With Ottawa’s main public school board in the midst of planning for what’s expected to be four years of shrinking budgets, Centretown’s newly elected trustee, Erica Braunovan, doesn’t think the province’s planned cuts to education spending will force the closure of any downtown schools.
Education Minister Liz Sandals has said that 600 schools in the province are more than half empty and some of those schools will close in order to help the Liberals “balance the budget on schedule.”
“I don’t think that any of the schools in Somerset-Kitchissippi will be at risk of closing,” Braunovan says. “For the most part, attendance at the schools is at or near capacity,” says Braunovan.
“There’s a couple of exceptions to that, where the enrollment is a bit lower, but it’s not nearly as low as it is at other schools in the Ottawa area . . . and so I don’t anticipate any of the schools in Somerset-Kitchissippi being slated for closing.”
Braunovan’s comments came three days after the OCDSB embarked on the second phase of its public consultation process for its next strategic plan, which aims to identify the board’s priorities for the next four years.
Between Jan. 9-18, stakeholders were asked to comment by email on a range of issues identified through an earlier round of online input by the public.
Braunovan was asked what kind of influence the province’s announcement to close schools has had on the board’s strategic planning process so far. She said it was still too early in the process to know.
The local priority setting process culminates in February when the results of the first two phases of consultation “will be shared with stakeholders in a detailed report,” says the board on its website.
One of the half-full schools in the Ottawa area is Cambridge Street Community Public School, which has a utilization rate of 45 per cent.
But Sharlene Hunter, the school board’s communications co-ordinator, said in December that the 45-per-cent figure doesn’t tell the whole story.
“It should be noted that basic utilization rates are only a starting point for discussing a school’s instructional space requirements, and in most cases they don’t provide a complete picture of need,” Hunter said at the time.
Braunovan says she has not received any questions or comments so far from parents about schools closing.
“I know a few years back the enrollment in the schools was low,” she says, “but we’ve moved some programs into the schools where the attendance was low, and we’ve brought the attendance numbers up at all of the schools, into a range where they shouldn’t be at risk for closure at this point.”
But Braunovan acknowledges that there could be impacts on schools in her zone if other schools in Ottawa are forced to close.
“I mean, any time there’s cutbacks anywhere in the board it’s going to have some sort of ripple effect throughout the board, so I can’t really anticipate anything right now,” she added, but acknowledged that she’d just been elected in October so “this would be the first time I’ve dealt with anything of this nature.”
However, Braunovan did note that “if a school closed in one of the areas that bordered on Somerset-Kitchissippi, then some students would obviously be coming into Somerset-Kitchissippi, because boundaries would get redrawn.”