By Courtney Battistone
School closures are at the heart of the election of the Centretown trustee for the Ottawa-Carleton District School Board.
The incumbent, former board chair Albert Chambers, says he thinks closing some schools inside the Greenbelt is necessary. His opponents, David Allston and Joan Spice, former chair of the Ottawa-Carleton Assembly of School Councils, are against closing urban schools.
Chambers admits, however, if all three schools slated to close in Zone 10, which includes Centretown, actually shut their doors, “the result will not be good.”
He adds the closures will result in overcrowding of schools that remain open and that some programs — such as early French immersion — will not be viable.
Allston, a 21-year-old businessman and part-time education student at the University of Ottawa, has run unsuccessfully for city council, but found his interests were really in education and schools.
He says he wants the schools in Zone 10 to stay open and that his goal is to overhaul the way calculations for school closures are done.
Allston says the province uses outdated information and inaccurate population projections when making decisions to close schools, leading to overcrowding.
“I don’t believe that closing urban schools is the answer.”
Spice, one of the leaders in the fight against school closures, has similar problems with the way the decision is being handled. She says she has been involved with the issue for three years with three rounds of closures, and this is the worst.
Chambers says that as a trustee he has been working hard to get more time from the province so the new population projections can be taken into account. But last week the province refused to extend the deadline for school closures.
Spice says there was little chance for parents to offer input on the closures and that trustees only got a chance to speak on the issue Oct. 17.
School closures based on the current population information should not occur, she says, but it’s possible that some could be necessary with new information.
She says schools inside the Greenbelt are at 87-per-cent capacity now. Schools must be at 90-per-cent capacity to stay open. “The population of Ottawa-Carleton doesn’t have to double to get 90 per cent,” she says.
While attention may be focused on the OCDSB, two zones in the Ottawa-Carleton Catholic School Board are also electing trustees.
Zone 10 has acclaimed incumbent trustee Thérèse Maloney Cousineau. Zone 9 also includes Centretown and has three candidates — Kathy Ablett, Catherine Maguire-Urban and Andrew Scheer.