Chris Spence
Photo courtesy Hamilton Wentworth School Board

Andy Barrie: Chris Spence is an educator who's witnessed the results of fatherlessness in his classrooms and in school hallways. He's created a program that matches up men and boys who have no father in their lives. Chris started the program as a teacher with the Toronto District School Board. Today, "Boys 2 Men" is also flourishing in Hamilton, where Chris is director of education of the Hamilton-Wentworth schoolboard.

Chris Spence joins me in the studio. Hello, Chris.

Chris Spence: Good morning.

AB: If you were introduced at the beginning of the school year to a whole crowd of young men, do you think you could spot the ones that didn't have dads? Are there identifying charactistics in the way they behave?

CS: I don't know if you could do it right off the top but over the course of the year what we tend to see is a lot of angry young men with little or no respect for themselves or others, poor academic skills, poor life skills, limited problem solving skills. And what we saw was they really viewed school as temporary incarceration. They were there to hang out, have fun with no focus, no engagement in school whatsoever.

AB: As a black man — as a black principal — did you feel a special sense of responsibility to these black students?

CS: Absolutely. One of the reasons I got into education was because I wanted to make a difference. I got into education because I started working in the criminal justice system, in detention centres ... you had kids — 12, 13, 14 years old — that had just about exhausted everything in terms of support in society so now they were in detention. So my thing was I'm going to try to get these kids before they get into detention and the school system is a place uniquely positioned to do that.

AB: Frustrating though. I mean you're an educator. One would like to believe you wouldn't have to take up a child's life before he even got into school and deal with issues that have nothing to do — formally I guess — with education.

CS: Absolutely, but you keep asking yourself if not you, who's going to do it? And if not now, when's it going to happen? And if you look at data around this and life opportunities if you don't stay in school and they're not great. So we felt a real moral purpose to make a difference in their lives.

AB: Who are the men who mentor? Tell me a little about them.

CS: Well, mentoring is something you can't mandate. People have to have a real strong moral purpose to want to do something like that. And because trust is such a big and significant part of mentoring we started with teachers in the school who had an incliation to want to work with some of these kids who were at risk and wanted to make a positive impact on them so we started with that and as we progressed in the program, we engaged other people in the community who stepped up and said what can I do to help?

AB: But a mentor or surrogate father still does not erase the core experience of the dad you did not have. So how much of a difference can a mentor make — can it erase that sense of loss in a child who feels he wasn't important enough for his dad to stick around to watch him grow up?

CS: I don't think it can erase it. Like you say, it can make a positive difference. Over the course of this program which has been in place almost 12 years, we have seen that impact - kids absolutely lost, at risk, all the indicators of kids heading for a life of crime and deviance who have, because of the mentoring relationship, turned their life around and are doing some wonderful things.

AB: Pick a kid. Tell me a story.

CS: I'm going to tell you about Sammy. Very positive impact on me. It started out, every day, Sammy at 11 years old, every day sitting on the front steps of our school. And I thought, why is he out there every single day? Went and talked to Sammy... you know he was having difficulty at his elementary school... again, no father, no positive male role model. Anyway we started to engage him even though he wasn't in that school yet — he was just grade 5 — got him hooked up with a mentor and over time we saw some positive changes. I just heard from him three, four months ago. He's doing well, got a job. And you know one of the things for Sammy is he ended up gravitating towards the wrong people, getting into difficult situations, and he did continue to have some of those bumps (he just got out of jail)... but he's doing okay now.

AB: How many Sammy's have you got?

CS: I'm going to say thousands.

AB: And do you have any evidence that apart from what else they got right in their life, that they'll be permanent parts of the lives of the children they father?

CS: That's one of the things we try to get them to think about — not repeating the cycle. For a lot of them, not having a father is a significant impact. What kind of life do you want for your kids? How involved are you going to be? It's really about rites of passage for these kids and without a father, how does it happen? And so how do you become a man? It's more than just turning 16, 18 or 21.

AB: Well, it's wonderful that you're helping them through those rites of passage. Thanks for talking to us.

CS: Thank you.

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