History of the QBBE

In 1968, a group of Caribbean-Canadian Black educators who were informally working with Black youth in the city got together to form an organization in order to formalize the work they were doing. These individuals were mainly Quebec certified teachers, some university students and a couple of professors from the universities. They were shocked by the drop out rate of resident Black youth in the school system and the stories that they heard from these youths about the low expectations of theachers and indifference for their development and social and economic futues manefested by guidance counsellors and the school in general.

This was a tumultuous time in the educational activity in Montreal. Large numbers of immigrants from the Caribbean were arriving in the city. The school system had little or no knowledge of the didervse cultures of the immigrant youth, and was ill equipt tto deal with the problems that immigrant children brought to the schools. The situation was further exacerbated by the racist views held in some sectors of the society about Blacks and their capacities for social and intellectual development. These prejudices were later (1971) well documentd in Professor Robin Winks' history of the "Blacks in Canada."

These educators also noticed that there was a marked absence of Canadian born Blacks on the university campuses. This lead them to making the observation that, for Blacks, the route from the Caribbean to Mc Gill was shorter than the route from the local community and its schools to the university. There was no CEGEP system at that time. But clearly, there was something endemic in the school system that prevented local Blacks from completing high school.

The THE QUEBEC BOARD OF BLACK EDUCATORS (QBBE) was officially launched in 1969. Its immediate strategy was to develop three approaches to addressing and correcting the problem. Create its own remedial summer schools, work with the school boards and other local institutions, and work with the parents of the students to remove the barriers and advance the educational attainment of the Black child . Thus the DaCosta-Hall Program was launched in 1970. Dr Leo Bertley (deceased) was its first principal. Shortly thereafter, Ashton Lewis and Clarence Bayne negotiated a 17 Point Agreement on behalf of the QBBE with the PSBGM. This agreement was formally signed adn still defines and under-pins the continuing and formal collaborations between the two institutions. This was a key contributor to the PSBGM adopting a policy of Multicultural-Multiracial Education. Garvin Jeffers created the Bana Summer program in 1972 and was its first Principal. In 1976 he secured a grant for an all year round remedial program for elementary level students. In the nineties Curtis George(deceased)introduced an adult literacy program with funding from the Department of Multiculturalism as part of a Triparte collaboration involving the Jamaica Association of Montreal and the Black Studies Center. This lead to the creation of the QBBE organizational literacy program and the business incubation program at the BSC. Dr Clarence Bayne, after extensive research expanded that program, based on positive parenting and sense of commiunity concepts,to create the QBBE Homework Assistance and Family Programm/"The Positive Parenting Program."
In 2007-8 Bayne,working in collaboration with faculty and staff at John Molson School of Business (ICED),and with resources from the Black Studies Center and financing from Ville de Montreal and the EMSB, established the QBBE Business Summer School.