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Muslim school to open in Kitchener this fall
4-08-2014
KITCHENER — You don’t have to be Muslim to send your kids to Kitchener’s first Muslim school.
“The school is open to everybody,” said Rania Lawendy, academic adviser for the Muslim Association of Canada’s new Maple Grove School on Courtland Avenue.
“Anyone who wants to join is able to join.”
Lawendy, who also serves as the Muslim chaplain at the University of Waterloo, says the high-quality private school’s commitment to “character” education will include the study of Arabic and the Qur’an. Arabic helps students understand the Qur’an and vice versa. Such “character” education is aimed at universal, faith-based values such as respect, leadership, diversity and citizenship, she said.
Tuition will be about $4,000 a year, with junior kindergarten through Grade 8 classes beginning in September in the former St. Joseph Catholic elementary school, which had housed one of the Catholic school board’s adult learning centres until last June.
Lawendy said a licensed child-care program will continue at the century-old school.
A deal to purchase the building from the board, which declared the property surplus a decade ago, closes in July. Lawendy said it will cost $2.5 million to buy and renovate the building.
She said an open house at the facility last weekend drew 400 people for a tour that ended with 40 students registering for the coming year. Lawendy expects 100-120 students at the school during its first year of operation.
Lawendy, who runs similar Islamic classes at Waterloo Collegiate on weekends, said the feedback from the community has been overwhelmingly positive to the Maple Grove school, a sister school to Olive Grove elementary in Mississauga.
“We even had people come to the open house who weren’t Muslim,” she said. “And they were saying, ‘Good for you.’ “
Lawendy says Maple Grove will keep a school open, benefit the community and erase any negative feelings that some in the community might hold.
“You don’t want a school to die,” she said.
“It’s going to be a typical Ontario curriculum school. I think there’s always some people who will have mixed feelings when there is change. I think they will see within a year or two that they will be an asset to the neighbourhood.”
Lawendy believes the school will be a drawing card that brings Muslim families to the region and keeps others from leaving for Toronto. Lawendy said Maple Grove will be the first Muslim school in Waterloo Region housed in an actual school building, albeit one that needs significant updating.
“We already had three families tell us they were moving to Kitchener-Waterloo because of the school. We’re really exited about that.”
Lawendy also said low-income families who want to send their kids to the school will be eligible to get help through a Muslim Association of Canada education fund.
More tours of the former St. Joseph building will be held in the coming months, she said.
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