Your tax dollars at work!
It’s too bad.
It’s too bad the Edmonton Public School Board couldn’t get creative, couldn’t think outside of their provincial government-funded box, couldn’t see the City of Edmonton is trying to keep people in the centre of the city and rebuild older neighbourhoods.
And because they couldn’t see or do any of that they are closing five more schools after this school year wraps in June. Dumb.
I’m not saying you keep all five open. Some of the neighbourhoods may indeed not have the need for so many schools anymore. But as I’ve tried to figure out before, at this website, I think the open school policy is more to blame, than which neighbourhood a school is in.
Some of the places being talked about (and dozens of schools are pending reviews) have the population to fill schools. It’s just that some school on the other side of the city offers Spanish and that’s what some parents want for their kids so the neighbourhood school sits quiet. Then gets closed by a closed-minded school board.
The City of Edmonton is finalizing plans for a long-term vision, which has jokingly been called The Way We Sprawl (It’s actually called The Way We Grow.) and this is only going to help Edmonton spill out further. Which you can argue is great, since suburbs look so much cleaner and safer than our dirty old, central neighbourhoods.
But I bet more than a few people driving their kids across the city, living out in brand new neighbourhoods are also going to complain about high taxes at some point. You know what raises those taxes? New roads, new subdivisions, fixing potholes because of all your driving, a transit system that doesn’t get effectively used, or is over-used at other points, because of sprawl and because so many school kids have to make it all the way across the city for special science classes.
Ugh.
If the Edmonton Public School Board doesn’t get some new trustees in October, trustees who actually care about the direction of Edmonton, the City’s plans are a waste of time, paper, and your money. You can’t fight City Hall, but it might actually be that City Hall can’t fight the School Board, for a better Edmonton.
Oilers arena will cost less than feared: Mayor (That sounds like he’s open to NOT building a new one downtown…)
NAIT slammed over proposal to chop court-reporting program
Edmonton’s first historian laureate named (Alright, along with roads and transit, this also costs you money.)
Tighter volunteer scrutiy lauded
Government’s ‘Tweety Bird’ omnipresent in social networking (The Alberta government is in your tweets.)
Liberals race to put out a wildfire (They’ve got their own Souray-like problems.)
Dave Eggen to run for the NDP in Edmonton-Glenora (He’s back.)
Feds, city mull future of Grierson jail (Mull…mull, mull, mull.)
Expo a ‘catalyst’ to tie Edmonton together: Mayor
Health-care cash cows (So that’s where all that health care money goes…)
Mandel Green Trip LRT (That headline is very “Hulk smash.” Oh, and interesting to note, as we did recently, that the LRT expansion will likely take some borrowing by the City. As would the arena. What a Sophie’s Choice.)
‘No nukes’ sign removal politically motivated: critics (Great bit of investigating, from the CBC. Also of note, they don’t talk to the Liberals or NDP for reaction to the government’s meddling.)
Alberta wants refund for early H1N1 vaccine expiry
Jaffer plea deal details revealed (Why the crown didn’t go ahead with all of the charges.)
Oilers retain top pick in NHL draft lottery (The future begins now. Or in June, when the actual draft happens.)
And to end on an up-note, here’s an NYC blogger on Juggalo radio. Gabe is kind of the guy who enlightened us on the Juggalo world.
I remember first hearing about ICP and the Juggalos 10 years ago when I was just a young punk working at HMV. The Kingsway store I was working at sold more ICP albums per capita than anywhere else in Canada at the time (number of ICP albums vs. total number of albums sold)
If I ever leave Edmonton I will cite that, not anything about crime or dirt or opportunities or anything else, that very fact about ICP, as a reason to get out of here.
I am not exactly sure on this, so some follow up research to confirm the following will be needed, but I am pretty sure that holding EPSB solely responsible for the closures is misplaced blame. I have this information from @bonmotgirl who has some good thoughts on this issue.
From what I understand (based on what she said), EPSB’s hands are tied on this. Provincial legislation has archaic requirements for how to measure the percentage of use that a school has.
In order to stay open, a school must have an 80% usage, but what constitutes 80% according to the Alberta Government laws is crappy.
Many schools offer a variety of daycare, afterschool care, alternative programming and various other services that don’t actually qualify as part of the 80% metric. The programming is used in the hopes of attaining the 80% needed to satisfy the GOA.
As such, there are clever ideas being used and the agonizing truth is that EPSB still has to close schools after these have been tried and not achieved the 80%… If the GOA were to use a different measure, then school closures wouldn’t occur.
What needs to change? The laws. The legal system is outmoded, outdated, slow, stagnant, and out of touch with the pace of the world today. Thus, innovation falls through the cracks and is never fully realized. Sad.
I share your frustration, but I also see that the rules of the game (the laws) are not allowing the players to utilize clever solutions to problems.
I too thought it was weird that they closed them all! Especially when they showed the map – many of them are in clusters. Wouldn’t it make more sense to close EITHER Fulton Place or Capilano, not both? Surely there’s enough kids in both to fill or almost-fill one of them. Ditto on the Boyle/Parkdale/McCauley area schools.
Certainly the school board’s hands look to be tied by provincial government rules and regulations…but to innovate they’d have to challenge those rules.
Instead they will follow their formulas and not take a stand.
And while closing schools may save some money for the EPSB right now, more students needing ETS transportation, more parents driving on more roads, will cost the City and the same taxpayer.
So there’s some innovation that needs to come in the recognition that there really is one taxpayer and if the City wants to control sprawl maybe the provincially-run school board could look into that idea.
I can appreciate the restrictions placed on the board by the government’s formula (and thankfully the Minister has acknowledged that the formula needs to be evaluated and hopefully updated).
I do think, though, that the board has an obligation to challenge the status quo and advocate for the children in their system. That is part of their job. They need to actually listen to the concerns of parents and teachers at the schools under review and address those concerns in a thoughtful manner. I don’t think this happened. I have little faith that the decisions on closure were actually made yesterday – it seems clear these decisions were made long before any of the “public consultation” meetings happened.
The other major problem with these closures is the locations of the schools being closed. The conflict with revitalization efforts and community building has been covered well by others, so I’ll bring up the strain these decisions put on families in some of the city’s least affluent communities. Families that have the least resources in terms of both money and time are now forced to spend more of both to get their kids to school. Instead of levelling the playing field, I believe the decisions to close these schools has in fact created more disparity and less choice for the families it affects. Choice has also been limited for families new to Edmonton who could potentially want to move to those areas.