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| Dr. Fraser Mustard |
When school begins in barely a week’s time, Thorncliffe Park will be the focus of one of the largest commitments to the education of kindergartners in the country. The new Fraser Mustard Learning Academy will have spaces for some 700 five-year-olds. It will be a congregation of races, religions and cultures seldom if ever seen in Toronto even for a city so famously pluralistic. The adjoining Thorncliffe Park Public School is said to embrace kids of 47 national extractions and we may be sure that the Mustard Academy will be no less varied. At the same time, the citizenship of the vast majority of all these children is Canadian. The large two-story building has been three years in the construction and is named after the distinguished physician and specialist in childhood education James Fraser Mustard. Dr Mustard died in 2011 at the age of 84. His roots were well established here. As a child he attended Whitney Public School in Moore Park. The academy is said to accommodate 28 full day kindergarten classes. It would no doubt please Dr. Mustard who strongly believed that a child’s first six years shape the grown-up-to-be for life. The academy is operated by the Toronto and District School Board.
