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Vindictiveness-- the municipal strategy?

The ongoing saga of the Town of Niagara-on-the-Lake vs. the District School Board of Niagara continues its sad, slow march to the Ontario Municipal Board, according to this Niagara Advance piece.
The DSBN has put Niagara District Secondary School on notice that if it doesn't boost enrolment to 350 by October, it's days are over. Initial relief in the community the board didn't vote outright to close the school is turning into vitriolic panic as the October count dates gets closer and closer.
NOTL councillors are on the Community Schools Alliance executive.
NOTL's planning committee has now given its consent to screw the DSBN out of a preferred school site in the village, where some in the community want a new school to replace two aging facilities. Why? Because council wants the high school to stay open-- and if it can't, then it wants the building to be used as a school of any kind.

Speaking for the Friends of NDSS, Jamie King urged the planning committee to approve the revisions that would impact on school board decisions.
The zoning as suggested would require the school board “to participate in more thoughtful and engaged discussions regarding the future of elementary and secondary education” in NOTL, King said.
“Despite the fact the DSBN feels it knows enough about the character and nature of our town to unilaterally dictate where education will and will not be offered within our community, we believe that any steps this planning committee can take to ensure our community participates in this decision-making process and that our best interests are served are steps worth taking.”

This doesn't imply the community is entirely supportive. Save Our School supports the new school and has been working its contacts to ensure council knows it wants the new 'Virgil' school to go ahead, where the board wants to build it.
The DSBN has already appealed a severance denial for the subject property. If council votes to pass the new comprehensive zoning bylaw, it will appeal that too. There's far more constructive work that could be done here -- such as drumming up another 100 students for NDSS out of the 350+ who live in NOTL but don't already attend that school -- that would allow this new project to proceed. Instead, council is intent on simply inflicting damage against a board it disagreed with on the future of the high school and making its elementary students pay the price.
Those students won't continue to be served as best as possible in their current schools.
They won't be in a revamped NDSS building that was never built for them and would still be too large for the population.
If I lived in NOTL and wasn't a journalist, I would be among the SOS supporters clearly telling this council to give their heads a shake and realize the future of their elementary and secondary schools don't have to be welded at the hip.

Community Schools Alliance cont'd

Now that I've written our own Community Schools Alliance-related story (will be linked once published... eventually), I wanted to note a few more things.
The letters from CSA chair and Southwest Middlesex Mayor Doug Reycraft have been sent to municipalities across the province, via e-mail as I understand. Councils are being asked to put membership in the CSA to a vote.
As it was explained to me by Middlesex County CAO Bill Rayburn, the CSA's governance model will be similar to that of the Association of Municipalities of Ontario. Very logical, since several of its executive committee members have been AMO presidents. Each municipality (if it so chooses) is a member, with the executive determined by the membership on a regular basis. As the CSA is just starting up, it has an inaugural executive and though Rayburn didn't specify this, I would assume that executive's term would be subject to approval/renewal at some point in time.
It brings an interesting thought to mind-- why the CSA didn't just form itself as an AMO caucus. There are already numerous AMO caucuses such as the northern one, the northwestern one, the small-urban municipal one and the rural one. The bear-pit sessions (closed to media) at the ROMA conference are particularly instructive for many councillors. In addition, there are the western and eastern wardens' caucuses. CSA looks like it will essentially encapsulate many of the same municipalities that are already participating in these various AMO subgroups.
I would expect and hope to see continued coverage coming in over the next few weeks (like this Niagara Advance piece) from around the province as each council that has received an invitation discusses and, likely, approves its membership.

Summertime ARC coverage

A rarity during the summer break, but the Napanee Guide had a story posted Thursday regarding the choices before the Limestone DSB after an accommodation review covering the village and its surrounding areas.

The committee at first recommended the one-school option, which was subsequently followed by senior staff issuing a report also calling for the construction of one bigger school, as opposed to two smaller ones. Upon further review, and more public consultations, the PARC group changed its endorsement to that of the two-school option, and senior staff was asked to go back and re-examine some of the questions and concerns from the public.
That report was tabled on July 7 to the board's School Enrolment-School Capacity Committee.
The primary recommendation made was that "the Limestone District School Board build one new school (approximately between 600 and 630 pupil space) on municipal services, at the south end of Napanee, to address the accommodation issues at H.H. Langford Public School and Westdale Park Public school; and further, that all or almost all students ... currently attending Sandhurst Public School be relocated to Bath Public school; and that the funding allocated by the Ministry of Education be allocated to the construction of the new school, and alterations to Bath Public school."

The staff response indicated two schools weren't feasible, maintaining support for the committee's first one-school recommendation. In the current climate and Ministry of Education rules for capital projects, this is understandable. Quotes later in the story refer to programming and other reasons for the single-school preference. Quotes from the two-school supporters sound very rural-urban, which seems odd given Napanee is no metropolis.
Napanee's municipality would likely be among those receiving an invitation to the Community Schools Alliance.

NDSS update

The St. Catharines Standard posted this Monday indicating that supporters of Niagara District Secondary School continue to push back on Niagara-on-the-Lake's Eden High School, a former private Mennonite school brought into the former public board pre-amalgamation as an alternate school.
Sandy over at Crux of the Matter blogged about Eden on July 5 and can speak to its history far more authoritatively than I can. Head over there to learn more about how this school became part of the publicly funded system.
From the article by Tiffany Mayer:

Paolo Miele said the Christian faith-based programs at Eden High School infringe on policies in the Education Act that prohibit indoctrinational religious education or focusing teachings on a particular faith.
Miele also claims the alternative high school's admission requirements, giving preference to siblings of students or those with a historical connection to Eden, are discriminatory.
"This is about fairness," Miele said. "I'd like to see permanent policy looked at and followed."
...
Kim Yielding, the board's communications manager, said in the 20 years since Eden became part of the board, the historical connection to Eden has become less of a factor in granting admission than whether a prospective student has a sibling at the school.
"That's also the case with other alternate programs," Yielding said. "If you had a sibling enrolled in extended French and you wanted to apply to that school, you could because your sibling is currently enrolled there."
...
Eden isn't doing anything wrong, Ministry of Education spokeswoman Patricia MacNeil said.
"Certainly its existence does not contravene the Education Act," because religious programming is happening outside regular class time, she said.
Annie Kidder, executive director for the advocacy group People for Education, also has her doubts that Eden's admission requirements, which also include a letter explaining why students want to attend, are discriminatory.
Eden's entrance requirements differ little from those at other publicly-funded alternative schools, which by nature are exclusive, she said.
"There are many alternative schools that say you have to audition or write an essay or you have to have certain marks, or even you can't have special education needs to get into the school. Have we decided that's OK in our public education system?" Kidder said.

This is the latest step for NDSS supporters to try and do what they can to avoid closure of the school at the end of this school year, given the student population is about 100 short of a 350 target set by trustees last year.

SQE compares tax-credit scholarships to failed Ont. policy

A commitment to a cause some times means what you lean on to support your position can't support their weight of your argument.

Take this post over at the SQE blog, School for Thought. It's largely based on this St. Petersburg Times article on tax-credit scholarships. From the blog:

For anyone who supported Ontario’s now defunct Education Tax Credit this St. Petersburg Times article will make you wish it still existed.
...
It seems to School For Thought that the cost of running such a program in Ontario would have been a lot less than the costs of implementing class size caps or ineffective reading programs that do not translate into significant achievement gains.

Um, well, I think SQE has compared an apple to an orange.
The Equity in Education Tax Credit, in place briefly in the last futile days of the Harris-Eves Conservative government, would have provided, at full rollout, a refundable tax credit of up to 50 per cent of private-school tuition to a max of $3,500 per year, per child. Anyone who had children registered in these schools could claim and receive the tax credit, regardless of family income, etc.
The Florida tax-credit scholarships are exactly that-- a scholarship given as a tax credit to families who send their children to private schools. With one big difference. From the article:

In this expanding universe of options, the tax credit scholarship is aimed solely at low-income children.
...
Our scholarship parents pay on average $1,000 out of pocket to make up the difference between the tuition and the maximum $3,950 scholarship. This is remarkable given that their average income is $25,400 for a family of four. Two-thirds of the students are black or Hispanic, and three-fifths of them are from single-parent households.

So, this is not a shotgun approach that gives every family of private-school students a tax break. It's targeted and directed at those who would benefit the most.
The EETC was a desperate move by a government of the day that was desperate to avoid the thumping it surely knew was coming at the polls. The population it benefited most were the upper-middle- to upper-class families -- where most of the private-school support exists -- most likely to already be Tory supporters.
During the 2003 campaign, I covered a whistle-stop Eves campaign visit in Woodstock (the same day as the 'kitten eater' comment came out). With hundreds and hundreds of faith-based private school students in the district, students from one private school came to the rally to show their support for continuing the EETC. The one secular private school where attendance is all about the ability to pay.
It's clear the EETC is not anything like this Florida program-- they're a world apart.

TorSun backs TDSB ARCs

The Toronto Sun staked out an editorial opinion today regarding the pending flood of accommodation reviews destined for the Toronto District School Board. From the editorial:

Avoiding school closings -- or putting a moratorium on closures as former education minister Gerard Kennedy did in 2003 -- has been politically smart in the past. It's now time for the Toronto board as a whole to flex its muscles against overprotective types trying to do the best for their own neighbourhood, but hurting the entire school system as a result.
And yes, that is very painful.
But this is a school board running at a deficit and raiding reserve funds to keep the lights on and books on students' desks and teachers in the classrooms.

The editorial goes on to say there has been only one vote to close a school in the TDSB since 2002, Timothy Eaton Tech. That vote has been subject to a petition and the Ministry of Education announced today, July 17, it has appointed David Cooke to conduct an administrative review of the decision.
For the Sun to come out with this position shouldn't surprise, given the paper's traditional viewpoints. However, before simply dismissing what the paper has to say, it's important to recognize that as far as I've been able to observe, the Sun is virtually alone in reporting on the pending reviews. Moira MacDonald broke the story, and I've been unable to unearth any significant reporting from other major Toronto media since her story broke. The closest I can find is a Louise Brown story from July 9 in The Star, where West Toronto Collegiate is used as an example and the pending reviews are referenced.
As written here previously, these reviews and how they're to be covered should be highly instructive to the rest of Ontario, where we've been dealing with these for a few years now.