February-13-13
Ontario Ministry of Education
Att. Hon. Liz Sandals
Minister of Education
2nd Floor, 880 Bay Street
Toronto, ON M7A 1N3
Att. Hon. Liz Sandals
Minister of Education
2nd 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.
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