Homework club making a difference in Glendower

Homework club making a difference in Glendower. Ashli Agate, clockwise from left, Cyleta Gibson-Sealy, Serrina Desmond-Robinson, Rebekah Webster, Keishawna Wright and Loydaizha Salmon-Hastings read during a session of the Glendower Homework Club. Gibson-Sealy recently received a Community Safety Award for initiating the club. Staff photo/DAN PEARCE

One night, as Cyleta Gibson-Sealy sat on her front step in Scarborough's Glendower community, a girl came to her, asking for a story.

Gibson-Sealy read Sam I Am to her, and Green Eggs and Ham.

"Community kids started gathering at my doorstep. Before I knew it I had 12 in my house and I thought, This cannot work," she recalled this week.

Gibson-Sealy looked for available space in a neighbourhood with almost none.

Last year, she started a homework club, "Beyond Academics" in ground-floor rooms at 2821 Birchmount Ave., a battered Toronto Community Housing high-rise at the heart of Glendower.

Gibson-Sealy is there, unpaid, after every school day waiting for 15 or more children, from age 14 down to four, to arrive. If she's not there, she said, "They come to my door and knock."

Some are nine years old and reading at a Grade 1 level.

Last year, three of them could hardly read a line. The girl carrying a puzzle book Monday from the shelves in a room freshly painted a bright yellow, Gibson-Sealy said, could barely read at all. "One or two words; that was it."

But with books from Frontier College, $500 from Community Housing for supplies and Gibson-Sealy's attention in groups, or one-on-one, the children, many of whom fell through cracks at school, are improving.

"She takes time to help us learn," said Loydaizha Salmon, 9, whose favourite book is a Ramona and Her Father, in which a girl "tries to stop her dad from smoking."

"Before, I could read but I read fast and I couldn't understand," Loydaizha said. "I wasn't stopping at periods and exclamation points."

Educated in Barbados, Gibson-Sealy is not a teacher, but she has taught these children how to do their homework, how to handle conflicts and how to apologize properly.

"If they have a problem very seldom are there any fists involved. They say 'This is what happened.'"

Every spare moment is spent watching and calling back children who have run into the other room and are up to mischief.

"Remember, I have eyes all over," she tells a girl.

She feeds them too - and what she can't get from a local food bank often comes from her own pocket.

In November, Gibson-Sealy received the Mayor's Community Safety Award from David Miller at City Hall. The $1,000 in prize money is being stretched as slowly as she can.

David Williams, principal of Highland Heights Junior Public School, which some of the children attend, said people there recognize Gibson-Sealy is "passionate about what she does."

Though Highland Heights has after-school tutoring too, "it's never enough," Williams said.

"We're grateful that she's providing that service."

Many of the parents work and don't have time to read homework, but they appreciate Gibson-Sealy and respect what she is doing, Michelle Grant of Glendower's residents association said this week.

"When the parents can't reach their kids about certain things, she does."

Also a member of the neighbourhood's crisis team, Gibson-Sealy said she wants her charges to feel good about where they live and not accept "what society says is the norm for them" which is that Glendower's children "don't learn."

"I don't expect anything from them that they cannot give," she added. "They can give more than they do."