Approximately 500 children will be bussed further than the already great distances they traveled in 2006 to get to primary school. This is because the newly amalgamated supersized school divisions in the province have provided misleading figures and information to boards with the intention of shutting small schools and small communities down. The result they feel will be stronger and better funded central schools, but they’ll ignore the needless plight they’ll inflict upon the children and the towns and farms they come from. For an industry that exists solely because children need to learn, Saskatchewan school divisions sure do a crappy job of deciding what is best for children.
Here’s a portion from the Regina Leader-Post with some key points highlighted:
Karen Brownlee, Leader-Post
Published: Tuesday, May 08, 2007How the Prairie Valley School Division can say it is committed to quality education is something that baffles some parents from Wilcox who were on hand to hear the board vote to close their elementary school.
Many parents from Wilcox are teachers at Athol Murray College of Notre Dame. Those community members at the school division office Monday said they don’t see anything wrong with the education their children are receiving.
“These parents know education. They know the quality is there,” said Greg Metz.
“That’s why they’re supporting the school,” added Metz, who stood alongside almost 20 others in the meeting to show the board their commitment to the school.
However, the board’s concern about low student numbers and fairness to other communities prompted it to vote for its closure.
Wilcox was the final school the board voted on after deciding to also close schools in Earl Grey, Francis, Gray, Lang, Glenavon and Odessa and Kronau’s Saar School as well as discontinue the high schools grades in Kennedy and Sedley. Only McLean was spared losing its school or any grades. The decisions are effective Aug. 15.
As board chairman Rod Luhning tried to adjourn the meeting, community members voiced their anger, saying the meeting and review process were a joke.
“We’re in the land of rape and honey,” said one man. “We in rural Saskatchewan are being raped while the cities get the honey.” [in reference to the Tisdale, SK motto with rape meaning rape seed (canola)]
Private security manned the parking lot and two RCMP officers stood inside the front entrance, but following the meeting, most people spoke quietly among themselves in the parking lot or were interviewed by media.
“It’s a sad day in rural Saskatchewan,” said Erwin Beitel, the reeve of the RM of Lajord. He is frustrated his municipality is so highly assessed and is paying so much in education taxes, yet it is being told it can’t have schools in Gray or Kronau.
“I really don’t think people are going to stand for what’s happened here today … We’ll be looking at our options,” said Beitel.
When your elected officials are so concerned about public outcry and discord that they hire body guards and have the RCMP attend a school board meeting, you KNOW something is VERY WRONG. What’s wrong is the closure of those schools. It increases fuel consumption not only for buses, but for the students who will drive, the parents who will drive further to get their children or attend school functions, and teachers who are now unemployed in their home communities and will move or commute elsewhere up to 100km away.
There’s also the bogus notion that class options are too limited in a small school. Saskatchewan and much of North America was created around single room school houses, and home schooling is a valid option in many cases too. You can’t tell me that a school is “too small” to exist, that’s a load of bull.
Saskatchewan has a leading distance education program through SCN, where accredited high school teachers accessible anyplace there is email and a satellite TV system. Since even the smallest schools are on the highspeed CommunityNet Internet connected network, distance education is available from any of those closing schools. I was at a conference last week where the calculus teacher I had for a distance education class was talking about how well the program works, and how it could be utilized a lot more. There are CITY schools using the distance education program to get the teachers they want.
I came from a town where there was a senseless school closure, and I can tell you that if this provincial government wants to discontinue the farce of its “Rural revitalization” efforts and make actual improvements, then they should start by directing local boards to discontinue their plans to close local schools. I don’t know what kind of snake oil they were fed, but obviously it’s pretty damn powerful stuff. So strong in fact, it could get Bush to withdraw from Iraq, Paris Hilton to stop drinking alcohol, and convince the Riders to win the Grey Cup.
The formula is simple folks:
School = place for children
No school = no place for children
If you’re looking to grow a location (which is done by bringing families), do you:
A) close a school/don’t provide a school?
B) open a school/keep a school?
The bottom line in this case, is that there is no growth planned for rural Saskatchewan, and that shows we have incompetent leadership.
–
More at the Leader-Post
P.S. You’ll see a lot more school bus accidents from SK in the coming years, obviously. Hopefully none with children involved.
P.P.S. Don’t try to stop a moving bus unless you’re Superman.
UPDATE: PVSD is ignoring calls from the media it seems. There’s accountable governance for you.
A famous Saskatchewanian described what is happening here:
Don’t it always seem to go
That you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone?
They paved paradise and put up a parking lot.
@hotmail.com
![[EFC Blue Ribbon - Free Speech Online]](http://www.efc.ca/images/efcfreet.gif)
thebluestbutterfly | 09-May-07 at 9:21 am | Permalink
I am glad that you blogged about this. People really do need to use their blogs to speak out about issues like this…it affects everyone’s future when you think about it.
Jan Johnstone | 09-May-07 at 11:04 am | Permalink
Saskboy, this is a rural issue and just not a Sask. prov issue. Declining enrolment in rural areas with migration to urban centres is happening all over. Ontario the same thing.
On the one hand, you may see this as bad for the environment - more bussing and increased tailpipe emissions. On the other hand, better for the environment, as one is keeping open half filled buildings where energy is used to heat/and or cool the joint.
Do you fund more than one school system, such as catholic? if so, looking to go to a one school system would be better.
Saskboy | 09-May-07 at 11:04 am | Permalink
It sure does Butterfly, and it’s literally crazy the effort some people are going to in order to dismantle rural life because they think it is inferior to living in a city.
Saskboy | 09-May-07 at 11:10 am | Permalink
“On the other hand, better for the environment, as one is keeping open half filled buildings where energy is used to heat/and or cool the joint.”
In many of the communities, the buildings will continue to be heated/used for other purposes. They become libraries, gyms, other division’s schools!, grocery stores, businesses… Your contention only has validity in a minority of the cases I’ve seen, and I’ve seen at least a dozen or more.
I think SK taxpayers do fund the Catholic and separate school systems as well. I’ve written on it before, searching the archives for Catholic and school ought to turn up the answer.
Meg | 09-May-07 at 5:51 pm | Permalink
I’m a teacher in small-town SK and a lot of our staff room discussions have revolved around this issue lately. It’s devastating to think that our school (and others just like ours) could close when we are still able to provide quality programs. Having a small school population is good and bad - good because the teachers can give more one-on-one attention to each student, and also because the students can do any extra-curricular activity they would like.
What worries me, other than the impact it has on students, is how it affects the teachers. The U of R and the U of S are still producing so many teachers but there are no jobs for them. So when they cut out all of these jobs (how can they possibly find new positions for all of the current teachers? I’m not sure about this) what happens to these new grads? Like you say, we want to keep people in SK, not force them to move to Alberta where they are begging for teachers in places like Fort MacMurray.
Melissa | 09-May-07 at 7:37 pm | Permalink
I grew up going to the school in the town you pictured, Earl Grey. I was the second last class to graduate before they closed the high school down, so I have a different opinion on this.
All I have to say, is they should have closed that high school years ago. I don’t know how old our Canadian history text books were, but there was only a few of them to share between us. We were double graded, and only able to take the “core” classes. There was an option to be bussed to Southey (neighbouring town) to take Industrial Arts and Home Economics once we reached grade 7.
I feel that I didn’t get a really good quality of education. I graduated and left for Saskatoon to attend the U of S where I was astounded at chemistry labs and biology labs. That’s not to say we didn’t do the basics, but there always seemed to be a lack of money in order to get a great education.
I have heard that closing what is left in Earl Grey (elementary to grade 6 I believe) is going to put a severe strain on the main neighbouring school (Southey). Apparently they are crowded there already and there is (from what I’ve heard) no plans to expand until the school reaches 110% capacity. That is ridiculous. If you are going to shut a school that supposedly is of poor quality down then you better make damn sure there is sufficient room for them wherever they end up.
While I will always attest to the fact that my high school education was not 100% sufficient when I walked into my first year at the U of S, I will also stand by the fact that the experience I had there, growing up in a small town, was likely the best. There was always attention, teachers were usually willing help on their own time and were more understanding. There is something about small schools that make them an incredible place to grow up but maybe not to learn.
Saskboy | 10-May-07 at 11:24 pm | Permalink
“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.
Tanya | 26-May-07 at 10:59 pm | Permalink
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.
Saskboy | 28-May-07 at 12:49 pm | Permalink
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 :-)
Brian S | 31-May-07 at 6:53 pm | Permalink
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.
Sarah | 07-Nov-07 at 10:34 pm | Permalink
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!
Saskboy | 07-Nov-07 at 10:38 pm | Permalink
Excellent comment Sarah. I took calc through SCN too, Randy’s class. I got 94% in UofR calculus first semester.
Sarah | 07-Nov-07 at 11:15 pm | Permalink
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.
Saskboy | 07-Nov-07 at 11:41 pm | Permalink
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!