Toronto's Specialized Arts High Schools

Etobicoke School of the Arts opened September 8, 1981, and is described by its own administration as the oldest freestanding, arts-focused high school in Canada — a school dedicated to the arts as its sole mandate, rather than an arts program housed inside a comprehensive high school. Students major in dance, drama, film, music, musical theatre or visual arts alongside the standard Ontario curriculum.

Claude Watson and Rosedale Heights

Claude Watson School for the Arts is technically an elementary and middle program, not a high school: the former North York Board of Education proposed a program for artistically gifted students in 1980, and Claude Watson opened in 1981. Its continuation for older students is the Claude Watson Secondary Arts Program, introduced in 1982 and run out of Earl Haig Secondary School. Rosedale Heights School of the Arts, at 711 Bloor Street East, has an older building history — it operated for decades as Castle Frank Secondary School — before being rebranded as an arts-focused school in the 1990s.

A pre-amalgamation legacy

These schools sit within a broader Toronto District School Board "Specialized Programs" structure that also includes arts streams at other secondary schools. Most of these programs originated in the individual pre-amalgamation boards of the 1980s and '90s — Etobicoke, North York — and were folded into the TDSB's district-wide offerings after 1998, giving Toronto an unusually dense concentration of standalone public arts high schools.

Sources

• Etobicoke School of the Arts — About ESA
• Toronto District School Board — Specialized Programs (Arts)

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