In the hallways of St. Demetrius Catholic School in Etobicoke, there is a flurry of activity as Ms. Farrugia’s first-grade class has just been let out for the day. The six- and seven-year-olds are putting on their snowsuits and getting ready to head home. Parents are waiting eagerly outside, mostly mothers. The children’s fathers are back home in Ukraine.
The students of the Toronto school are all of Ukrainian descent. Nearly half of them arrived in the last year.
“February 24th hit. About two weeks later, we started to receive students,” recalled Lily Hordienko, the school’s principal.
“Then they started coming in droves … and they’re still coming.”
On the day Global News visited the school, three more students from Ukraine were registered for classes.
“We realized we needed more classrooms, more space, more teachers … we had more portables put in,” said Hordienko.
The school now has a total of six portables outside the building to accommodate the growing needs.
The walls of the school are painted in bright colours, but most obvious are the blue and yellow marking Ukraine’s national flag.
As the children gather their belongings, some are speaking in English, but most are chatting in their native Ukrainian.
“When they arrive, they hear Ukrainian, they pray in Ukrainian, we sing the anthem for both Canada and Ukraine and so they at least feel that they’re home, they’re amongst their own people,” said Hordienko.
Now principal of the school, Hordienko attended as a child and then sent her own children.
“It’s a community that keeps us all coming back. It covers from little ones to older ones,” she said.
St. Demetrius Catholic School is an Eastern Rite school within the Toronto Catholic District School Board that has been in existence for 45 years.
It is located in what has become a hub for the Ukrainian community in Ontario. The school is nestled between a Ukrainian seniors’ residence and a Ukrainian church, St. Demetrius the Great Martyr Parish. There is also a Ukrainian credit union serving the nearby senior population.
A true community in every sense of the word, which is precisely what the newcomers need when they arrive, explained the church’s associate pastor, Father Bohdan Swystun.
“A few weeks after the invasion began, people started to arrive in Canada,” said Swystun. “As people were filling out visas, we’d have calls from Poland or Germany and other countries saying, ‘Is there places to stay around your church? Because we’ve heard about your church, we heard about your school.'”
Swystun said his own parents came to Canada as refugees after the Second World War so there is a deep sense of understanding among parishioners.
“A lot of our parishioners came escaping poverty … so we all know what it’s like to be resettled, what it is to not have all the things that everybody else has. So everybody in the community has gone through that at some point or somebody in their family has. So when someone in need appears at our doorstep, we all roll up our sleeves and make them welcome,” he said.
Some of the older Ukrainian refugee students from St. Demetrius join the seniors at the church for pierogi-making sessions.
“These ladies remind them of their grandmas so they sit beside these ladies, most of them already know how to make pierogies, they sit, they bond, they share stories. So it’s this intergenerational support as well,” added Swystun.
With the support of the school, the church and the community, the refugee families receive gift cards and weekly deliveries of groceries.
The school’s library has also been transformed into a space where families can visit to access free dried food, fresh bread and warm children’s clothes, should they need them.
Hordienko calls it a “holistic approach” to helping the refugees feel welcome.
“Almost everybody has family back in Ukraine so we were living and breathing it with our newcomers,” she said.
In one of the portables, teacher Lisa Perri prepares her Grade 8 class for a project they will embark on for Black History Month.
She slowly articulates the objective and begins to ask the students questions.
The children appear shy at first but then several of them raise their hands.
Some of them use Google Translate on their computers because language remains a challenge.
“There’s a lot of students that did come with no English … on their computers, they can use a translation app and that kind of helps them to get comfortable and it helps us to communicate with us when we’re having a difficult time getting what we want to say across,” said Perri.
Teaching is only one part of Perri’s job.
“A lot of these students have come with very little or nothing. They’ve escaped a hardship that’s even difficult for us to imagine,” she said. “They’re coming with oftentimes only one parent, perhaps no parents and a sponsor. They’re coming with limited resources. So it’s been difficult for us to try and make sure that not only are they set up academically, but especially emotionally.”
“They’re looking after the mental health for these kids. Did they have a lunch? Do they have a snack? … The staff has been unbelievable,” said Hordienko.
The bell rings. It’s Friday afternoon. The students are heading home for the weekend. Some of the little ones stop to hug Hordienko on their way out. She speaks to them in Ukrainian and they smile.
“Nothing is traditional about what has been going on here this last year,” she said.
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