COMMENTS ON SOME OLD BLYTH STANDARDS

EXPLORATIONS OF BACK COPIES OF THE BLYTH STANDARD

We have hundreds of back issue of the Blyth Standard going back to 1900 and a few odd pages before that. I find these to be absolutely fascinating and hope that you - some of you - will find them equally interesting.

My plan for this blog item is not to follow any particular theme, but just random accounts of things that catch my attention as I browse through the old stuff.

THE WEEKLY'S CHANGING VIEW ON WAR

The second Boer War was raging in Southern Africa in 1899 to 1902, and WW2 was raging in Europe from 1939 to 1945. The front pages in the Blyth Standard in Boer War years was totally dedicated to war news.

Front page of a 1900 issue.
All articles concern the war in South Africa

Front page for April 12, 1942

Articles indicate life going on pretty much as usual

The Boer War information obviously came from reports provided by the British and Canadian governments. There were numerous illustrations and photos. The local news was rarely accompanied by  photos in those days. I don't know much about printing, but assume that the local paper must have been provided with plates which enabled the printing of photos and maps which appeared regularly.

The war news was not confined to the front page. Many additional articles and photos were sprinkled throughout inside pages. Another possibility is that the paper received large packages of newsprint already printed leaving space for the local masthead to be printed as well as space for the other local news to be printed

The papers during WW2 contained references to the war as it affected the community directly. The activities of the Red Cross Society, the sale of Victory Bonds, notices of local service people being wounded, missing, or killed - these would appear throughout the paper. But if one just glanced at most issues of the paper, one would scarcely realize that a war was in progress. Those who subscribed to national daily papers would get their war news from that source as well as from radio broadcasts.

The Blyth Standard for May 27, 1942 featured a 2 full column list of people who had donated money to the Red Cross to help with the great work they did to assist the local service men and women. This list contained almost 300 donors who gave from 25 cents to 25 dollars to the cause. It was common in those days to publish the names of donors and the amount donated by each. There were two donations of $25. The Red Cross sent care parcels to soldiers and prisoners of war, corresponded with many of these young heroes. The knit socks, scarves, made up bandages and slings, as well as sending treats, cigarettes, and other gifts.

The Red Cross did their work and held meetings in the second floor rooms at the front of Industry Hall, which is the building on the southwest corner of Dinsley and Queen Street.

MORE LATER

Brock Vodden

LETTER TO NEW MINISTER OF EDUCATION

February-13-13

Ontario Ministry of Education
Att. Hon. Liz Sandals
Minister of Education
2^nd Floor, 880 Bay Street
Toronto, ON  M7A 1N3

THIS IS AN OPEN LETTER TO THE MINISTER OF EDUCATION FOR ONTARIO

Dear Minister:

First of all I would like to congratulate you on your appointment to this very important position in the new cabinet.

I have written several letters to two of your predecessors about the matter of the unnecessary closure of schools in small rural communities and have been sorely disappointed by their responses.

I will speak only from the perspective of the community of Blyth which I represent as a municipal councillor in the Municipality if North Huron, Huron County. Over the past three years, I have been working with many communities from all corners of Ontario, communities whose schools, like ours, have been torn from them for no legitimate reason.

Our Blyth Pubic School no longer exists. It was closed as of June 2012, the building has been sold and now our community and our local council are faced with the problem of finding ways to mitigate the loss of this central institution and this blow to the education for our children.

Though the school is gone, there lingers within our community the memory of deception, the smoke and mirrors, the false pretense of consultation and community involvement which was exercised by the Avon Maitland District School Board, and your ministry. You are moving into a position which represents to us an anti-rural, dishonest, mean-spirited group of thieves that have allowed our local school board to mirror your duplicity. They (AMDSB) violated most of your Pupil Accommodation Review Guidelines, ignored the required tests, deliberately avoided involvement of sectors of the Blyth community which might have questioned the proceedings and decisions of the ARC committee.

Our community requested that the minister provide a facilitator to review the conduct of the board’s accommodation review. The facilitator, Margaret Wilson, instead of reviewing the board’s duplicity, scolded the community for not behaving properly in the meetings and completely ignored the fact that the ARC meetings were given only perfunctory advertisement. There was no Blyth municipal representative and no Blyth business person involved in the ARC. (There was a North Huron councillor from a different ward in attendance at one or two early ARC meetings but he was told by the school board that he did not need to attend.)

There was no process put in place to do a proper valuation of the school to the community or to the local economy. Asked by a citizen why no impact study was conducted, the Superintendent of Schools said they did not need to do that because the other valuations were sufficient.

We took up a petition against the closure, the petition being presented in the Legislature several times by our MPP Lisa Thompson. In this community of 1,000 people we had signatures of 631 people.

I was interviewed on a local radio talk show on this subject. The interviewer asked me if the community of Blyth was properly represented on the ARC, and I replied in the negative. I added that the ARC meetings were mainly advertised by students taking home flyers from school, giving the strong impression that this was totally a school issue rather than a community issue. Later a staff member from the Board came on the talk show and by implication called me a liar. He said that Blyth was fully represented on the ARC and that every one of the ARC meetings was advertised in our local papers. His comments were not in line with the known facts.

I have repeatedly asked the board to identify by name the local councillors and the local business persons who were on the ARC group. They have never replied because there were no such people. I proved that only one of the six ARC meetings, the second meeting, was advertised in The Citizen (for Blyth). And only two of the six meetings were advertised in the Wingham Times Advocate. The first meeting, the very launch of the process, was not advertised in either paper.

There is a fundamental flaw in the entire process engineered by the AMDSB. They apparently began by responding to the declining enrolment in elementary schools in this area. They were saying essentially, we have too many schools and not enough children. Then they come out with a plan that is totally contradictory: a plan to build a new 24 classroom school right on the north edge of this area. Hence the need to close several schools in very good condition.

Now we see that the closing of schools had nothing to do with declining enrolment. The school closing was merely a way to justify a long secret plan of the board: the construction of a big school to match the school built previously in the Perth part of the board’s jurisdiction. Our Blyth Public School has been sacrificed in order to satisfy the hunger of our largely acclaimed members of the AMDSB for a monument to themselves.

There is on the positive side a  spin-off to the new school even though it has no educational justification or value. The presence of this new school has been partly an incentive for a large gradual construction of a residential development in Wingham. It will continue, I am sure, to generate other kinds of economic development which North Huron needs.

It is ironic that the source of funding for this monster school came not from the educational funding source, but from economic stimulus money. So the many millions of dollars which might have been used to help build a factory are now being used to build a school. Ironically, it is also being used to damage the economies of several other communities which from now on will be without schools.

Minister, this is part of the reason that the  power of school boards to do whatever they wish without considering the plans and needs of the community must be stemmed NOW. Changes need to take place in the Education Act in which school boards have the absolute right to close any school they choose regardless of what the community wishes or needs.

I understand that the Ministry of Education plans not only to continue its ill-conceived policy of closing schools in spite of community wishes and needs, but also to accelerate that process.

It’s too late to save our community of Blyth, but I would urge you at least to take a very hard look at the ministry’s plans and get them for once to deal honestly with citizens and try to get school boards to be honest as well.

H. Brock Vodden  B.A., B.Ed., M.Ed.

http://allaboutblyth.blogspot.com

www.hbvodden@ezlink.on.ca