WATERLOO REGION — Attending high schools with students who are mostly white reminds Marissa Polanco and Sanaa Selby every day that they are different.
So it felt good to gather with hundreds of Black high school students to talk about how to achieve their dreams.
“It feels nice to see people who kind of look like me,” said Polanco, who is in Grade 10 at Galt Collegiate Institute.
Thursday’s one-day “Beating the Odds” conference drew more than 200 Black high school students to the Wilfrid Laurier University campus. Students attended workshops and heard from Laura Mae Lindo, Kitchener’s first Black member of provincial Parliament.
Polanco and Selby bonded in elementary school. “She was the only other Black girl that I can remember,” Polanco recalls.
Selby had no sense when she was younger what it means to be part of a minority.
“It took a long time as a child to understand that I was not white, to understand that when people looked at me they saw something different,” she recalls. “When you first realize that you don’t look like everyone else, it can come as a shock.”
The friends are 15 now and pondering their futures from different high schools.
Selby aspires to bring about change through a career in politics and law. She’s in Grade 10 in the enriched International Baccalaureate program at Glenview Park Secondary School in Cambridge. “School has always been something that my parents taught me to go get,” she said.
Polanco is thinking about becoming a teacher.
“I plan to continue my education because we need more Black people getting their education,” she said. “I’m always complaining that there are no Black teachers. Why don’t I just become that?”
To achieve their dreams they must also push through racial barriers.
“To even be noticed, you have to be so much better,” Polanco said.
Lindo told students not to bury the hurt they feel if stung by racism because that’s not how to get through it. “Yes, racism happens. Yes, it’s horrid,” she said. “Allow yourself to feel it.”
She told them to dream big and when somebody says no, to dream bigger. And she asked them to become leaders when typically they might say no to getting involved.
“Make this the year of yes,” she said.
Black students at Laurier helped organize the high school conference, held annually.
“Education is one of the ways you can progress in life,” said Michael Manful, 21, president of the Association of Black Students.
He figures high school counsellors must do more to help guide Black students toward diplomas, and toward more education after high school.
One in 13 students is Black in the region’s public and Catholic schools, a student census found in 2021.
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