Capital Campaign

Jackman ICS Building Campaign and Our Future

 An artist's rendering of the improved exterior of 56 Spadina
and the public entrance to the new Spadina Wing.
 

The Dr. Eric Jackman Institute of Child Study's Laboratory School (Nursery - Grade 6) enjoys its home-like environment in Toronto's beautiful Annex Landmark, the Leighton G. McCarthy House. The Laboratory School's 200 students and 20 staff shares McCarthy House with the Institute's Laidlaw Research Centre on the third floor, and with the almost 100 graduate students enrolled in the Master of Arts program in Child Study and Education. In addition, there are up to 50 doctoral students who work with the Institute's ten faculty members on various projects, covering topics in literacy, numeracy, early learning and development, early care standards, family literacy and parent programming, special education, technology as a classroom tool, and social development. A total of 375 people or more are regularly working in the current facility and it's tight!

Furthermore, a gymnasium (indoor) is desperately needed to serve our children in the Laboratory School. A dual purpose auditorium/gym would provide a large assembly space, serving all of the Institute's needs as well as providing important family and teacher outreach programs for the broader community, so vital to strengthening our mission and future.

Laboratory School families and community leaders have been instrumental in helping the Institute raise almost $11 million towards our Campaign Goal of $12 million to date. Nobel Prize-winning chemist and U of T professor John Polanyi has been a parent at Jackman ICS, and a strong supporter of the institute’s goals: “The Lab School draws on its scholarly links with a great university, but it does more; it transforms the study of children into a study of the entire world by children,” he says. “This enchanting enterprise, with which I have been associated one way or another for generations, now needs new space. It abundantly merits it.”