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From Pakenham to Plantagenet, from Long Sault to Glen Tay, the little country school is under attack.
The Upper Canada District School Board is undergoing a massive review of its 86 schools, with an eye to closing as many as 29. Striking in the first of wave of 16 is the number of villages, hamlets or country crossroads that might lose the only elementary schools they’ve ever had.
Unlike in an urban setting, where students can deal with school closures as a program inconvenience or transport issue, the shutting of single-community schools is being viewed as the further ripping apart of Ontario’s rural fabric.
“It’s definitely an attack on rural living,” said Jennifer Downey, chair of the school council at Pakenham and part of a fifth-generation family on a cash-crop farm outside the village. “Our school is the heart of our community.”
Not only did the board just spend more than $200,000 on renovations on the 48-year-old building, but it forms part of a communal hub west of Ottawa that includes an arena, curling rink, library and daycare.
“One of the reasons we chose to put our kids there is for the small community feel that the school offers. You walk into that school right now and every child knows every child.”
The plan is to bus the JK-to-Grade 6 children about 17 kilometres to a school in Almonte. Downey is part of grassroots campaign — banners, petitions, political arm-twisting — trying to stop it. (Adds Brockville-area MPP Steve Clark: “This just feeds the rural-urban divide in Ontario.”)
Unused capacity is the main engine of change, and Pakenham illustrates the board’s dilemma. There are 90 students in a school with a “utilization”, on paper, of 176.
Across the sprawling board, which goes from the edge of Arnprior to Cornwall to Hawkesbury, there are 36,000 students and 9,800 unused spaces — the equivalent of 30 empty schools. In the elementary panel, 23 schools are less than 60 per cent full, with five schools holding fewer than 75 pupils.
The capacity issue is an important one for the board because it can’t access Ontario funds for new schools as long as it has so many empty spaces.
But neither are things that simple.
Look at the village of Long Sault, a community in the St. Lawrence River valley, west of Cornwall, created when the Seaway was built in the late 1950s. (It was a “planned” community, but who plans a community without a school?)
Its only English elementary public school — a JK-to-Grade 6 program — is at 96-per-cent capacity, with 270 students. Still, the plan is to close the school and bus the students about 10 kms west to Ingleside, to fill up a JK-to-Grade 12 school called Rothwell-Osnabruck. (Those high school students would, in turn, be bused to Cornwall.)
“We have a lot of people investing in the community and now we’re going to be without a school,” said Dale Rudderham, chair of the school council, with two children at Longue Sault public, which uses the alternative spelling of the famous river rapids.
“We live rurally for a reason. We want them to go to a rural school.”
A recent survey, he added, showed about half the affected parents might transfer their children into the Catholic system rather than bus them too far away. “Everybody is fighting back. I haven’t met a person who has kids who thinks it’s a good idea.”
The aggrandized role of schools in small places is a repeated theme. At Sweet’s Corners, outside tiny Lyndhurst, the school has the township’s only full-sized track, a lit baseball diamond, soccer fields and a playground built with parent funding and sweat equity. Yet, it too, is on the block.
Phil Dawes is a superintendent at the board, which thinks of “community” not as a hamlet but on the basis of the feeder group of schools — usually three to five elementary schools that feed students into a single area high school.
He was asked if the board considers the impact on small communities where the public elementary school is the only option for education.
“I’d say, that’s where we’re at, right now, in the process. We want to hear that feedback. We want to hear how people are feeling about accessibility versus service delivery.”
The board makes the case in its 188-page draft report that a mix of programs (French immersion, English) can only be delivered at the neighbourhood level where numbers warrant.
“What we’re struggling with as a board is how to maintain the level of service we want to provide.” Furthermore, smaller schools are relatively expensive to operate (heat, light, clean) if much of the space is not being used.
Dawes says the board does have flexibility in the number of schools it can close. The plan is to shut 16 in June 2017 and a further 13 if accommodation funding is approved. A series of public meetings is scheduled from Nov. 10 to 16. A final report goes to the board Feb. 15.
To contact Kelly Egan, please call 613-726-5896 or email kegan@postmedia.com.
Twitter.com/kellyegancolumn
To contact Kelly Egan, please call 613-726-5896 or email kegan@postmedia.com
Twitter.com/kellyegancolumn
查看原文...
The Upper Canada District School Board is undergoing a massive review of its 86 schools, with an eye to closing as many as 29. Striking in the first of wave of 16 is the number of villages, hamlets or country crossroads that might lose the only elementary schools they’ve ever had.
Unlike in an urban setting, where students can deal with school closures as a program inconvenience or transport issue, the shutting of single-community schools is being viewed as the further ripping apart of Ontario’s rural fabric.
“It’s definitely an attack on rural living,” said Jennifer Downey, chair of the school council at Pakenham and part of a fifth-generation family on a cash-crop farm outside the village. “Our school is the heart of our community.”
Not only did the board just spend more than $200,000 on renovations on the 48-year-old building, but it forms part of a communal hub west of Ottawa that includes an arena, curling rink, library and daycare.
“One of the reasons we chose to put our kids there is for the small community feel that the school offers. You walk into that school right now and every child knows every child.”
The plan is to bus the JK-to-Grade 6 children about 17 kilometres to a school in Almonte. Downey is part of grassroots campaign — banners, petitions, political arm-twisting — trying to stop it. (Adds Brockville-area MPP Steve Clark: “This just feeds the rural-urban divide in Ontario.”)
Unused capacity is the main engine of change, and Pakenham illustrates the board’s dilemma. There are 90 students in a school with a “utilization”, on paper, of 176.
Across the sprawling board, which goes from the edge of Arnprior to Cornwall to Hawkesbury, there are 36,000 students and 9,800 unused spaces — the equivalent of 30 empty schools. In the elementary panel, 23 schools are less than 60 per cent full, with five schools holding fewer than 75 pupils.
The capacity issue is an important one for the board because it can’t access Ontario funds for new schools as long as it has so many empty spaces.
But neither are things that simple.
Look at the village of Long Sault, a community in the St. Lawrence River valley, west of Cornwall, created when the Seaway was built in the late 1950s. (It was a “planned” community, but who plans a community without a school?)
Its only English elementary public school — a JK-to-Grade 6 program — is at 96-per-cent capacity, with 270 students. Still, the plan is to close the school and bus the students about 10 kms west to Ingleside, to fill up a JK-to-Grade 12 school called Rothwell-Osnabruck. (Those high school students would, in turn, be bused to Cornwall.)
“We have a lot of people investing in the community and now we’re going to be without a school,” said Dale Rudderham, chair of the school council, with two children at Longue Sault public, which uses the alternative spelling of the famous river rapids.
“We live rurally for a reason. We want them to go to a rural school.”
A recent survey, he added, showed about half the affected parents might transfer their children into the Catholic system rather than bus them too far away. “Everybody is fighting back. I haven’t met a person who has kids who thinks it’s a good idea.”
The aggrandized role of schools in small places is a repeated theme. At Sweet’s Corners, outside tiny Lyndhurst, the school has the township’s only full-sized track, a lit baseball diamond, soccer fields and a playground built with parent funding and sweat equity. Yet, it too, is on the block.
Phil Dawes is a superintendent at the board, which thinks of “community” not as a hamlet but on the basis of the feeder group of schools — usually three to five elementary schools that feed students into a single area high school.
He was asked if the board considers the impact on small communities where the public elementary school is the only option for education.
“I’d say, that’s where we’re at, right now, in the process. We want to hear that feedback. We want to hear how people are feeling about accessibility versus service delivery.”
The board makes the case in its 188-page draft report that a mix of programs (French immersion, English) can only be delivered at the neighbourhood level where numbers warrant.
“What we’re struggling with as a board is how to maintain the level of service we want to provide.” Furthermore, smaller schools are relatively expensive to operate (heat, light, clean) if much of the space is not being used.
Dawes says the board does have flexibility in the number of schools it can close. The plan is to shut 16 in June 2017 and a further 13 if accommodation funding is approved. A series of public meetings is scheduled from Nov. 10 to 16. A final report goes to the board Feb. 15.
To contact Kelly Egan, please call 613-726-5896 or email kegan@postmedia.com.
Twitter.com/kellyegancolumn
To contact Kelly Egan, please call 613-726-5896 or email kegan@postmedia.com
Twitter.com/kellyegancolumn
查看原文...
