My presentation to Ontario Education Critic June 12

Received in person by The PC Education Critic, Lisa MacLeod. MPP Nepean-Carlton accompanied by Jeff Yurek, MPP Elgin-Middlesex-London

SCHOOL BOARD ACCOUNTABILITY

I am Brock Vodden, a retired educator, and currently a municipal councillor for North Huron representing the Blyth Ward. I, along with others, have been working hard for almost 4 years to try to make the Avon Maitland District School Board recognize its responsibility to the community in which its schools are located.

I have been involved with many aspects of education throughout my entire career. A teacher in elementary and secondary schools, Superintendent of Schools, College administrator, and from 1976 to retirement, a self-employed corporate training and development specialist.

 I have only recently become aware of the question of school board accountability. Until the past 10 or so we have taken as a given that the trustees are public-minded citizens who are looking after the education needs of our children within the context of our communities. The connection of school to community was not something that we ever felt the need to discuss.

The convergence was always assumed.

In my in-depth studies of education, I came to realize that one of the truly outstanding strengths of the Ontario education system is the tight bonding we have between school and community – especially for children in the early years.

Recently, this matter has become a very serious matter for my community and for many communities across the province subject to a cluster of pivotal questions. There has been a major change that quietly took place. Even at the last municipal elections most people were just beginning to become aware of these emerging questions:

• ·       What is the nature of the relationship between the school board and the community?
• ·       Does the school board represent the people who elect them?
• ·       What is the nature of the relationship between the Ministry of Education and the school board?
• ·       What obligation, if any, does a school board have to ensure that its decisions support the sustainability of the community, and that those decisions are not in conflict with the plans and the needs of the community at large?
• ·       If such a conflict were to develop between a board and a community, what mechanisms are there to resolve the conflict?

These are very serious questions, and all across Ontario we find examples of school board-community conflicts based on these questions, and most of these battles are being resolved at the expense of the community. I believe that when the community loses the fight, the education system suffers as well. They are lose-lose situations.

Battles are being joined almost every time the term “Accommodation Review” is introduced.

I am in touch with many communities across Ontario going through similar conflicts.  My community of Blyth in Huron County seems to be fairly typical of these troubles

.

Let me tell you a bit about Blyth in case you are not familiar with it:

We have a small but vibrant community with many remarkable assets. Population is less than 1,000. 

Our Blyth Festival Theatre thriving since 1975.(30,000 patrons each summer) Our Threshers’ Reunion  in its 51^st  year. (13,000 visitors for one weekend each September). 

We have the largest serviced event campground in Ontario (800 serviced sites and 200 un-serviced.). 

Our latest achievement: the opening of our Emergency Services Training Centre which will provide training for 7,000 or 8,000 emergency personnel each year from all across Ontario and beyond.

Through great local investment we have developed and retained a very attractive main street with plans which will make this one of the most distinctive communities you ever passed through. But you might feel you just have to stop for a second look.

Unfortunately, I have to report that all of this is threatened by our school board.

They are closing our only school, Blyth Public School, in the next two weeks. This closure is already producing serious side-effects which will only multiply. It will affect our businesses, our general economy, our property values. This condition will discourage investment in our community. We will not be able to attract or retain young families. We will over time lose volunteers who play such an important part in all of our signature events as well as our volunteer fire department. We stand to lose retail businesses which in turn will cause us to lose our bank and perhaps our post office.

Our pool of volunteers, which is essential to so many of our endeavours, will be depleted over the years. Some facilities and events will not be sustainable for lack of volunteer support. The school board is doing all this to us with no thought or concern for the downstream effects.

A senior administrator with the Avon Maitland DSB is quoted as saying that the community is not the concern of the school board. He said that the only concern of the school board is the children and the schools. If the closure causes difficulties for the community, the community will have to find the solutions.

The school board has done nothing to dispel that opinion.

It is not just Blyth that is facing this bleak future. There are 90 other communities under the same type of shadow across the province at the moment. And many have already gone through the pain and suffering.

The Blyth community did everything it possible could to challenge this decision, but all has been of no avail.

·       The Blyth members on the ARC committee petitioned the Minister for an Administrative Review of the board’s process. They got their review, but the process was rigged by the Ministry.

• ·       Objections to re-zoning application for the site of the new school
• ·       Letters to the Board
• ·       A petition delivered on March 5 to the Ontario Legislature against the closing of our school with the support of our MPP, Lisa Thompson. 631 signatures were on that petition.
• ·       We filed a complaint with the Ontario Ombudsman’s office about the negligence in the Ministry of Education in not enforcing the terms of the ARC Guidelines
• ·       We filed a complaint with the Auditor General Ontario regarding the waste of funds in conducting consultative ARC meetings when the decisions had already been made as to the school closures, and for the wasted millions of dollars to build a new school which has no educational justification.

Members of the Blyth community have worked hard for four years to prevent this arbitrary decision from being implemented. 

Avon Maitland DSB has resorted to producing falsified reports about what they have done in Blyth, about the ARC meetings, about what the people of Blyth said and did. Just as an example, the official word from their Director of Communications and the chairperson is that every ARC meeting was advertised in the local paper. In fact, only the second meeting was advertised. 

That is just one of many such missteps. 

The chairperson wrote to me pointing out that the ministry’s facilitator judged the board’s conduct of the ARC to be exemplary. The facilitator made no such judgment. She said that the board’s policy was exemplary – not their implementation of it.

That seems like a small slip of the tongue, but it is typical of the misinformation that comes from the highest levels in the board.

The history of our own school is being written by board staff replete with untrue statements.

The school board does not represent us. It is not clear to me what their real motivations are. At first, we were led to believe that all these efforts were to deal with declining enrolment: too many schools, not enough children.  But deciding to build a new 24 room elementary school does not seem a logical remedy for declining enrollment.

I happen to believe that rogue boards like AMDSB are merely using the declining enrolment obsession as an excuse to do many things that have been dreamed up in back rooms in years past.

In any case, it is clear that many school boards across this province do not see themselves as being accountable to their respective communities. The Ministry is complicit in this anti-democratic trend since they have done nothing to dispel that impression and have done much to project a false impression that the people are being listened to.

Research on School Consolidation in both Canada and the United States shows that consolidation can be a good thing in some cases, but only in very specific circumstances.

It can be effective in terms of achieving greater efficiencies and improved educational quality but only when careful, objective research is done on the specific community and equally careful design of the precise solution to be implemented.  The nature of the consolidation must be tailor-made for the specific situation.

On the other hand the research shows that system-wide consolidation programs do not work. Saving money and improving quality are not guaranteed. Success in one aspect may be accompanied by failure in the other, or both results might be negative.

Also the research is very clear that big schools are not better than small schools just because they are bigger.

This entire consolidation campaign throughout Ontario is supported by no research and offers no advice on alternative strategies that boards may use. There is so much wrong with this entire process, it is little wonder that the Ontario educations system has to rely on Draconian measures to enforce such a baseless and destructive policy.

The damage being done to small rural communities is beyond measure but it is probably in the billions of dollars. It is another aspect of the government’s attack on rural Ontario.

REMEDIES

Legislative changes:

The absolute right of school boards to close or open schools without offering the right of appeal must be removed.

School boards must be subject to the principles of sound municipal planning in addition to sound educational planning and must be required to face objections and appeals.

The traditional link between the community and education must be restored  throughout Ontario so that no community can be deprived of a local school except under very specific conditions, making retention of a local school completely impractical.

We must find a way to balance cost efficiencies and ensuring that our education is relevant to each community.

School boards have become obsessed with the need to have all kinds of specialists in the board offices.

This is one of the reasons that the board has notified five schools in our county that they cannot afford to operate their schools any more.

It is time to recognize that the most critical need for expertise lies in the teaching staff. The relationship between the teacher and the students is the most critical part of the education process. Many teachers tell me that there is so much paper work and so many demands to continually adopt new fancy methodologies that they barely have time to do any teaching.

The board specialists need something to do so they constantly demand reports from the teachers and seek to prove their worth by working on the implementation of the latest instructional fad – needed or not!

I believe that the Ontario Ombudsman must be given the right to investigate the activities of the MUSH group: Municipalities, Universities, Schools and Hospitals.

One mayor mentioned to me that I should be careful what I ask for since if the OO looks into school affairs he will also be able to investigate my activity as a councillor. Well, I happen to believe that all of these public organizations need to be subject to review. There are many injustices that are never challenged because the individual or the groups do not have the resources to conduct the review themselves.

CONCLUSION

The Ministry of Education has facilitated this process that enables school boards to do pretty much whatever they decide to do. The activities in question very often have little or nothing to do with declining enrollment. This arrangement leaves the community with no way to turn.

In my view, school boards are accountable to the Ministry of Education these days.

The school boards, when questioned about their arbitrary decisions either refuse to answer our questions or they give false information. If the community requests an administrative review from the Ministry, to pass judgment on the board’s ARC process which they know was rigged, they do not get an objective analysis. The facilitators that conduct the reviews invariably find the board’s actions to be satisfactory. They point out a few areas that the board might improve the next time they have an ARC process, but they always point out that they do not feel that these little errors had a material effect on the board’s decision. Of course they didn’t! The decision was made before the ARC even began.

The only result of the admin review is that it provides the board and the ministry with documents which whitewash the entire process of the board, and which contradict all of the facts known by the people who were there and know the truth about what was actually said and done.

It appears that the Ministry of Education has a goal of eliminating a certain number of schools. They don't seem to care which schools are closed, or what the effects are on their communities. To them it is just a matter of numbers. We often refer to this as management by spreadsheet. It is happening in both urban and rural settings, but the rural areas are hardest hit.

We are looking for support in the Ontario legislature. Our school board will not even talk to us or listen to us.

SCHOOL BOARD REFORM DESPERATELY NEEDED

The way we were

This picture was taken in the spring of 1953 on the steps at the front entrance of Clinton District Collegiate Institute. The students, all from the Grade 13 class of that year, hailed from various communities within the district. Each of these communities its own school board with representatives on the Collegiate district board.

These students were represented and their home communities were represented. In most cases, these students were known personally to those representatives. The decisions made by these trustees reflected their concern for the educational needs and opportunities of these students as well as the needs and interests of their whole communities.

Those days of representative democracy in education are gone now. Sadly, they are gone!

The system in decline: Taxation without representation

Instead, we have a school board, Avon Maitland District School Board, made up of nine members from all over two counties: Huron County and Perth County. If they know any of the students attending these schools, it is a purely accidental happening. They don't even know most of the communities they are expected to represent. What is more - they don't care about those communities, except perhaps for the one in which they happen to live. A senior administrator for the system was quoted as saying that "we are only concerned about the schools, not the community. If closing a school causes difficulties for the community, the community will have to deal with it. It is not our concern."

We can't truly refer to these members as "trustees". We cannot trust them to represent our communities. They work for someone else. We are not sure what is the basis of their strange behaviour.

Back in 1953, school boards represented their communities. Today, AMDSB has been co-opted by the Ministry of Education to serve the political needs and wishes of the McGuinty government. They are led by a pack of non-accountable self-serving administrators who have no sense of community and not much wisdom related to education either. Not only does this board hold a silo mentality; they are a silo built within a fortress.

AMDSB's Hidden Agenda

They have declared that they can no longer afford to operate our Blyth Public School (among others).

The reason given is the evil funding formula, and the declining enrollment.

Too many schools, too many classrooms, not enough children! So what is the first measure taken to solve these problems? It is to build a new 24 room school. Cost: approaching $14 million dollars.

Does that make any sense?

Two weeks or so from now, Blyth Public School will be history.

HISTORY!  That brings up another issue. 

AMDSB Fails its history test

AMDSB is writing its own history about the Blyth Public School. Anything in that history that might make them appear to be stupid or dishonest or incompetent (and there are many examples of each), they alter the facts to create a better image - the image that they wish were true.

The Ministry of Education is complicit in this process of revising the history of our school and our community. They sent one of their consulting flunkies to perform an administrative review on the ARC process that took place here. Margaret Wilson did quite a number on us. She ignored all of the cheating and missteps  committed by the board during the ARC process and declared that their ARCing job was exemplary.

So our little community of Blyth is all wrapped up in pink paper and tied with a bow.

If we seek the truth from the board, they give us their revisionist version backed up by Margaret Wilson's fictional report. If we lodge a complaint against the Ministry with the Ontario Ombudsman for the way we've been treated (and I have done that), the feedback we get is Ms Wilson's fiction backed up by the school board's revised account of what AMDSB would like us to think happened.

As a self-appointed volunteer historian of this community, I take great exception to these interlopers producing distorted accounts of the life and times of our village. I take exception to the damage this board is doing to the quality of our education. 

AMDSB, by closing our only school, has delivered a serious blow to this community. Economically, socially, and educationally!  Education needs to be intrinsically tied to the community of the learner. That link is being broken for Blyth.

We must face the fact that our school is lost - probably forever. But we must engage in a new war to achieve a complete reform of the school board system and the Ministry of Education as well, since the Ministry has allowed rogue boards like ours to corrupt the Ontario education system.

Throw the bums out.

At the very least we must see that we have community-minded candidates for all positions for school board in 2014. They must be prepared to get rid of the dry rot in the administration and give notice to the Ministry of Education that that the new board will strive for a better education system that serves the needs of the whole communities in which the students live.

Then we must work with boards across the province to eliminate the corruption within the Ontario Ministry of Education and to revise the Education Act so that school boards are subject to the same planning requirements as everyone else in the making of decisions that have major effects on neighbourhoods and the community in general.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
We received a phone call a week ago from a 90 year old lady friend who was raised in Blyth. She told us that she called the school board office and asked the receptionist whose idea it was to close the Blyth School. The reply was that the school board decided that. I have to translate her reply slightly:
She shouted "Get rid of the buggers!" and hung up.

NEWS RETURNS TO INDUSTRY HALL

In this streetscape of Blyth from around 1920, we see that our weekly newspaper office of that era was located at the southwest corner of Queen and Dinsley. That paper was called the Blyth Standard, owned and published from 1910 to 1934 by J.H.R. Elliott.

Blyth circa 1920
Queen and Dinsley looking south

In the past month, our current paper, The Citizen has moved to the same site, Industry Hall.

Industry Hall June 2012

This building has served many purposes since it was built in 1888.

To name just a few:

• Upstairs was the main concert hall for the village. Pauline Johnston gave a concert here about 1896.
• Meeting room for many groups including Village Council.
• Blyth Standard
• Telephone central office, first on second floor later on first floor.
• Red Cross meeting room
• Sibthorpe's billiard hall, barber shop, soda fountain
• Wolf Cubs and Boy Scout troop.
• Blyth Library
• Village Office and council chamber
• OPP Police Office
• Insurance/investment office

Can you add any functions for which this building was used?

History-making

Jenny Versteeg, Chair of Avon Maitland District School Board,  has written to me that various watchdogs and committees have "confirmed the veracity of the previous board's decisions" (regarding the closure of our school). In an earlier letter she advised me that the Avon Maitland Board has also confirmed all of their previous actions and decisions.

I guess this means that the fibs told by their Communications Director on CKNX and confirmed by  Ms. Versteeg herself, have been forgiven. The slate is wiped clean. As far as I know none of the board members or staff have confessed to any breaches of veracity, but those confirmatory motions are pretty powerful, if you think it is proper to abuse that kind of justification.

Now that all is forgiven and the smart-board has been completely erased,  AMDSB can start all over again to write the history they wish were true. If the truth gets stretched or twisted, self forgiveness can cover up.  

Unfortunately, the official records about the closure of BPS and the Blyth ARC experience in the board's files as well as the copies in the Ministry of Education will still contain the fictitious accounts. The sinning is washed away but the products of the sinning will remain forever in the soon to be archived history of Blyth Public School.

There is to be a celebration of the history of Blyth Public School later this month. Which history will  be celebrated?


Note: By "smart-board" in paragraph 3 I am not referring to the school board. It has not been erased.

Project to Save our Schools & Communities

To-day, May 12, hundreds of campaigners who have been engaged in attempting to save their local schools from unjustified closure, joined in an campaign to flood the offices of Ontario legislators and others with letters, emails, appeals, articles of all kinds.

This we hope will draw attention to the plight of many communities and to the draconian actions of rogue school boards who in this one instance are able to close any school they wish with no fear of appeal from any person or group except by very expensive and cumbersome legal procedures. All of this is a serious glitch in our democratic principles.

We are anxiously awaiting word of reactions to our efforts. I have no idea at this point how many people actually participated or how many messages they sent.

I hope the result will be a dramatic response in Queen's Park.

Picture about our Family Business

We never know what is going to arrive in our post office mail box, our email box, or at our front door. There are very few weeks in which we fail to receive at least one surprise - a contribution to our collection of Blyth memorabilia. This week was no exception.

The above picture of a wedding cake came this week by surface mail. At first I ignored the cake and was trying to identify the people. I soon realized that the cake was the main feature since I did not recognize the ladies behind it.

This cake came from Vodden's Home Bakery in Blyth for a wedding taking place in 1947. That was my family's first business up to 1953. My parents were Harold and Myrtle Vodden. Their bakery in 1947 was located in the building now occupied by Sharon's Miniature Museum on Queen Street.

The picture was sent to us by the bride of that wedding that took place 64 years ago. What a kind and thoughtful gesture!

She sent the following note with the parcel:

"Dear Brock and Janis:

I am slow to mail this picture.

Your Mom was sick with an infected tooth at this time, but she did a great job."

My mother did all the cake decorating for their business as well as most of the pastries. 

DEBATE WITH STEVE HOWE

MY DEBATE WITH STEVE HOWE, Director of Communications, AMDSB

On March 27, 2012 I was invited to be interviewed on the CKNX Talk Show about the replacement of our Blyth Public School and  the new Maitland River School at Wingham.

I indicated that Blyth was not properly represented in the meetings of the Accommodation Review Committee and the meeting were not properly advertised. The Communications Director of Avon Maitland District School Board came on afterwards and stated that there was no truth in what I had said. He went on at great length saying that all the communities were fully involved and consulted according to the Guidelines that the ministry required the board to follow. He said that every meeting was fully advertised in all the local papers (He mentioned The Citizen in particular.)

The truth is very different. Only one advertisement appeared in The Citizen through the entire ARC process. A small ad appeared in the December 4, 2008 Citizen,  the week before the second ARC meeting.  None of the other ARC meetings were advertised in The Citizen – not even the first meeting.  As the guy who places the ads, I guess Steve was assuming that no one would go back to check on the“facts” at the source fro 2008 an 2009.

I did!

The Ministry of Education Guidelines state that the board is responsible for recruiting a representative cross section of the community to the ARC meetings. Obviously they failed miserably at this task. Placing a tiny ad in one issue and hoping for the best does not constitute "recruitment".

One would almost think that they wanted to avoid involving people who might see what damage would come to a community losing its only school. A sort of “Mis-Direction of Communication” function.

Steve Howe said that all the meetings were reviewed in the press. Actually very few reports appeared in the Citizen. Most of the reports came from parents in letters to the editor.

Steve Howe said that the board followed all the Guidelines. The guidelines state that the community consultation must include representation by parents, educators, and business and municipal leaders from the community.  There were no Blyth business people or municipal councillors in attendance at the meetings, and the minutes of the ARC committees contain no presentations or comments by either of these groups.

Steve Howe said that there was a large attendance at all of the meetings. A parent’s letter to the editor of The Citizen on December 4, 2008 asked the question “Why aren’t people coming out to show support for their schools?” Poor attendance was consistently reported by concerned citizens.

Steve Howe said that in his opinion loss of the school may be “inconvenient” but should not create any serious problems for the communities. He further indicated that there are many communities in Huron County which are thriving despite the fact that they have never had a school. I would ask Steve to name a few of these communities.  How about Jamestown, Belfast, Bluevale, Bodmin, to name just a few?

Steve Howe said that the board adopted all of the ARC’s recommendations except the move of Grades 7 and 8 to Madill High School and the K to 6 school instead of K to 8. He forgot to mention the placement of the school in Wingham instead East Wawanosh. Also the Maitland River Elementary School is not even remotely the same as the envisioned Center of Excellence.

Steve Howe said that the new school will have many special programs with specialized teachers which would not be possible in our current schools. I would like Steve Howe to be a little more specific: Tell us what specialized programs and what specialist teachers are going to be hired, and what current teachers are going to be replaced by these new hires?

Avon Maitland has had a program for many years aimed at instilling values in all the students, values such as honesty, truthfulness, respect for others, dependability, etc.

Perhaps the Avon Maitland board and staff could acquire some of these values by joining the kids as learners!

Brock Vodden  

April 24, 2012

EMPLOYEES AT WORK

Some time ago I was shopping at a retail outlet in this area. One of the employees in that store who knows that I am a councillor, came over to me to tell me about one day when he called in at our office in Wingham. As he was being looked after at the wicket, he noticed two other employees standing off to one side having a conversation. He reported that this conversation went on for several minutes, two employees standing there not doing any work at all. Imagine how much that is costing the tax payers! I asked what they were talking about. He said that he couldn't hear what they were saying. I suggested that they might have been discussing township business. "Oh, no. One of them was laughing about something." Then I asked if both of the people were employees. Could it be that one of them was a resident getting help from a staff member? He said he had no idea whether that was the case, but it looked to him as if they were enjoying the conversation - not doing business.

Finally, I suggested that the situation he was telling me about was quite similar to the situation he and I were in. "You are hired to work in this store, but you have taken some time off to tell me abut something completely unrelated to your job. what's the difference in this case?"

I guess he had never thought about the fact that when we point a finger at someone else, there are three other fingers on the same hand pointing back at us!

SAVING BLYTH PUBLIC SCHOOL

We are coming down to the wire. Our only school in Blyth is slated to close at the end of June 2012. Most people are sure that nothing can stop this terrible event. They may be right. But I am not prepared to give up yet.

We still have two possible stoppers. Our petition with 631 signatures has been presented several times to the Ontario Legislature. It calls for a moratorium on ALL contested school closures in Ontario as well as legislative changes which will prevent rogue school boards like Avon Maitland DSB from indiscriminate closing of schools, and force school boards to adhere to the community planning principles that protect us from such destructive groups. The Ontario government must answer to us and to the legislature by early June.

The other iron we have in the fire is an appeal to the Auditor General of Ontario to review the joint and separate actions of Avon Maitland District School Board and the Ministry of Education for Ontario in the Accommodation Review process which has led to school closures and school consolidation plans in North Huron. This appeal points to the many wasteful expenditures by both bodies to support ineffective processes, the construction of a new school for which there is no educational justification, for the economic and social damage being inflicted on the community of Blyth, for the board's improper conduct of the Accommodation Review in violation of the Ministry guidelines, and the lack of vigilance of the Ministry of Education by not enforcing its own guidelines.

The collusion of the AMDSB and the Ministry left our community utterly defenceless, and both of those bodies continue to use falsified documents to justify their actions and positions. The most egregious example of this is the report prepared by the independent facilitator, Margaret Wilson and edited by the Ministry, claiming that the school board's process in the accommodation review was beyond reproach. We in Blyth know that that is absolutely false yet that is the weapon being used by the board and the ministry to beat us down. This false defence cost thousands of dollars to construct and that in my mind is not an example of positive value for dollars spent.

This kind of duplicity has been occurring in many jurisdictions across Ontario. It is a "can of worms" that I believe needs to be opened wide. We need to get back to the principle that our elected bodies such as councils and boards are to serve the best interests of those who elect them. They are not there to be co-opted by the provincial or federal government to deceive us, to beat us down, to tell us what to do or how to behave.

We citizens of Blyth have been denied our democratic rights. We are subjected to taxation without representation. Our school is about to be taken away from us. We are left without the right to appeal the decision to those who have made the decision. To add to the disgrace is the fact that our elected bodies, the school board and the provincial government are both using false and misleading information to justify what they are doing.

I do not know whether the Auditor General for Ontario will take on our case and give us some justice. I will be disappointed if such is not the case.

However I would be even more disturbed if the AGO looks at our situation and decides that no action is required. That would mean that public servants don’t have to be honest. school boards don’t need to be accountable to the public, small rural communities don’t matter. It would be saying that it’s OK to hold expensive public consultations that will never be listened to. It would mean that the Ministry of Education is within its rights to send people out to investigate school board procedures knowing that these people will always find the board blameless and the community at fault regardless of what the reality is.

That would be a hard pill to swallow.

Brock Vodden

WINGHAM FREE PRESS APOLOGIZES FOR LYING

This is the headline that we are all waiting to see in the Wingham Free Press.

It would be a positive sign that they have realized the errors of their ways, no longer acting like spoiled children, taking some responsibility for their community instead of making false accusations that make all of us look bad.

Perhaps it would be a sign that they have taken a course in Journalistic Ethics and now realize how they have been a largely negative force in North Huron.

They may also recognize that they have been successful in attracting only a few correspondents who are functionally literate.

Having attracted a group of people who missed school on the days that they taught spelling and civics , they could have explained to them that the school board and North Huron Council are two different bodies that do not share the "Town Hall". They could have been careful to help them understand that the consultant hired by Huron County Council was not hired by North Huron Council. They might have even got these poor souls to recognize that North Huron Council does not control the North Huron Police Force. Of course before they could get some of these finer points across to their correspondents, they would have to brush up on these matters themselves.

Well we can always hope that there will be brighter days ahead.

Brock Vodden

April 12 Comment of the day

Wingham Free Press and some of its correspondents continue to rant about Wingham being shunned by potential home buyers and the dearth of businesses willing to come here.

Our taxes are fairly high here, and all members of council agree with this. To reduce taxes some programs and services would need to be cut back. The problem is identifying those services that the population as a whole are willing to give up. The key phrase there is "population as a whole".

In the Citizen Survey that was conducted late last year, we learned that while there are many people hoping for reduced tax rates in all wards, there are many who want services and programs increased, and many who say that they moved to Wingham because of the services offered.

The vast majority of people responding on the survey approve strongly of nearly all of the services offered by North Huron. This includes some of the areas that some WFP correspondents want to cut.

While there may be some who stay away because of the tax rate, the present status is actually attracting people. One of the attractions is the low initial cost of the housing. Low assessment base is the result of that, and that also contributes to higher taxes.

Reducing taxes is not an easy process.

There are some very positive signs for future growth and when they occur, the tax rate could be modified considerably

I believe that the trash talk of WFP contribute more to driving people away than high taxes.

Brock Vodden

Second Comment ---- April 11

Wingham Free Press criticisms of North Huron council this week are completely unfounded.

They are saying that we have "abandoned fire contract negotiation". How can this be? There are no such negotiations going on. We have almost two years remaining on our current contract. There are no negotiations to abandon.

WFP saya that NH actions "guarantee that no compromise will be reached". To make a compromise you have to have two sides each with their own position and both sides have to search for a blending of the two positions to reach a situation  agreeable to both. Morris-Turnberry keeps changing its position so that NH has no idea where M-T stands.

NH council was offended by the Mayor's criticism of us at the County Council meeting, but that is not why we cancelled the meeting (at least in my estimation). The Mayor is launching a campaign to develop a county-wide fire service, and although I think that is a very good idea, it is not something that we and M-T need to discuss.
Separate fire department, new fire board, county fire department? What are we discussing?

Wingham Free Press, why don't you present the whole picture instead of criticizing NH for issues manufactured by others?


WFP accuses North Huron of fabricating and denying facts. WFP is constantly making up things and we could never hope to keep up denying those so-called "facts".  That's the kind of problem that gutter journalism creates.

Brock Vodden

Wed. April 11 Comment

WFP criticizes  North Huron for cancelling the  meeting with Morris-Turnberry.

We agreed to meet with Morris-Turnberry, then later at County Council we hear Mayor Gowing coming up with a completely different scenario: He called for a county-wide fire service. In proposing this he states that they cannot get North Huron to negotiate.

We think there is no point in holding a meeting if we have no idea what  M-T wants to discuss.

Back in February we got  together to coordinate all of our many areas of cooperation most of which are functioning quite well. They said they weren't prepared to go along with a joint Economic Development process.

Next day, M-T announces they are going to create their own fire department by 2014. That told  us that they don't want to negotiate; they are going on their own. We thought, that's fine! Good Luck! They have every right to do that!

Then out of the blue they sent us a letter giving us three options. The letter says that this is their last effort at trying to negotiate with us. (We had not received any indication that they had asked to negotiate. We already have an agreement which runs for two years.)

The options amount to going back to a form of the old fire board system which NH pulled out of because it was failing to provide consistent and compliant fire service. In my view none of the options were acceptable.
Fire boards are no longer recognized by emergency authorities except for "grandfathered" boards.

Their plan would leave North Huron with high standard of service out of Blyth station for Blyth and M-T offered by FD of North Huron ; and a limited service out of the proposed Turnberry station to cover the Wingham and Turnberry areas provided by M-T Fire Dept. North Huron will never accept again two different level of service for our citizens.

We were prepared to meet with them to discuss matters at that point, although some councillors were skeptical about the value of discussing a set of really bad ideas. I think the main reason we thought that meeting should be a closed meeting was that we needed to sort out the question of what M-T really wanted to talk about. We all favoured an open meeting once we clarified the questions on which we could negotiate.

Then we heard the Mayor saying that he can't deal with us and that he wants to take another completely different tack: a county-wide fire service.

It just made no sense to have that meeting when we don't know what Morris-Turnberry wants to talk about and they don't seem to know either!

The Ongoing Attack on Rural Ontario

Attack seems like a strong word, but it helps to describe the situation we in rural Ontario find ourselves.

It's a war. We have propaganda coming out of the mouths of Ministers of the Crown. We have fifth columnists in the guise of school boards sinking ships with their overworked lips. We have weapons used against us such as the hated and feared funding formula. We have traitorous groups made up of Mayors, Reeves, Councillors whose municipalities are getting fancy new schools to replace the perfectly good but about-to-be-closed schools of their neighbours. We have secret war plans worked out by sleazy school board administrators which suddenly explode onto the scene creating havoc in the community. We have local propaganda in voice and print spewing from communication officers to mislead and abuse the local people who elected their boards.

And we have victims. Children dragged away to another community like displaced persons. Local school bus businesses deprived of their livelihood by foreign infiltrators. Home owners whose property values began to subside as soon as the school closure was announced. Children losing the exercise they used to get from walking to school.

Perhaps the biggest loser in all this is the social contract which we have enjoyed in this country: the contract by which we have the opportunity to choose who will be our representatives in all levels of government and boards that do their best to represent the people they serve.

Complaints about politicians have always been a normal part of life, but in rural Ontario it seems that everything the government is doing is contrary to our common interests. Few of us feel that we have any influence on any government policy or actions.

The McGuinty government has brought about this change. It seems that everything that we in rural Ontario want from them is denied; everything that we absolutely do not want is being forced on us. Our rural way of life is being laid waste. Our communities' best features are being held against us. Our greatest achievements are being treated as failures. Our major vital contributions to the society at large are treated with scorn or ignored.

Nearly all the ministers in the McGuinty cabinet have taken to denying that there is a rural-urban divide in Ontario. They are saying that we are all the same, working together, even though at the same time they are conspiring against us just as if they were laying land mines on out pathways.

 Even our own local school board has been co-opted to undermine us. A spokesperson for the Avon Maitland District School Board proclaimed that the Accommodation Review process conducted in this area of North Huron was conducted in complete and total compliance with the Ministry Guidelines and the board's policy. Everyone in this village of Blyth knows that is completely false, and yet that false position is what is held by the Ministry of Education to be true and accurate. A lie becomes the official position about our community!

The social contract is so important but a very fragile thing. It depends on trust, goodwill, integrity, transparency, competence. When any of those qualities are missing, the social contract collapses. The Avon Maitland District School Board lacks all of those qualities just as the Ministry of Education lacks them. The social contract is in really jeopardy.

Surely there are some trustees who have the character and fortitude to stand up for a higher standard of leadership than we have seen from this board.

Brock Vodden

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.

More Blyth History Coming Your Way

Today, Jan and I received two DVD disks containing many hundreds of issues of the Blyth Standard, our weekly newspaper. These are dated from 1906 to 1980. I just now counted the number of issues, an amazing 1,686 separate issues - ranging from 8 to 12 pages each.

We already had the 1906, 1907, 1925, and 1930 issues, but this new collection will fill up our collection to the end of the life of that publication.

We have already begun to lay plans for getting this "new" information from the past out to the many people who are interested in Blyth. One idea that I am thinking about and plan to pursue is publishing some decade summaries in book form of what happened in the old home town. The first I intend to work on is the 1940s.

The other process that this collection will allow us to do is rapidly search through the old papers for tne occurrences of a particular name. We have many people contacting us and making appointments to visit the colection for family information.This newspaper collection will provide us with another rich area to search for "Smith", "Jones", or "Brockest" in any article of any issue of the paper, select the article, and print it for the guest if it appears to be relevant to their search.

We know that not everyone is as excited as we are about old newspapers, but from a lot of experience we can assert that when we find an item related to the ancestor of those indifferent people, many of them become quite engaged.

We are excited!

Brock Vodden
Blyth,  Wednesday March 7, 2012

The McGuinty Code

The McGuinty Code

I just spent three days at a municipal conference in Toronto. While there were numerous  beneficial presentations and discussions, there were many provincial cabinet ministers there responding to questions, giving speeches, and holding fifteen minute audiences for delegations  from all over Ontario.

Each time I attend meetings like this, I find it interesting to watch for themes that emerge from members of the government. This year the common theme, expressed in various ways is this:

"THERE IS NO RURAL-URBAN DIVIDE. WE ARE ALL IN THIS TOGETHER. WE JUST NEED TO WORK TOGETHER AND EVERYTHING WILL BE OK."

This annual conference is jointly sponsored by the Rural Ontario Municipal Association and the Ontario Good Roads Association, both of these are organizations that are very well aware of the increasing number and advancing seriousness of issues facing the rural and small town communities throughout this province. Many of the emerging problems we face are caused by or aggravated by the current Ontario Liberal government.

Even the Minister of Agriculture, Food, and Rural Affairs espoused this myopic viewpoint, despite the fact that he is in the position most likely to make the rural-urban divide most obvious.

That minister, Ted McMeekin, does not strike one as the most insightful politician in the pack, can hardly ignore the cries for help coming from all over the rural areas of Ontario.

Another common element is showing up amongst the government officials. I have been encountering this right here in Huron County. It is not a theme, but a code. It’s a code made up of a very ordinary string of words. Those who are not aware of the fact that this word string is actually a code for something else, will end up with a very wrong interpretation.

Here is the code:  “IT’S ALL ABOUT THE .......” .   Now this code can be completed with any number of nouns and adjectives. To fully and accurately understand what the speaker is saying about those things, you must convert the code part to its literal meaning.

What does “IT’S ALL ABOUT THE .......” stand for? I’ll provide you with some very frequently used examples by members of the McGuinty government, and Ontario school board officials.

“It’s all about the children.”  Spoken by the Avon Maitland School Board officials over the past two or three years, in reference to the closing of certain schools and the building of huge new schools, actually means:  “It has absolutely nothing to do with the children.”

“It’s all about the safety of the children.” Spoken by Laurel Broten, Ontario Minister of Education at the ROMA/AGRO Conference in Toronto, February 27, 2012 in reference to the ministry giving out huge contracts to U.S. firms to provide school bus services for some Ontario Counties, and thereby putting many Ontario transportation companies out of business.  What she actually was saying is “It has absolutely nothing to do with safety of the children”. Local companies have been providing safe transportation for hundreds of thousands of Ontario children for many decades. Ms.  Broten is struggling to get the hang of using The McGuinty Code in a convincing manner. She has a way to go still.

“It’s all about the declining enrolment in our schools and the need to save money.” This has been said by senior administrators for Avon Maitland many times trying to justify the closing of Blyth Public School and other schools. We have to apply the key to The McGuinty Code to find out the real meaning of the statement. Translation: “It has absolutely nothing to do with declining enrolment or saving money”. What the board is actually doing is using up some available economic stimulus funding to match the new school opened in Perth County last year. Spending $10 million dollars, give or take a few million, on an unnecessary school is an unusual way to save money.

Look out for The McGuinty Code.

Blyth, Weenusk, and Other Small Towns

Blyth Public School 1896 - 1965

Several people, including my wife Janis Vodden, have suggested that there is a parallel between the current closure of small rural schools and the infamous Residential School Scandal that has been the subject of police investigation, parliamentary investigations, criminal charges, law suits, and truth and reconciliation hearings for the past two decades.

I must admit that when Janis first mentioned this to me, I didn’t pay close attention. I was too much involved in our local fight with Avon Maitland School Board over their attack on our community of Blyth by threatening to close our only school, Blyth Public School.

That fight has reached a milestone two days ago, February 23, 2012 when I delivered our stack of 631 signatures on a petition to the office of our MPP, Lisa Thompson. It is a petition to stop all of these inappropriate closures of schools all across Ontario by school boards that have been granted the absolute right to close any school of their choice and no one has the right to appeal that decision – no person or group in the entire world!

The school board says to us “Your school is closing as of June 30, 2012 and your children are going to be bused to another community for a year or two until we get a new school built and then your children will be bused to either that new school or maybe another school.” And this line is issued with the understood implication “and there is nothing you or anyone else can do about it!”

Parents in our community hate this arrangement. They want their children to continue to walk to their school just down the street. Many of them have voiced their opinions and complaints, but no one listens to them.

Now that the petition is on its way and I have a little more time to think about things, I am realizing that Janis is absolutely right.

We are being treated by our school board in exactly the same way as the First Nation communities throughout Canada were treated when their children were wrenched from their arms (sometimes literally) by the RCMP, and taken to a residential school not just for the day but for the entire term. The school to which they were taken could be just a few miles away or, in many cases, several  hundred  miles away.

For example, all the school age children from Weenusk near Hudson Bay were taken to Horden Hall, the Anglican residential school on Moose Factory Island, at the southern tip of James Bay near Moosonee. This is a distance of over 500 miles as the crow or the airplane flies. No chance for parents to drop in for an occasional visit, no chance to meet with the teachers to discuss the children’s progress, and no opportunity for the teachers or principal to get to know the communities from which the children came or the way of life in those communities.

Well, the teachers in the residential schools, were not concerned about their lack of understanding of the background of their charges. Their job was to replace those backgrounds with a strict religious doctrine, a different language (English or French), and a completely different way of life. The goal was to stamp out all vestiges of the aboriginal culture. By the same token, the time away from their home communities prevented the children from learning the ways of the hunter, fisherman, and trapper which was how their home communities supported themselves. They also did not learn the stories of their people, the customs by which their communities operated, and the centuries-old cultural and religious tenets that had sustained their people for centuries. The main goal of most of the residential schools was to teach the children to disrespect everything about their first language, their customs, their community, and their parents.

As generations of First Nation people were exposed to this systematic cultural deprivation, many children grew up in a kind of wasteland between two cultures, in many cases with no practical parenting skills, torn as they were between the role model of natural parents whom they were taught to disrespect, and institutional staff who were more like jailers than parents.

And of course, in some instances, there were many forms of abuse as part of the “educational experience”.

What does all that have to do with the closures of schools in Ontario?

First of all as in the issue of residential schools, the closure process is very widespread.

Here is a list of schools that are< have been  or will soon be under threat in Ontario:  Blyth, Brussels, Moonstone, Peterborough, Thorold, Colborne Central, East Wawanosh, Cobalt, Welland, Niagara district, Sudbury District, Crowland, Bruce Mines, Echo Bay, Grandview Sault Ste Marie, Central Algoma, Johnston Tarbut Central  PS, St. Mary's Kingston, Listowel Central, Turnberry, Usborne Central, Wallace PS, Zurich PS, Downview Hanover, Elgin Market Kincardine, Chesley, Milton, Kanata, East Guillimbury, Foleyet, Gogama, Dunville, Haldimand, Port Dover, Harrow, Sudbury south, -----to name just a few. There are many others.

Your first thoughts may jump to the differences between the two situations. In our present battle there are no residential schools involved, they are not federally operated schools, the children are not all aboriginal, the times away from home are not of term duration but daily only, and the distances from home to the “foreign” school are much  shorter.

But there are strong similarities between the two situations:

•    The decisions to close are contrary to the wishes of either community
•     The decision of the school board was arbitrary and did not require approval from the parents or the  community, just like the federal government’s decision of where aboriginal students would  be educated
•     No person in either community has the right to appeal the decision.
•     Should a parent in our present case refuse to allow their children to go to the new school, the RCMP will not come and drag their children away, but there would be legal steps taken to force the parents to comply.
•  The children are being moved out of their own community to be educated in a different community which will offer a different cultural environment than that of the children’s and their parents', same as in the aboriginal communities.
•  The children will have less chance to learn informally about their home community.
•   The teachers in the new school community will by and large have no knowledge of or interest in the idiosyncratic characteristics of the displaced children’s community, same as in residential schools.
• The economy and the social fabric of the community deprived of its only school, will suffer in many ways: unable to attract or retain young families, less able to attract business investment, loss of business, loss of a major employer ( the school), and loss of identity. The aboriginal communities suffered from their children not being able to learn the life skills needed in their environment.
•  Small towns, like First Nation communities, depend on each new generation to learn how the community functions and to learn a role by which they can contribute to that community. Stealing hundreds of hours and days out of the time of our children, robs our community of much of the potential spirit, wisdom, and dedication which we will require of them when they come of age to lead and sustain the unique character of our home town.
•   Finally, this is probably the most powerful connection between the Residential School scenario and the current school closing phenomenon. Some explanation is required:

o   The residential school movement was conducted under a regime intended to give it legitimacy and to mask its evil intent. That regime was, in almost every case, a church or other religious entity. To the outside world these “educators” were seen as sacrificing their lives and talents to a noble cause, as proven by the fact that they were hired and paid for by the federal government and trusted explicitly because of their impeccable sanctimonious credentials.

o   The current behaviour of school boards which are closing schools for no good reason do so under a regime of legitimacy stated in the current Education Act which gives them the untrammelled right to close any school. In former times we thought of our school trustees as our representatives, people we could trust to oversee our children’s education.  In recent times the school boards have been co-opted by the Ministry to force upon us an unproven fantasy that bigger schools provide better education, that smaller schools are too expensive.

o   The result of this is that our communities are completely cut off from the school system, completely unrepresented, just as much as the people of Weenusk were cut off from the Minister of Indian and Northern Affairs who paid the Anglican church to teach their children that their community was worthless, their parents not worthy of trust to make educational decisions for their children.

o   This is a fundamental change to our education system. Our school boards do not represent the community in any sense and to any degree. They have been taken over by the Ministry of Education which remains impervious to community appeal, shielded by their school boards who cannot be held accountable for anything.

The only avenue open to us who are trying desperately to retain our only school and to maintain the viability and vibrancy of our small rural communities is to appeal to the Ontario Legislature which is over and above the government, in the hope that the members of all parties will recognize the flaws in the current closure policy and will recognize the justice of our pleas and will make the changes so desperately needed.

Brock Vodden

Rogue School Board: Avon Maitland DSB

Avon Maitland District School Board has decided to close the only school in our community of Blyth.

So what, you may say! That’s happening to many communities!

This is the community that I know well, and I just want to use it to illustrate how these closures can affect any small rural community. You have to understand the Ground Zero realities before you can grasp the enormity of what is occurring across Ontario.

We have been told by the school board that rules over our Huron-Perth education system, that they can no longer afford to operate our school. Our elementary students, almost all of them, will have to be bussed to a different municipality for their schooling, Central Huron. It is, they say, a simple matter of saving money by reducing the number of school sites.

Well, sometimes they say it is not entirely a matter of saving money; it is a question of improving education quality. To achieve this, they are building a large 24 classroom school in Wingham. This, some say, is a great step forward. The vice chair of the school board stated at the sod-turning ceremony that it was impossible to provide quality education in those old school buildings. The new school will, he said, open doors for the children that we can barely imagine today.

The Director of Education in 2009 gave a different explanation. He told an ARC meeting that the new school construction is being funded under the economic stimulus program, so we had better get busy and make our decisions quickly to please the Ministry and get this money working. So it’s not to save money; it’s not to improve education; in fact it is not an educational program at all; it’s just a project to spend a few million dollars to build a school – somewhere – to help out the economy.

That turns out to be the most plausible explanation for this school. But anyway, lucky Wingham! They are getting stimulated. Too bad for Blyth, however. Their school is going to be sacrificed to make the new school appear to be serving a real educational purpose!

To add insult to injury, only a handful of our Blyth children will ever get a chance to attend this Nirvana of educational bliss. Instead most of our children will be riding a bus down the road south to Londesborough to another of those old school which like Blyth Public School lacks the ambiance required to deliver excellent education. Here I thought teachers did the educating – not bricks and mortar.

So in return for giving up our only school, what are we in Blyth getting in return?

No joy, that’s for sure; just a long list of losses and a very bleak future for the community of Blyth.

· No children able to walk to school,

· No school board employees living or working in the community,

· No ability to attract or retain young families to the community

· 10% to 20% drop in residential property values (this decline is already in evidence)as a community which has no school

· Reduced business investment in the community

· Reduced patronage of existing businesses

· Loss of connection with the community culture and spirit

· Reduced connection between parents and school

· Loss of community identity in the present and in the future

· Loss of a major community meeting place

· Local taxpayers having to pay for development costs for a new school in another community

One wonders why our own elected officials would do this to us. 


I sent some questions to the Director of Education, Ted Doherty, to help me understand the thinking behind the Blyth decision. He provided no answer to any of my questions. He wrote: “I have read your letter numerous times. The only thing I can say is that I am sorry you feel as you do, but the proper processes were followed. The school board has to make difficult decisions.” That was the whole letter. If that is not a sign of a fortress mentality, I don't know what is.

The really scary part of this is that similar scenarios are playing out all over Ontario.

One of our very attractive houses in Blyth has dropped in value by fifteen percent, $32,000, in the past year, solely because of the school closure. Imagine the loss across our entire community. Several million dollars for sure! Then think about what that means for property values across the length and breadth of Ontario where other rogue boards are behaving almost as irrationally as AMDSB.

My goal is to find some way either to force the school boards (including AMDSB) to change their deplorable decisions, or to convince the opposition parties and rural backbenchers to find a political solution which will force the weakened Liberal government to find a way to end this madness and do the right thing.

We need lots of support from small rural communities. We are all being affected.