There is no doubt that the Avon Maitland District School Board cheated in its conduct of the Pupil Accommodation Review for North Huron. The Ministry on its website describes both the authority of school boards to make decisions about closing, consolidating and building new schools, and the mandatory requirements which the boards MUST meet in making and implementing these decisions.
The Ministry's requirements are presented in bold below with comments on how the AMDSB failed to meet each of these requirements. Key words are italicized for emphasis by the blog author:
This process must follow the school board's policy that governs accommodation reviews.
Boards are required to ensure their own accommodation review policy (also known as a school closure policy) is compliant with the ministry's revised guideline.
The board failed to follow its own policies and ignored many of the ministry's guidelines. The most critical oversight was the board's failure to complete a valuation of the school to the local economy. Had this criterion been completed honestly, it would have been impossible for the board to close the BPS.
The ministry has issued a Pupil Accommodation Review Guideline that outlines the minimum requirements for school boards.
This statement means that the ministry's guidelines are mandatory, since they are minimum requirements. Approximately half of those guidelines were violated in the board's actual procedures.
The heart of this process is community consultation through representation on the ARC and through public meetings.
The representation on the ARC was not even close to a reflection of the Blyth community. There was no representation from Blyth business, Blyth Ward councillors, members at large from the community. Invitation were sent home with pupils for their parents; consequently the participants were mostly from the school community.
The ministry encourages students, parents and community members to get involved in the accommodation review process.
The entire ARC process in North Huron was a farce in that the board had already made its decisions. The community involvement turned out to be irrelevant. In fact, the ARC served the board as a diversion to keep the the school community busy while it carried out the administration's plans.
This document provides school boards and their communities with a tool to ensure transparency and accountability in an accommodation review process.
The boards decisions were all made in secret since they bear no relationship to the discussions that took place in the community forums. There was no transparency. Since neither the ministry, the Minister, the facilitator, and the community could not change the decision or appeal it, there was no accountability
Since the Ministry has made no effort to enforce its guidelines, has presented no sanctions for boards' deviations from the spirit and the words of their policy, the Ministry itself is at fault for the damage being done to communities such as Blyth by its becoming a community with no school.
Boards are required to ensure their own accommodation review policy (also known as a school closure policy) is compliant with the ministry's revised guideline.
As mentioned above, many of the ministry's guidelines were ignored by AMDSB, but also the ministry-appointed "independent" facilitator made no mention of those oversights in her review of the petition.
It appears that much of the boards decision-making took place in secrecy, taking illegal advantage of in camera meetings with no public scrutiny and no transparency.
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