Orillia review urges closure

Nathan Taylor at the Packet and Times had this story posted Wednesday regarding a Simcoe-Muskoka Catholic District School Board review of two Orillia schools. The most recent board report on the review is on the SMCDSB's website.
The review committee's recommendation is to close and consolidate both current schools at a new site.

Parents, including Monsignor Lee parent council chair Mardi McLaughlin, explained some of the issues and inadequacies of which the board is already aware.
"We have a very dangerous bus and drop-off zone," she said, noting the heavy traffic volume in front of the school, which is located on Fittons Road at Peter Street. "This is a safety issue that must be addressed before there is a serious incident."
The schoolyard is too small, she said, adding they almost had to cancel some sports due the small playing field. At Monsignor Lee, it works out to 20 square metres per student, she said, while, at Notre Dame School, it's 155 square metres.
Two other parents spoke in favour of the PAC's recommendation for similar reasons, and praised the committee for its hard work.
"We know that we're headed in the right direction," said Jeff Waite, whose son attends Monsignor Lee.

The matter comes before trustees Oct. 14.
It's a second recent example of where a review committee has been able to, while acknowledging the difficulty in closing a school, been able to see how the dreaded option leads to improved schools for their children. This is a review's biggest challenge-- to move past the status quo and see how they can get the best for all students whose schools are included in the review.

Ottawa looks at three schools

A few accommodation reviews are coming to a conclusion in Ottawa, with reports yesterday about their pending appearance before the Ottawa-Carleton District School Board later this week. Check out the Ottawa Sun story (by a former co-worker of mine), the Ottawa Citizen, CBC Ottawa and CTV Ottawa. The board has reports on both the high school and elementary reviews.
I've got some significant familiarity here-- Gloucester High School is a stone's throw from the family home in Ottawa (though not my alma mater) and Colonel By isn't much further away, about five minutes as the raven flies. Rideau High School -- with a population just over 500 pupils -- is recommended for closure in the high school review, with students and programs mostly transferred to Gloucester High School.
Dealing solely with the high school review, the committee had recommended status quo-- keeping all three high schools open when none of the three is at capacity. Knowing the Gloucester-Colonel By area quite well, and the Rideau neighbourhood too, these are communities whose glory days of children with heaps of young families have passed. Not to say there aren't any young families, but as an example, in the family abode's immediate neighbourhood, there haven't been any school-aged children at all for some five years or more. Like me, we've all graduated and moved on, with precious few of us having kids since leaving the nest.
This sets up another situation where trustees will be forced to decide between a staff recommendation that attempts to address changing dynamics, and a set of committee recommendations pushing for the status quo. Who will "win?" If the committee's recommendation isn't followed, will it accept the decision? Or will Ottawa be the next member of the Community Schools Alliance?
If time allows, I'll update post committee-of-the-whole meeting Friday.

Flood your MPP: CSA

The latest from the Community Schools Alliance, as reported by the London Free Press' Deb Van Brenk, is to form-letter e-mail flood MPPs across the province, going on the theory that the squeakiest wheel gets the grease.

The alliance sent e-mails yesterday morning to all elected municipal officials.
The "Dear MPP" letter template says in part that, "the current system for determining which schools stay open and which schools are closed is a flawed process and school boards are closing schools, amalgamating schools, transporting students out of their community, and building new schools without reviewing the impact of these decisions on our communities."
It goes on to say that a joint process among school boards and municipalities is needed to address issues of declining enrolment and funding to schools in rural and small communities.
But school boards maintain the communities already have plenty of input into decision-making in the accommodation review committee process set out by the province.

Indeed, many municipalities did have plenty of time and some opportunity to contribute their opinions and solutions to many of the schools whose closure they continue to oppose. The Middlesex County municipalities are among these and should be commended for the work they did in the two reviews whose final reports I read and whose presentation to trustees I sat through. Trustees didn't follow the recommendations these municipalities helped develop.
While in this story CSA chair and Southwest Middlesex Mayor Doug Reycraft speaks about a York Region school closure, I'm still waiting for that ever-elusive list of the municipalities who returned the alliance's request for membership over the summer months. Come to think of it, I'm also still waiting for a letter sent from the City of London to the alliance in regards to that very request.

Deutchland v. Canada — Dropout edition

Quebecor Media (QMI) / Sun Media sent reporter Sébastian Ménard to Germany to look at some people and programs in place in that European country having a dramatic impact on dropout rates. For the bilingual amongst us, you can read Ménard's original pieces en Français as run by Le Journal de Montréal in September — the articles are summarized on this page. The Ottawa Sun started running the series in English this week with articles here and here on Monday.

Independent school administrations, an arsenal of specialized learning programs and a competitive edge have helped 94% of its students graduate high school.
In 2005, Canada's national dropout rate was listed at just over 10%. In Alberta and Quebec, 12% of students dropped out, as did 9% in Ontario. The numbers vary, and there have been improvements, but no Canadian province can match Germany's success.
One difference is the lack of school boards in the German educational system, which leaves school principals free to decide for themselves how to help their students graduate.
"All schools are different and they all try, each in their own way, to have the fewest dropouts possible," explained Manfred Paul, a principal in Aachen, a city in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia.
Since the municipality maintains the schools and manages staff, Paul has a lot more time to focus on education.

I look forward to reading the complete series (I'd only dug up the French-language links, not read them in their entirety) to see how this comparison continues. Considering the few very large differences in our education system and others, it should be an interesting read. More later.

SQE Sunshine

Also delinquent here... the Society for Quality Education sent out an advance invitation to a new website, Sunshine on Schools, launched last week. Moira MacDonald writes about it in Monday's Toronto Sun.

It could get you clicking and comparing for hours with plenty of info on individual school board costs, spending, how students do, teacher salaries, how much each school board spends per student, and in-depth financial reports. Every Ontario school board is covered.
As tech lovers might say, it's got great functionality, with each mouse click leading smoothly to another layer of information, using easy-to-understand graphs and charts.
"It's all stuff anybody could look for if they knew where to look," says Doretta Wilson, SQE's executive director, who gathered the stats from government and individual school boards.
"People can play around with it. We don't want to make judgments. If it piques more interest and causes people to dig a little deeper it's accomplished its mission.

This collection of public information in a one-stop format will be useful, even with the data gaps that exist on the site where a a particular number isn't available for a given school board in a given year. It will pique interest and lead to conversations such as the one MacDonald had with the head of the province's French-language public school boards.

French language textbooks are more expensive and school services "of equal quality" to what other students receive must be delivered to French public students wherever they are in the province.
With only 22,000 students spread across Ontario, that means higher transportation and staffing costs. As well, the system has seen a 25% enrolment increase in the last 10 years, requiring the purchase or lease of new schools.
Fair enough. That's the sort of dialogue Wilson hopes the website will inspire.

As advocates of school choice, the SQE's optics on publicly education education are on display at its website and on its related blog, School for Thought. I haven't had time to go poking around on this site yet, other than to notice one of the boards I cover is ranked second in the ratio of $100K+ earners to students. I had touched on the $100K+ and education issue in a previous post here, noting the huge lack of context and explanation that plagues reporting on the list's annual release— spurred by a release at the time from the SQE on $100K+ earners and school boards.
What MacDonald doesn't do is draw a strong enough, or any, link between the SQE's politics and this Sunshine website. The way the site was built and the way the numbers are compared is no doubt ideologically motivated to induce conversations leading to the society's goals.

Spending money in schools

I've been delinquent in keeping up with the London Free Press' Kelly Pedro's reporting on the money families pitch in to their children's schools throughout the school year. Pedro's year-long look is in its fourth (fifth?) iteration so far, with recent stories published Saturday and Monday. The goal is to follow a series of London-area families throughout a full school year and track the money they spend on school-related activities.
Saturday's piece showed two elementary school families (one public school, one Catholic school) and what they've doled out for their kids so far this year. Monday's touches on a high school student and the dollars thrown at his involvement in the football team.
As previously stated, I'm envious of this series. Great idea and the collection of stories by year's end will be an eye-opener for many.
Follow the series and related spreadsheet online at http://www.lfpress.com/news/classroomcash.
It's being noticed too— the London District Catholic School Board trustees touched on the series' first few iterations at its Sept. 14 meeting. The minutes are taken down after the subsequent board meeting, so I've uploaded the pertinent comments to my GoogleDocs.
The questions raise an important contextual point I hope is explained as the series continues. Schools do a lot of fundraising that covers a gamut of causes— from school trips and activities to supporting various charitable causes such as United Ways, disaster relief, etc. The school-based funds that must now be consolidated and reported in school board financial audits have to include all this money, even though it simply funnels through a school-based bank account on the way to other causes.
I would hope this sort of fundraising is explained and broken out from what the series has highlighted so far— the money for student planners, locker deposits and the like.
I'm also looking forward to the continuing installments.

ARCing in my own backyard

It's not my custom to post about my own reporting here on a regular basis, but given the track record here on accommodation reviews and how committee members and others approach the task, I feel it's appropriate. Mostly because it's the first review I've covered where the committee voted (in a 5-4 split) to close a school.
Other commitments have kept me from being at every one of this Thames Valley District School Board committee's meetings, but between myself and my newsroom colleagues we have covered every one to-date and will continue doing so until after the trustee decision— expected some time early next calendar year. However, from the first meeting I covered I was instantly aware this committee was perhaps better prepared to accept closure as an unpalatable compromise to improve the learning conditions for all the students attending the four schools represented. When Woodstock Coun. Ross Gerrie — attempting to put forward a "keep the school open, but if you do decide to close" series of recommendations — said he didn't think anyone on the committee would support a closure of Hillcrest Public School, some of the parents said his assumption was wrong.
I used the strongest quote in the story.

"It's going to happen, let's just admit it and say, 'close the school' and this way all other (schools) benefit," Springbank 'holding zone' representative Belinda Montague said. "If we say don't close (Hillcrest), then the message is that everything in all the other schools is OK just to leave it as is."

The committee, thorough in ensuring it wasn't simply backing Hillcrest into a corner, also polled the principals of the four schools, whose quotes didn't make the newspaper article.

"The upgraded gymnasium is probably the most important thing (in proposed upgrades)," said Springbank Public School principal Iggy Ferrara. "The upgraded library and general arts rooms, again, we were built as a JK-5 school and we can't offer instrumental music and we need the specialized room.
"This will help is to have enhanced places to deliver our arts program. They're wonderful and it really will enhance the school."

D.M. Sutherland Public School principal Susan Davis acknowledged it was early still, given practice is to strike a design committee to finalize the what's and where of the new components.

"We would always like more than we have, but what would be coming our way is an absolute treat," Davis said.

The committee spent substantial time ensuring its recommendations covered all the bases to ensure the three remaining schools would have the best learning environment possible for the funding that might be available from ministry and board funds. Let's see how its public input night unfolds at the end of the month and whether the committee changes any of its recommendations before finalizing its report and sending it off to trustees.