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Toronto's most unlikely high school is a skateboard factory

by Chris Dart

Oasis Skateboard Factory isn’t your typical high school. The program, which is part of Toronto’s three-campus Oasis Alternative Secondary School, is run out of a single room in a downtown Toronto community centre, and students don’t really go to class, per se. Instead, they work on building their own skateboard brands and running a design business.

“People look at skateboards and say ‘Oh, that’s just a toy kids play with,' but embedded in that you have math, English, design and technology,” says teacher Craig Morrison. “We just did a project with Spacing Magazine with Toronto icons, so there’s a history component… then obviously all the business curriculum because they’re constantly marketing their skateboards.”

Morrison, who taught art at Oasis’ Arts and Social Change program, ran a skateboard building class with some help from local custom skateboard company Roarockit. He saw how those workshops manage to captivate students who were deemed “at-risk” and had struggled in school.

He wound up pitching a program that aimed to “marry art and business.” Six years on, the program has two teachers, and Morrison says that a student could get the bulk of the credits they need to finish high school from the program. He adds that the real success has been getting students at risk of dropping out interested in school again and thinking about their futures.

“We have students who never imagined they’d graduate high school graduating high school,” he says. “We have students who are the first people in their family to graduate high school. We have a 90 percent course achievement rate every year… every one of our students who applied to college last year got in.”

Gage McGregor is one of those students. The 16 year-old is in his first year at the Skateboard Factory. He says that he started having trouble in school after moving from Quebec to Toronto and eventually started “slowly not going.”

Now, McGregor says he loves school and is “fascinated” with entrepreneurship. In fact, he’s already filling orders for decks from his brand, Filth Skateboards. The deck, which features a stencil of his face turned into a zombie, was an instant hit with his friends.

“They were like ‘I’d love to boardslide on your face,’ so I’ve sold a bunch to them,” McGregor said.

In addition to running their own brands, the students at the Skateboard Factory also do design jobs for businesses around the city, doing mural painting, signs and T-shirts, as well as running board-building workshops at the Art Gallery of Ontario and working with middle school students. All those deals are, by-and-large, managed by a group of students in the school’s leadership program. One of those students is Nicole Peterson, known around the school as “Petey.” Listening to her rattle off her list of clients, you forget she’s only 17 years old. Instead, she sounds like any other young, driven entrepreneur.

“You’re in charge of paperwork, working with clients, making sure they’re satisfied, going out and meeting them,” she says. “You’re the one that has to have everything organized at the end of the day.”

Morrison says that the program is proof that, for a lot of struggling students, all they need to succeed in school is a school that gets them.

“All the students are engaged in what they’re doing, working hard, helping each other out. They’re basically everything you could want in a student,” he says. “And these were… kids other teachers had trouble with, but change the context and watch what happens.”