October 26, 2009 (Catholic education, Catholic schools)

Few issues in education generate as much emotion as the closure of small schools in rural communities. In some areas the school is often all that remains of a once-thriving village and the threat takes on added meaning.

Although Ontario’s Ministry of Education and the McGuinty government have shown commendable restraint and patience with those parents who wish to preserve small schools, there are many reasons why it is time to close them.

Chief among the reasons are economics, new curriculum standards, changed cultural expectations and practices and new safety requirements. None of these reasons exists in isolation. Each is interrelated with the other. In different communities the relative weight of each may vary, yet all are involved.

Economics

In short, continuing to maintain many small rural schools is simply very expensive. On a per pupil basis it costs more to educate a child in a small rural school than in a modern consolidated rural school.  This means a board is robbing Peter to pay Paul. The government on the whole provides the same basic grant per pupil regardless of the school’s locale.

At the same time, small rural schools rarely have the breath of facilities or resources of a larger school. Most of today’s rural schools are four to six room buildings constructed during the late 1950’s and early 1960’s, the last great period of rural school consolidation. That means such schools are now well past their normal life span of thirty-five years. Not only that, they rarely have the amenities parents expect of a school in the 21^st Century.

Gymnasiums and libraries were not standard components of an elementary school in that era. During the 1990s one particular six-room rural school community in the legacy Dryden Board of Education worked particularly hard to get the Board to build a gymnasium for the children. Quite rightly, the ministry of Education would not fund its construction nor should the Board have put it on the mill rate for the local taxpayers of the nearby town to pay.

Because of their age, keeping such schools functioning is expensive. Septic fields and roofs have to be replaced. Inefficient heating systems require upgrading and often the electrical wiring is not adequate to meet the needs of a modern classroom. None of these upgrades are low cost maintenance items.

Parents expect full-time principals, secretaries and caretakers in their school, and rural schools, even with additional small school administrative grants, cannot sustain these extra costs because their enrollment is simply too low and the Ministry’s ratios for such staff are so high since they are based on much larger urban averages.

At some point a Board has to bite the bullet and close not one but two or three such facilities, and merge them into one modern facility to better match the grant standards. For example in 1997 when the Dryden Board of Education merged with Red Lake and Kenora to become the Keewatin-Patricia District |School Board it brought with it five such schools.  All are now closed. One, over 75 years old, was merged with a more recently built, but underutilized facility in a neighboring village. Three were consolidated with one City of Dryden school into a new facility built in 2004. The fifth has been merged with two other town schools which in turn are being consolidated into one brand new facility due to open in 2011.

Curriculum Expectations

As the lack of gymnasiums and libraries attest, a structured regime of daily physical activity or physical education, library research skills or reading for pleasure as school activities were never visualized. These are no longer considered frills, and rural schools have had to find innovative ways of creating them.

Often it has only been possible as a result of reduced enrolment to create a library or sub-standard indoor play space as spare classrooms became available. Obviously, in the long run, such a situation is unsustainable economically. At some point it is just good money chasing bad to put it in investment terms.

More recently, as technology becomes ever more important the impossibility of retrofitting such small units becomes less and less feasible.

Moving from a 1:1 ratio of electrical device to outlet per classroom (as in television, overhead, filmstrip or movie projector)  to this plus a 1:3 ratio for computers was costly and difficult enough, but moving as we are now to Smartboards and a 1:1 student to computer configuration will be next to impossible both structurally and economically.

Few realize how close to extinction the traditional textbook is. Electronic fully-interactive textbook /courseware or cyberware as I suspect we will call it, is already in existence and will within a decade be the norm.

I have no doubts that we are on the threshold of unprecedented change in both the ways in which youth will learn and teachers will teach but that is a topic for another time.

Cultural Expectations and Practices

Certainly parents expect and demand not only that their schools and teachers will successfully teach their children to score at the highest levels on provincial tests, but also that they will also have available the latest technology to assist them and the resources to keep them physically fit and literate.

Unstated, however, and highlighted by the parents’ fight to retain small rural schools is the desire to retain something more nebulous, a sense of community.

I would, however, ask such parents to analyze their own practices to see if they have not already redefined their own sense of community.

Rarely does a rural school even have a convenience store, let alone a rural post office or, General store or gas station located nearby. Today such schools are the geographical equivalent of the one room school house they were built to replace.

When such schools were built, rural roads were gravel, cars and school buses were smaller and slower. Today the majority of roads are paved and cars and schools buses now cover more ground in greater comfort in less time.

Parents themselves have already redefined community because they take their children to “town” to shop, to play sports, and go to church or social and entertainment events. Community is therefore much more likely to be defined by both parent and child as the local urban place, leaving the rural school as only a sub-unit of the larger one not much different than the hockey arena.

Watching the experience within the Keewatin Patricia DSB certainly confirms that rural parents accept these changes once they take the leap. To provide an example, when K-P built New Prospect School, one rural school voted not to close. The school board wisely built the school to a capacity as if they had.

Once the new school was opened, [parents moved their children to it. After all, they were travelling to the town to work anyway. In the September of the second year, only three children remained. Effectively, the parents, not the board closed the school.

The Issue of Safety

School board personnel are often reluctant to share all of the safety related issues buried in fifty year old school buildings. They do not want to be seen to be biasing or scaring parents, nor do they want to be faced with making costly short term repairs while a new consolidated school is being built.

One example is the issue of water.  When rural schools were built, well water without filtration systems was the norm and acceptable. Today rural schools must have in place the most sophisticated of filtration systems.

Even if rural schools are retrofitted with such filtration systems, it is prohibitive to replace the old pipes and these too are a problem. Rust and unacceptable bacteria counts require frequent flushing particularly after any extended rest period. Some schools have even had to bring in bottled water for periods of time.

At a different level, one particular school had hallways so narrow and so many half flights of narrow stairwells I shuddered to think what would have happened if students panicked during a real fire emergency. The school” library” and principal’s “office” were in the basement and you could literally see the boiler from both locations.  In my view the fire marshal should have declared it unsafe decades earlier, well before an earlier administration spent $300,000 repairing the roof.  In that case, fear of community disapproval prevented both the fire marshall and local trustees from acting in the best interests of the children.

As a consequence of the foregoing analysis I would ask those parents within The Community Schools Alliance to think hard about what it is they really want. Ask yourself if what you are really fighting for is that intangible positive experience you had (or think you remember) and want to pass on to your children but if you are honest, is it also something by your own actions you have already left behind?

In the final analysis, the government’s and school trustees’ first responsibility is not to retain your sense of community, but rather to create the most up-to-date facilities and resources for future generations of children. Eventually, this means rebuilding from scratch, so for the sake of the children, let’s get on with it.

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