Ursula Franklin Academy

Welcome to Ursula Franklin Academy

Principal: Georgia Gallagher 

Ursula Franklin Academy (colloquially known as UFA; pronounced as oo-fah) is a high school located in the High Park neighbourhood of Toronto, Ontario, Canada and owned by the Toronto Board of Education until its merger into the Toronto District School Board.

At Ursula Franklin Academy, the values inform everything staff and principals do and believe to be important. When the school was founded in 1995, the original educators set out to build a school that would prepare their youth to lead and thrive in a rapidly changing world. Once they had established the core values for this new school, they sought a worthy individual to be our namesake. Dr. Ursula Franklin valued pacifism, social justice activism, and the importance of looking critically at how principals use technology – all values that blended perfectly with how they wanted to run the school. The five school values below guide us in creating a community where students can integrate their learning, take risks, continue to develop confidence and resilience, and, in the words of Dr. Franklin herself, go on to live lives that are “personally happy and publicly useful.”

UFA common goals:

• Focus on the UFA community and give us a communal sense of purpose beyond the curriculum
• Allow teachers to incorporate school values in their approach, teaching methodology, and evaluation
• Build values-based continuity in classes to help students understand their importance and follow through with them in and out of school
• Support the administration to make good decisions that shape the school experience
• Clarify for prospective students and parents whether and why they want to attend UFA
• Clarify what makes us different from other schools

Although UFA is a rather small school, many of its students and teachers participate in UFA's sports teams. Aside from the usual high school teams (boys' soccer, baseball, swim team), UFA offers some unusual sports. The Dragonboat Team and the Ultimate Team (a.k.a. the Ultimate Frisbee Team) are exemplary highlights. Although many teams are coached by teachers and/or "community coaches", some teams are coached and managed by UFA students (e.g. the Ultimate Team).

Wednesday Enrichment Program is a unique aspect of UFA as you know students are able to take up to 24 mini-courses each year over and above the regular eight credit courses, they take annually to graduate high school. Regular teaching faculty are not the only ones to teach these courses: students, parents, and community members step up to offer a wide variety of exciting educational experiences for students (always under the supervision of a regular, though).
On Wednesdays, UFA offers students a program with hundreds of courses to choose from throughout the year. Some examples include Robotics, Debating, Literary Reviews, Yoga, Walking Tours, along with many other wonderful opportunities for skill-based learning and “out of the box” experiences.

The world can become very small if you’re close-minded. Thinking outside the box can expand your worldview, allowing you to have a greater perspective on the events and happenings in your career (and in life). When you’re willing to consider alternative points of view and ways of doing things, you’ll be more open to a variety of different points of view and potential solutions.
A greater perspective can make you more receptive to different ideas, which means that you won’t be limited by a small worldview. When you’re open to limitless possibilities, the possibilities are endless!