New Islamic school set to open in city

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This article was published 17/06/2023 (1205 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

While students and teachers look forward to the end of classes, new school trustee Delvinder Zamir anticipates piles of summer homework.

As the board chair of the yet-unnamed new Islamic elementary school supported by the Manitoba Islamic Association, Zamir plans to hire teachers, furnish classrooms and buy supplies before the institution opens its doors in September.

“It will be nice to see parents and kids come to a spiritual place where they can use it in a different way,” she says of the kindergarten to Grade 4 school to be based out of Winnipeg Grand Mosque and Community Centre on Waverley Street.

The fourth Islamic school in Winnipeg, this one is the first located at a mosque and run as a project by Manitoba Islamic Association, and the only one in southwest Winnipeg, says Zamir, who also serves as second vice-president of the MIA board. Members asked for a community-run Islamic school at the mosque since they faced waiting lists at other schools, she says.

The school will start small, with about 30 students expected in kindergarten and the early elementary grades during its inaugural year.

“Because the numbers are small, I think our ratio of students to teachers is really good,” says Zamir, the mother of a toddler.

“We’re looking for a smaller student-teacher ratio.”

She says the new school will operate in English and offer French and Arabic as additional languages and will follow the provincial curriculum as well as Islamic teaching, like how a Christian or Jewish school would enhance its program.

“Just like Catholics and other religious schools, there is religious education, but also education of values,” says Zamir.

She says the new school will also apply for provincial funding once the requisite waiting period of two years is over. Funded independent schools must teach the Manitoba curriculum, hire certified teachers and be legally incorporated. About 60 independent schools, many of them with a religious component, receive funding from the province.

The mosque’s library and some multi-purpose rooms at the west end of the building will be converted to classrooms over the summer, and the students will have access to the building’s large gymnasium, already busy with evening and weekend programming, says Zamir.

Students will not be near the recently constructed funeral home and body preparation space at the south end of the building, she says.

“As we grow, we’ll have to start for looking for new options” for housing the school, says Zamir.

She says tuition will be set at about $400 per month, with subsidies available to families who can’t afford the fees.

Across the city at Al Hijra Islamic School in Elmwood, enrolment has reached about 250 students from kindergarten to Grade 9, with plans to expand to high school, says board chair and school founder Abdo El Tassi.

He says the school board been encouraged to open another campus, but they have decided instead to construct a new gymnasium, three classrooms and a science lab at their Desalaberry Avenue location once the money is raised.

“It’s difficult for us to go to another place and to look after more than one property,” says the CEO of Peerless Garments, who has 12 grandchildren enrolled in the school.

Now in its 27th year, the school has served several generations of students, and created connections within Winnipeg’s diverse Muslim community, he says.

“It’s a big value for us in the community. I’ve always said an Islamic school is more important than a mosque,” says El Tassi, who declined becoming Manitoba’s lieutenant-governor last year because of his involvement in the school and other community groups.

“The school is a link between families and a link between generations.”

Zamir hopes the new Islamic school can also provide a safe place for Muslim children, as well as offer a comfort zone for recent newcomers to Canada who are already adjusting to so many new cultural practices.

“We want kids to be proud of their identity of being a Muslim and being able to dress a certain way and practise a certain way.”

brenda.suderman@freepress.mb.ca

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