By Heather Miller
Commute with your child, says school council
Weekday mornings, Shari Isaac is up at 5:20. She gets her three kids up shortly after 6, and the whole gang is out the door and headed downtown by 7 or 7:10.
The family lives in Nepean, but Isaac works at a doctor’s office on Kent Street. Her children, Kelsee, 8, Jazzmyn, 5, and Joshua, 4, go to Elgin Street school in Centretown.
“They complain about getting up but not about the school,” says Isaac.
She drops her kids off at the nearby YMCA daycare on her way to work every day. As she continues on to her office, the kids are put on a school bus. At 5:30 all four are back in the car, heading towards the sunset.
Isaac’s the type of person Elgin Street would like to see more of — and the type the Ottawa-Carleton District School Board considered when it passed its ease-of-access policy last fall.
In October, the board agreed to make easier access to its schools a legitimate reason for cross-boundary transfers. So if parents find it more convenient to get their kids to a school other than the one designated to them, principals — the decision makers —should take this into account.
In January, trustees decided to advertise this policy, and let schools advertise themselves if they wanted to attract students from other areas. Elgin Street school council is launching a campaign to bring in children from overcrowded schools outside the Greenbelt, hoping to top up its own numbers.
“These schools have got children in portables. We’re offering them classrooms,” says Bill Filleter, co-chair of the Elgin Street school council.
Student enrollment was a pivotal issue in last fall’s school closure debate and pitted downtown schools struggling for survival against suburban schools desperate for building grants.
Trustees who want to see boundary transfers made easier don’t think this will solve board-wide imbalances, but some hope it will give schools in the core a fighting chance against population trends.
“Population breakdown hasn’t changed very much — younger families tend to move here and then when families get older they move farther away,” says Joan Spice, trustee for Somerset/Kitchissippi.
She says she’s confident the new city council will follow the old with a commitment to revitalize construction in the core.
Spice also expects these changes will translate into more school-aged children living in her zone, and sees commuting kids as a short-term solution.
Many parents groups share the conviction that downtown school populations are on the rise and used it as an argument against school closures.
A demographic study — commisioned by the old regional government — is now overdue, but some analysts interested in housing trends say young families aren’t the targets of downtown developers.
“From ’94 to ‘98, there were a lot of townhouses (being built),” says Alain Miguelez, Ottawa market analyst at the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation. “The focus seems to be shifting towards condos.”
He says low-end condos are aimed at singles and childless couples, high-end condos intended for empty nesters.
Paul Knowlton, president of the Ottawa-Carleton Home Builders Association, says there may be an increase in the number of young families settling in downtown apartments, but generally the westward migration of new parents continues.
And some trustees are skeptical that the ease-of-access policy will lure kids back for school.
“The majority of people (in my zone) couldn’t understand why people would want to load their kids in the car for an hour,” says Lynn Scott, trustee for West Carleton/Goulbourn/Rideau.
But Isaac, who started looking for a downtown daycare when she was pregnant with her first child, has no regrets.
“My time from leaving work to getting home is spent with them,” she says. “Kelsee goes skating every second Friday, walks to museums for different programs . . . at the Y there’s swimming, dance lessons, a gym.”
“There’s so much they’re able to do because they’re downtown. You always have give and take, but this is well worth it.”