Comments on: UPDATED: Prairie Valley SD does its part to help Climate Change along

By: Saskboy

Saskboy — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 05:41:25 +0000

Not quite the same class, I finished university in 2003. Randy is the best. I saw him this year giving a presentation on distance education. If the fools shutting schools had attended, they’d see that there’s no need to keep accredited teachers in tiny towns, when you have people like Randy on demand. City schools are using satellite classes!

By: Sarah

Sarah — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 05:15:45 +0000

Small world! Were we in the same class (January-June 2003)? I was one of those annoying people that would actually call in….hahaha. Great mark in Calc, btw- I’d definitely say we had a good teacher!

Thanks again for bringing attention to this issue…it’s nice to find someone who understands what it’s like to have to fight to keep your school.

By: Saskboy

Saskboy — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 04:38:31 +0000

Excellent comment Sarah. I took calc through SCN too, Randy’s class. I got 94% in UofR calculus first semester.

By: Sarah

Sarah — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 04:34:27 +0000

Hey, everyone- I graduated from Glenavon School in 2003 (was it really that long ago?), and I’ve been paying pretty close attention to the school closure (my brothers are 15 and 10, so it has really affected my family). Just to vouch for small-town education- one of my profs at the U of R said he could always tell which kids in his lab section were from small towns- they were much better at working independently, and were generally more likely to look something up on their own than to sit and wait for the teacher’s help (no doubt this has to do with being in a split grade classroom and only having 50% of the teacher’s time). Now, I’m not saying that small towns have BETTER education- just that bigger isn’t always better. Yeah, we didn’t always have the most advanced computers, or the most impressive science labs, but we learned what we needed to. And along the way we learned perserverance, honesty, independance, and the value of working together. I took Calculus through the SCN program, which I found to be an amazing experience. Did it adequately prepare me for University Calculus? Well, I got 99% in my first-year Calc class at the U of R. You tell me. Now I’m finishing up my third year of Optometry School at the University of Waterloo. Could I have accomplished this with inadequate primary and secondary education? The argument can be made that some students will do well regardless of the learning environment, but I feel that this argument is weak at best. Attending Glenavon School taught me everything I needed to do well at university- including independent study skills, which a lot of students have trouble with. Just thought I’d rant a little bit, and let everyone know that just because you’re from a small town doesn’t mean the sky’s the limit… the only difference is we know how to pick ourselves up when we fall.

Thanks for reading!

By: Brian S

Brian S — Fri, 01 Jun 2007 00:53:16 +0000

The provincial governments don’t care about what goes on outside Circle Drive, Ring Road or the Perimeter Highway (MB) Their electoral base is urban……. plain and simple.

Closing smaller schools is not the beginning. They have allowed the closure of railroads, elevators, reduced funding to rural highways and roads. The cost of fuel now is making it very difficult to drive the extra distances to receive the services that they are gutting out of rural Manitoba and Saskatchewan.

Can you imagine if a person living in Winnipeg or Regina had to drive 35 miles to their nearest hospital, or put their kids on a bus for 2 hours? There would be a quick change in Government if they did.

By: Saskboy

Saskboy — Mon, 28 May 2007 18:49:51 +0000

I drove through Borden yesterday evening. The school there is probably best known for it’s Grade 3/4 class who call John Gormley’s contest every week :-)

By: Tanya

Tanya — Sun, 27 May 2007 04:59:08 +0000

I attended a small town high school and although I had some good teachers, the quality of education did not compare in any way to the quality I received while I attended my final year of grade 12. I got to take Calculus and they weren’t going to offer it because there wasn’t enough interest in it.

But that was before the internet made so much material avaliable. I would most definitely take any course possible if the internet had been available and I agree that we should be using it to our benefit. There is no reason why these small schools should be sacrificed just to maintain a larger-school environment. It’s a shame that they are going this route.

My dad and his family lives in Borden and their school is going to be on the chopping block in the near future. If the goal of the government is to destroy these small communities, they are doing a damn good ob of it. Although small-town living does not suit me in the slightest, I grew up in a series of small towns and the last thing I would want to see is the rural Saskatchewan way of life disappear. It’s just wrong.

And we are going to have bucketloads of money when the next SaskParty government decides to develop nuclear power and we turn our planet into a dead smouldering crater. Ugh. I just really shouldn’t think about politics.

By: Saskboy

Saskboy — Fri, 11 May 2007 05:24:09 +0000

“There is something about small schools that make them an incredible place to grow up but maybe not to learn.”

There are good and bad sides to small schools, just as there are to large ones. That leaves me to believe that neither is really “better” than the other, they are just different and suit different people in a variety of ways. I may not have been able to take Industrial Arts if I’d stayed in Wood Mountain through high school, but with the extra 90 minutes a day I would have saved on sitting on a school bus, I could have spent that time working on a project of similar value in the garage or in any shop on any farm. Distance education classes available today mean you can have a completely “qualified” teacher for any subject, with video, archived classes, email, and cheap technology that was only becoming available 10 years ago.

Some people don’t like small schools because of the social environment. The large schools have different social environment problems. No way is perfect, but from the problems you listed that we face from closing Earl Grey, and the problems I listed, it makes 0 sense to close it down. There are better solutions, that keep kids educated near their hometown, and they get the quality of life you and I experienced, instead of the hundreds of hours spent riding a bus that does no one any good.