Is the Province about to pull the plug on the new school?

ARE THE MINISTRY AND THE SCHOOL BOARD CONSPIRING?

Sunday March 25, 2012

It has come to my attention from undisclosed sources that the Avon Maitland District School Board was advised some time ago that the Ministry of Education intends to quash the plan to build the Maitland River Elementary School (MRES) in Wingham. It is no secret that the province is close to bankruptcy and needs to cut back on many multi-million dollar projects. Apparently MRES is one of them.

It also appears that the Ministry and Avon Maitland are coordinating their timing to give the school board the chance to get rid of the Blyth, Brussels, and East Wawanosh schools before the axe comes down on the new school that was supposed to replace them. In this way, the “ temporary” arrangement for the transitioning will become a longer term accommodation until some future time when they can afford to build a new facility – much later, maybe never.

This leaked information answers many questions many of us have been asking:

• Why not leave the children in their present schools (Blyth PS, East Wawanosh PS, and Brussels PS) until the new school is ready?
• Why did Trustee Colleen Schenk and Mike Ash come to meet with North Huron Council to explain how the students are going to be accommodated during the construction, when they have never provided any information of this type to council before?
• What was behind Trustee Schenk’s pseudo-psychological explanation of the transition process as a means of helping children to “build a culture where people would get to know each other and hopefully negate some of the culture shock that would come with moving all the students mid-year”? When we are exposed to a speech like this, one must ask what the speaker is trying to hide. If moves are so disruptive, why have two moves when one move would have sufficed? Now I think we know what they were hiding.
• Why adopt such a convoluted plan of moving children here and there in such a crazy quilt pattern, and renaming Turnberry Public School and Wingham Public School as “campuses”?

Now we are beginning to see how it all fits together. If this new information is correct, the plan is to get the doomed schools closed and sold, move the children into one of the schools in Wingham (all of which will have a new lease on life), announce the cancellation of the new school build (with great sadness), save a few million dollars on construction, and gain a few more dollars from the sale of our schools.

It is difficult to believe that a plot like this is happening in our community, but it is undeniable that it matches the pattern of deceit that has characterized Avon Maitland’s past treatment of Huron County communities. And they could not have gotten away with these behaviours without the complicity of the Ontario Ministry of Education.

I firmly believe that this kind of subterfuge on the part of the school board and the government, now exposed, should convince the opposition parties in the legislature that it is time to use their new influence and force the government to be accountable for treating their citizens in this manner.