This week the Ottawa-Carleton District School Board released a list of 15 schools it says should close between next autumn and September 2006. Most Centretown students were spared — only about 30 local children who attend nearby Devonshire Community Public School could be forced to move to a new school.
Although the final bell won’t toll for any of Ottawa’s schools until at least the end of November, their fate is already proving contentious.
That’s just one reason local trustees elected in this fall’s municipal contest must have the final say on which schools stay open and which shut their doors.
Right now, it’s not clear that will happen.
The province sidelined the current crop of trustees and replaced them with an appointed supervisor last August, after the trustees defied the Education Act by passing a budget with a $23-million deficit.
The government took the same action against rebellious trustees in Toronto and Hamilton.
Supervisors have managed all three boards ever since. Kyle Murray, the second appointed board overseer in Ottawa, filed a balanced budget this year after the province handed him $27.3 million in extra funds.
If Ernie Eves’s government hangs on to power in next month’s election, Murray is expected to keep his job until an auditor’s report shows the board’s budget is not in deficit. That report is due at the end of November, right before newly elected trustees take office Dec. 1. But Murray hopes to finish one last task before he steps aside: signing off on which schools will close next fall. That would be a mistake.
School closures have intensely local consequences. Few issues inflame parents’ passion more than the prospect of shipping their children off to unfamiliar classrooms, robbing them of the friendships and stability they’ve built at local schools.
Those local schools can also serve as focal points for their communities. Shutting their doors may forever alter the character of the neighbourhoods that revolve around them.
School closures hit citizens in their own backyards. That’s where decisions about them should be made – not at Queen’s Park and certainly not by a supervisor who won’t face voters at the polls.
When those voters do go to the municipal polls on Nov. 10, they deserve to cast their ballots secure in the knowledge their choice for trustee actually has the power to follow through on his or her campaign promises. Closures will undoubtedly be the school board campaign’s hot-button issue.
It is undemocratic and insulting to suggest candidates and citizens engage in healthy, vigorous debate about the future of their community schools only to render that debate meaningless by leaving the schools’ fate to an unelected supervisor.
Deciding which schools to close is never easy. In the end the choices will boost some Ottawa communities and blight others. All the more reason to give elected, local decision makers the last word.
– Kelly Patrick