fail for the same reason?

Look. The two years before me students at Midland one way or another ranked very well on the University of Waterloo high-school math competitions. I too did this, making it three years in a row that Midland had students ranking well on these math tests. The school got very lucky in that the three of us just happened to attend, but based on that, the school should have concentrated on extra-curricular math programs or whatever and tried to build their reputation on that. But my parents took a hard look at the school and decided my math ability was not being cultivated there.

I think their shops were actually quite good, their art classes well equipped and they had an excellent track. I just don't get why they couldn't leverage that (and their lucky short term math thing) to make the school more attractive. "People didn't want to go there" doesn't sound right to me. Even if there was a switch in demographics towards immigrants, why couldn't the school sustain itself on an immigrant student body? Your explanation about the switch from the Scarborough school board to the Toronto school board makes some kind of sense though. It could just be that Midland was too far removed and could not be cultivated by Toronto-centric people. Qed (talk) 03:10, 10 June 2010 (UTC)

Merge this article with SCAS - same building.

I propose that Midland Avenue Collegiate Institute be merged into Scarborough Centre for Alternative Studies. I think that the content in the Midland Avenue Collegiate Institute article can easily be explained in the context of Scarborough Centre for Alternative Studies, and the Scarborough Centre for Alternative Studies article is of a reasonable size that the merging of Midland CI is due to that school is in the same building. FreshCorp619 (talk) 18:12, 7 April 2013 (UTC)

But wouldn't that leave the historical existence as a high school before it was an "Alternative Studies" center out of the picture? Qed (talk) 03:07, 10 April 2013 (UTC)