Edmonton became part of a special club last night.
The Room club. I’ll blog about that a little later, when I’ve had more time to digest one of the western world’s greatest artistic achievements.
For now, we will talk news.
Oh, and before I forget, Adam, over at the Unknown Studio, is taking a hyper-local look at the 2010 closure of the Dawson Bridge. It’s good stuff.
Also, I like that the Edmonton Oilers are so bad…(How bad are they?)…they’re so bad, that if other teams give up goals, any goals at all, it’s seen as terrible play. *sigh* There’s always next year.
Edmonton school serving at-risk students faces closure (Pretty much every other school closure story I ask about the idea of letting students go to any school in the city, instead of just their neighbourhood school. So, I ask again, what does that serve, in the long-term? How does that build communities? Doesn’t it just enforce the big-box lifestyle of driving away from your home to get things?)
Edmonton walking device ‘has absolutely changed my life’
Syncrude noise cannons in place when inspector arrived
Oilsands image back in the tar (Syncrude, by going to trial, hurts their image more.)
Foul duck pictures may have PR benefit (Really, do you guys think this is true?)
Syphilis crisis must be recognized, fought properly
Edmonton pawnbroker attacked with hatchet from his shop (Yikes, there are a lot of “terms violated” comments removed from this story. Suffice to say, I get the feeling commentators don’t have a lot of sympathy for pawn brokers or some of their usual customers. Also, maybe don’t sell hatchets. There’s a sketchy convenience store by my house, alluded to here, that sells axes and swords. I won’t be surprised if something like this happens there.)
MacEwan to close pool in July to expand fitness centre
Report estimates Alberta has almost 700 grizzly bears
City cracks down on garden centres (You know, from the last two stories you’d think we’d have solved all of our really big problems.)
A lesson in racism? (Some thought-provoking ideas raised in the speech.)
Prof hosting dinner in the dark for research funds
Two different stories (I wish they could put the dog on the stand for a third version.)
Officials eye pub-crawling partiers
City seeks input on public washroom design
West Edmonton Catholic school spared closure (I repeat my questions to you, from the above school closure story.)
Not too late to nominate a neighbour (Maybe all of our neighbours are jerks?)
Winnipeg’s derelict buildings bylaw looks good to Caterina (And Caterina would look good in Derelicte.)
Disabled raiser human rights complaint over transit costs
Vigil pays respect to Mayerthorpe’s “Fallen Four” (It was the 5th anniversary of the Mountie murders, yesterday.)
18-month-old foster child dies in Edmonton hospital
Making the square more user friendly (I think we all know the answer is more arena.)
Face the facts (How are women in Alberta doing?)
In a word (That’s a take on Israeli Apartheid week. There are events over at the U of A.)
The Urban Farmer: Concrete jungle no more (Time to get growing.)
Delicate pruning or hatchet job? (Just talkin’ bout the Alberta Budget.)
Hit me up with your thoughts and feelings, Edmonton.
Oh, and if you could set up a meeting for me with Leonard Asper, I’ve got a media venture he can throw money at.
I think for the duck footage to be a PR boost, the government needs to stand behind their employee. Too often governments smell a little controversy and distance themselves from the situation. In this case, I think a) it really puts a human face on the government – a single man shocked and horrified by this awful scene, and b) if the government rallies behind him and goes further in their support, whether it be devoting more resources to investigating these issues or developing a civilian “street-crew” a la Global News to bring things like this to their attention immediately. But it all has to be fueled with action.
It’s a tipping point, but if they don’t push, they’ll never get over the hill.
I’m happy Edmonton has a policy allowing students and parents to choose what school to attend. Some schools excel in different ways. I was able to attend a high school with strong arts, tech, and science programs. If I had to attend the school in my area, I would have gone to a school that excelled in stabbings, drug use, teen pregnancy, and drop outs. I wouldn’t change my choice of high school. Not one bit.
the school thing is interesting because i wonder, is it giving people their choice of school that creates some quality schools and some stabby ones? or is it that there are naturally some stabby ones and some quality ones, and people are just being given the option to opt out?
bit of a chicken and egg situation.
Jill, so…cutting $17.5-million from the AB Environment budget (http://74.125.95.132/search?q=cache:YCQtBa4mofAJ:www.straightgoods.ca/2010/ViewArticle.cfm%3FRef%3D272+alberta+environment+budget+cuts&cd=8&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=ca) that’s like supporting good environmental stewardship, right?
Brittney, by that argument, everyone that wants to leave Edmonton because it’s not hip enough, not creative enough, not innovative enough, too dirty, too cold, too “crime-y,” too boring, too right-wing is free to head to Calgary, Vancouver, Toronto, Montreal or parts further flung.
Boo to that.
It’s up to people (not you in this specific case, since you were a kid) in the community, around the school, in the school and education system, to make each and every school worthy of a student’s time. Sure, there can be a handful that specialize with advanced classes, languages, arts, etc… but clearly people in “bad” neighbourhoods live there, so why not go to school there and really start making it a place worth living.
Hahaha, no it doesn’t. But that’s what I mean. It could be a great opportunity for them if they backed it up with other things that show they care. (Which I guess they don’t!)
Re: Schools. My kids won’t be test subjects for “making a school great”. The fact is, some kids would have to just deal with getting stabbed for a few years until things improve. That kind of school culture is not going to turn around in five minutes. So who wants to volunteer their kids to fall on the knife for the good of humanity? No one.
Alternatively, if they spent some effort improving the school and its reputation, kids would start to go there.
My mom homeschooled me rather than send me to my local elementary (lazy teachers, dumb kids, crappy resources). But not everyone has that option. If your school can’t attract new kids, maybe you should ask what your school is doing wrong, rather than say all the area kids should be forced to go to the crappy school. I think we all have a right to the best education we can have.
I think it’s worth thinking of this with that chicken-egg mentality.
If you couldn’t go to a school across the city, your local school would (in theory) have to provide a lot of similar programs to the other schools.
Thus, there’s no real difference in curriculum or programming from one neighbourhood to the next.
Right now, as I understand it, schools offer one or two programs, or a stream of programs to try and attract students who want to focus on, say, Spanish or the arts.
So, if the programming and education was about the same (there will always be some differences) you’d then have to think about cleaning up your neighbourhood, if that’s been the problem all along.
I actually think forcing people to go to schools would de-motivate any one school to improve. After all, if they have to come, why bother investing in it? They’re already there, right?
Right now, you have to be competitive or face closure.
When you decide to send your kids to a different school, do you pay for that privilege or is that a cost that the city incurs?
Education mostly ends up costing the provincial government…which you and I pay via our municipal tax bill (that’s the education portion.)
The city DOES actually bear a cost of this choose-anywhere system (that other cities wouldn’t) in terms of transit. There aren’t yellow school buses picking up 1 kid in the north end, 12 in the west end, 5 in the south and 7 in the east to go to the same school. So they (mostly) have to take ETS.
I would hazard a guess to say more Edmonton students then take ETS (or get rides in personal vehicles) than would occur in cities where you attend neighbourhood schools. Keeping in mind that in other cities they do have some schools that specialize, just not all of them.
This kind of blew my mind when I first moved here.
So wouldn’t the fix be to charge students/parents for attending a school in something other than their neighborhood?
Closing down schools in one neighborhood and building new ones in another doesn’t make much sense. All that happens is that you end up with a hollowed out core that no one wants to use/live in/work in/go to school in. That’s to no one’s benefits.
As for sending kids to “stabby” schools, I would hazard a guess that the odds of a kid getting seriously assaulted is roughly the same anywhere in the city. I remember some brutal fistfights when I was in school 20 years ago (gross) and my dad used to tell me about fights from when he was a kid. Children fighting isn’t anything new. And before I hear “But kids bring guns to school now!” I can’t recall ever hearing about such a case in Edmonton. Taber, yes, and I don’t think anyone would argue that the perception of Taber is that it’s far safer than Edmonton.
And really, at the end of the day, it doesn’t accomplish anything (moving kids; fighting, just like booze and religion, solves ALL problems). You don’t want your kid to go to a stabby school? Great. Now all the stabby kids are at the good schools, too.
Closing boundaries, I think, is not necessary, but things are way out of balance with Edmonton Public Schools.
Trustees have created a “four legs good, two legs better” situation — ordinary, community schools are fine, but if you want something sensational, enroll your child in special programming.
There’s an abundance of it, from Christian education to hockey academies. This week’s Examiner is full of advertising for these options, paid for by your tax dollars. What the EPSB never talks about, unfortunately, is the old-fashioned, sustainable option of walking your kid to the nearby school, which functions as the centre of your community.
Indeed I’d say the public board has become Edmonton’s foremost advocate of suburban living, where everyone gets in a vehicle to go anywhere, and new infrastructure is constantly under construction in emerging neighbourhoods while we dispose of anything that is more than 50 years old.
In addition to the marketing subsidy programming-based schools receive, the EPSB also picks up most of the transportation costs. Essentially, suckers like me who have chosen sustainability see their tax dollars redirected to pay for yellow buses to go through communities scooping up children who are registered, for example, 30 blocks away in the back-to-basics Cognito school. (And we get dinged a second time when the city raises taxes to fix the potholes that plague mature neighbourhoods.)
If someone wants to send his or her to an alternative school, fine, but why I am paying for this choice?
Another problem: overwhelmingly, open boundaries favours rich communities. Poor Parkdale, on the south side of Alberta Avenue, is home to more than 450 EPSB students, Kindergarten through Grade 9, but less than 200 children are registered in the school. Meanwhile, elite Crestwood, which is home to about 160 EPSB kids, has an enrolment of 400 and two portables on site to handle the overflow. Guess which school is being reviewed for closure.
Best practice in many school districts is to locate niche programming in poor communities, as a way of building social capital. For example, the Catholic board established Academie Holy Cross in Canora, north of Stony Plain Road, in part because it is a high needs area. The EPSB’s policy is that all corners of the city should have niche schools, equally distributed. Instead of bringing French Immersion students to half-full buildings such as Parkdale, kids are sent to the suburbs, because, according to trustees, that’s what’s fair.
I should point out that the situation at Eastwood is not entirely the fault of the EPSB. City planners have made decisions which pushed families to the outskirts of Edmonton. There may not be sufficient demand to save all inner city schools (half of them) under threat of closure.
What we could do is pursue specific initiatives to promote urban living for people who have young children. Indeed, council is mandating this in the new Municipal Development Plan: 25 per cent of units in large infill projects must be made suitable for kids. With the opportunities in the Quarters, Boyle Renaissance and around Stadium Station, McCauley School could be transformed into what Richard Florida calls a “Strollerville.”
The EPSB is disinterested in pursuing this option. In the case for closure it has prepared against McCauley, the possibilities for a more sustainable city are explicitly dismissed. Young families will always choose the suburbs, the authors assert: not only is McCauley School doomed, so are 30 to 50 others in mature communities.
That’s the vision of Edmonton shared by the majority (seven of nine, for Star Trek fans) of public trustees. If you share it, vote for your incumbent in October, or like many people leave your ballot blank. If you prefer a collaborative approach to community building, with the city and school board acting as partners, please be mindful of your civic responsibilities and find out whether the candidates in your ward favours sustainability or sprawl.
Well said, Christopher Spencer! And it should be said that the idea of “choice” is laughable for low-income families. Here’s a pretty thorough rundown on the inner city closures, for more info:
http://districtseven.weebly.com
Huzzah Christopher! Nice succinct overview. You should run in Ward E to keep Sue company!
I live in McCauley. My take on school closures:
It’s a losing proposition to ask the government (taxpayers) to fund a near-empty school.
If we want to keep our schools, and if we want to “revitalize” our communities, parents need to stop sending their kids to schools further afield. We also need to take a less my-neighbourhood-centric view of community building. Sure McCauley looks to be shutting down, but Norwood Elementary is less than 1.5 kms from McCauley. Can’t these two communities both take ownership of Norwood?
As someone who grew up in a stabby neighbourhood I’m a little disturbed at the comments suggesting it’s better to drive your kids somewhere else to go to school. And kind of offended on behalf of my parents who didn’t really have a choice but to let me “fall on the knife for the good of humanity”.
I loved my elementary and junior high schools (I moved to the US for part of highschool, so we’ll leave that out). I walked or biked to school K-9 with my friends.
I knew kids all over my neighbourhood and, in junior high, surrounding neighbourhoods. We hung out together, joined soccer teams together, and really had a lot of freedom because we knew so many people so close by. I even knew my neighbours who didn’t have kids and had the run of their gardens and (shocking!!) even got home-baked cookies on occasion.
My neighbourhood had one of the highest crime rates in the city. Each of our cars was broken into at least once, our house was broken into twice, and my bike was stolen twice. There were stabbings and shootings in the area and yes, my schools had drug problems, but I had a GREAT childhood. Mainly because I did not grow up ruled by fear. I grew up knowing there are problems in the world and that everyone needs to be involved in the solutions. Ignoring them or herding them into select areas of the city only makes things worse. And when our house was broken into, it was our neighbours who called the police in time to stop anything being taken.
My schools got kids involved in things besides drugs and crime. I never “fell in with a bad crowd” as the fear mongers like to say. In fact, most of my grade in junior high was on the honour roll and we went to one of those inner city schools facing closure. Our principal, Ken Podlubney, purposely accepted kids who had been kicked out of other schools and gave them a chance to do better. Sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn’t, but he deserves huge props for trying.
This is an emotional topic for me, so I’m glad there are people like Jeff and Chris who’s arguments are more rational. I think it’s important to have specialized schools for arts, french immersion, academics, etc., but I really believe neighbourhood schools are key to creating good, connected communities. And good, connected communities is what it takes to reduce stabbiness in schools, not shipping kids off to other parts of the city.
There’s another issue here of assuming that everyone in a stabby neighbourhood has a car and/or the time and/or the money for bus fare to take their kids to a non-stabby school (or move). That just isn’t the case and I don’t think those families or kids should be stretched even further by having their local school closed.