Smaller communities in Ontario are accustomed to receiving the Queen’s Park ‘shock treatment.’ It happened again on January 28, 2015 when Ontario Education Minister Liz Sandals stated that $1 billion out of the $22.5 billion education budget could be saved by “closing about 600 half-empty schools.” A day later the Minister backtracked, saying that her primary concern was underutilized Toronto schools, not those in rural or remote communities.
The whole Accommodation Review Committee (ARC) process, as school closure exercises are now called, has been under fire in central Ontario ever since Toronto consultant Margaret Wilson released her September 2013 independent report rapping the knuckles of the Near North District School Board (NNDSB) for its “lack of public transparency” in the forced consolidation of three North Bay elementary schools.
A more recent provincial proposal to shorten the ARC process also aroused concerns for local school board trustees in North Bay and elsewhere. It proposed to give municipal governments a bigger role, suggesting “a shift away from consideration (of the) impact of school closures” on “community well-being and the local economy” toward “a more exclusive focus on student achievement.”
Veteran NNDSB trustee, Al Bottomley, sees the ARC reform proposal as a “dangerous” initiative. “It seems that the government wants to close schools at all cost,” he said. “Kids do better in small schools,” Bottomley added. “Putting them in one school is not going to benefit the kids. They’ll be so tired, they won’t be able to do anything. The buses might be going 15 to 20 or 30 kilometres more. That’s ridiculous. Student achievement is something they won’t get.”
The bigger question is whether closing small schools and moving students to regional education centres saves any education dollars at all. School planners continue to base closure recommendations on predicted “economies of scale.” Such claims are highly suspect, according to American researcher Barbara Kent Lawrence, if and when you factor-in the operating costs per square foot, the actual cost per graduate, the added cost of busing students, and the often inflated costs of new school construction.
School capital funding decisions can also leave smaller towns and villages out in the cold. In the case of Mattawa, a town of 2,100 near North Bay, North Bay Nipissing News Editor Rob Learn recently laid bare what can happen. In mid-December, he made public the contents of a Ministry of Education – NNDSB communications trail showing how between 2010 and 2013 that small town lost out on its promised school funding, not just now but into the future.
Without any public disclosure, and ignoring public pleas from Mattawa Mayor Dean Backer, a 2010 $1 million grant commitment earmarked for F.J. McElligott Secondary School was quietly diverted from the town and shifted to fund a North Bay school re-build to turn it from an intermediate school to a K to 6 facility.
The Mattawa school controversy brought into sharp relief what NNDSB Chair David Thompson recently conceded was a “shell game.” Capital grants for Mattawa were diverted to North Bay, then topped-up with unspent money from Full Day Kindergarten capital grants, allocating a total of $1.5 million to Silver Birches Elementary School which opened in September of 2014.
The nub of the whole matter is the spectre of school closures shifting even more students out of their home communities, down the highway to larger regional population centres. Proposed changes to the ARC school closure process will only worsen that problem.
Small school advocates have countered Sandals and the education officials at Queen’s Park with a “community building” solution. Instead of closing the remaining rural and remote schools, the proposed plan is to transform underutilized schools into what Dr. David Clandfield terms “community hub schools.”
The Hub School model, now authorized in Nova Scotia regulations, opens the door to the potential for school and community revitalization. Under such a model, the adversarial, divisive closure processes become community planning exercises designed forge community partnerships and re-purpose the underutilized space without displacing the students and teachers.
Closing schools is a losing proposition for much of small town and rural Ontario. It’s time to explore a third option with better prospects. Stop the closures and consider more innovative solutions, starting with “hubification” and the sharing of school space.
Provincial and district education authorities must commit in a big way to school renovation rather than current ‘tear down’ and relocate approaches. Then let’s empower school boards to hire local business development officers to initiate community partnerships, tap into alternative funding sources, and rent out school space to local organizations from child care and seniors groups to social enterprises and performing arts organizations.
Rebuilding struggling communities with emptying schools sure beats tearing them down and “community hub schools” could well give them a new lease on life. The fundamental question is: What’s standing in the way of proceeding with such community-based, “dollars & sense” alternatives to closing schools and abandoning smaller communities?
An earlier version of this Commentary produced for the Northern Policy Institute appeared in the Parry Sound North Star.
Everything you need to know about Ontario school closings.
http://www.thelittleeducationreport.ca/
The Liberals are about to find out the high cost of closing small schools. “Activists” backed by substantial funding are planning to hang the school closings around the necks of Liberal MPPS totally bypassing the local boards once the Liberals twig to the fact that many of their members will lose the next election over school closings there will soon be substantial backtracking on this issue.
A Reply – from Catherine Soplet
Community hub schools are gaining support in Ontario… Here is some information that may be useful in helping to promote and establish community hubs so public schools remain in their locales.
On February 3, Toronto Mayor John Tory spoke up against threatened TDSB closures of 1in5 schools. I posted to social media about
· ‘bad math’ proposed in changes to ARC reviews and
· a video of ‘World’s Best Mayor’, Calgary Mayor Nenshi saying: Walk-to public schools help cities to thrive. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xDAgM3Alq2Y
In separately held meetings, on February 10, the City of Toronto and TDSB pushed back on the Ministry of Education Directives issued in January 2015 to sell off 1in5 TDSB public schools.
Motions MM3.12, MM3.13 and MM3.14 were passed at Toronto City Council to call for Ministry of Education to:
· Revamp of the Education Act, and to fix the funding formula.
· Reserve the sale of any public school lands until
o the funding formula is fixed, and
o community use of currently repurposed schools facilities for child care, adult learning and settlement services be reviewed.
o Protect publicly accessible green space, open spaces, and sports facilities on Toronto District School Board properties in consultation with Toronto City Manager and Toronto Chief Planner, and other senior City department officials.
Via Toronto’s Chief Planner blog http://ownyourcity.ca , Jennifer Keesmaat released the November 2014 letter of Regional Planning Commissioners of Ontario to Ontario government ministries of Education, Community Services and Social Services, and Municipal Affairs and Housing.
· The letter stated “significant concerns” with negative planning impacts, within the context of the Provincial Policy Statement.
· Read the letter: http://ow.ly/IW7cw
Whether schools serve urban or rural populations, or suburban tracts in between – public learning centres such as schools and libraries are anchors to the communities.
I hope you find the Toronto and Calgary information useful. Best of luck.
Catherine Soplet
http://www.nabrHUBS.ca
Excellent post.
What about the kids?
Many of the “endangered schools” in Toronto are in struggling communities: poor and recent immigrant. If those community schools in which teachers are trying to do their best are closed and students are sent to other schools, will they be welcomed and attended to or thrown to the curb since they do not :fit” existing school culture?
Would any $$$ saved by school closures be more than spent for busing and the social costs of underserved communities in terms of health, unemployment, crime, etc.?
Just asking.
Good post John.
thanks, Doug
Schools ought to be communities, not buildings.
The conversation about funding needs to end and actions must be taken to properly fund education. Continued talk about efficiencies and cost cutting needs to be replaced with ways to increase revenue in order to keep our schools open. If the public decides that it wants to keep schools open, then the public must be willing to pay more to keep schools open. If they do not want to pay more, then decisions about school closures must occur. The other option is to return to more local funding for education, which would encourage communities to pay for the education that they want for their children, but would inevitably create inequalities throughout each province.
Schools as community hubs make natural sense. Unfortunately, it involves another level of government which presents its own challenges. Just look at the mayoral situation for the past 4 years in Toronto. Image the situation in schools in Toronto if Rob Ford had a role to play.
As an aside, I always find it interesting in Ontario that the smaller communities typically vote Progressive Conservative provincially, but in the 1990s, it was this party that always thought bigger is better and cheaper. They diminished the role of smaller communities in favour of bigger boards that stretch across large areas of the province. They also created the original provincial funding formula that favoured larger schools over smaller community schools.
It is the classic penny wise £ foolish proposition to even attempt to save money on education. Every $ spent returns 3-4 $ to the economy. Until that ratio changes it is impossible to spend too much. Oh, you can misspent for sure but overspending is very difficult.
Is there a limit to how low of a utilization rate even rural schools are tolerated? I mean, trustees refuse to close even a 22% utilized school with no real hopes of being able to increase its numbers.
You have identified the reason why Community Hub Schools have emerged as a viable option. As soon as numbers dip, the Nova Scotia Small Schools Initiative has been active in encouraging the formation of School Sustainability groups to begin developing shared use plans. Think of the regular day school as more of an “anchor tenant” with preferred space, and the school building as gradually morphing into a community hub. That’s preferable to closing the school, turning it over to not-for-profits and watching it decay or fall into gradual disuse.
Super-sizing Ontario schools never seems to go out of fashion and it’s emerged again at the Kawartha Board in Peterborough, Ontario. The school board that closed PCVS has now come up with another brilliant idea – turn two high schools in Norwood and Lakefield into K-12 education centres.
Director of education Rusty Hick says now is the time to take a comprehensive look at the local public school board’s future.
“They were built when there were a lot more kids,” explains Mr. Hick. “You needed the space then and you don’t need it now.”
Norwood currently has its second floor closed and is operating almost 60 percent under capacity while only 47 percent of Lakefield’s building is in use.
“There is no cookie-cutter approach to what is happening there,” Mr. Hick explains. Really? Establish K-12 schools and busing everyone in for 90 minutes in all directins sounds familiar to me. It should: it’s a failed strategy elsewhere!
The Kawartha News reporter was taken-in by the plan. Here’s the evidence:
http://www.mykawartha.com/news-story/5451583-what-do-you-do-when-you-have-half-empty-schools-other-boards-are-merging-jk-to-grade-12/
Massing kids in bigger numbers to fill empty schools is called “warehousing” and only perpetuates the destruction of local communities. Wake up, and smell the future, Kawartha News!
It may be too late for some schools, but there needs to be a more long term approach to school constructions. Why are schools built in the first place? – a need due to the number of students. Few think about what to do with these schools when the numbers begin to decline. If community hubs are to be successfully, they need to be implemented when the schools are being built. It can be a challenge to create hubs when other services are housed elsewhere. You then face the problem of empty public buildings.
The role of trustees have been debated again and again, but these long term visions of community hubs do not support the view of trustees (or councillors) as elected officials. Elected officials mainly think short term (the great ones think long term). If trustees were appointed (by whom is the question) maybe long term visions for schools and the growth of community hubs would be more attainable.
In my time the left of Toronto board had an answer for when to close a school. We will close it when the majority of parents want it closed. Not before. Talk about parent power.
Of course we could not offer every program they might want but that is the trade off.
“The Mattawa school controversy” makes it sound like Mattawa is a viable community. Census data says otherwise. Mattawa’s population fell by almost 12% between 2001 and 2006. The remaining residents are older than the Ontario average, the median age went up 3.5 years in that 5-year period. In 2011 there were only 205 kids aged 0-9.
Mattawa is in a population death spiral. Sending more money isn’t going to fix it, and would be a poor example of the “dollars and sense” in your article title.
Census data for 2006:
http://www12.statcan.gc.ca/census-recensement/2006/dp-pd/prof/92-591/details/page.cfm?Lang=E&Geo1=CSD&Code1=3548021&Geo2=PR&Code2=35&Data=Count&SearchText=Mattawa&SearchType=Begins&SearchPR=01&B1=All&Custom=
So your solution would be what…..bus the kids hours and hours further and further?
Reblogged this on westernmark.