A News out of London had an interesting piece on two rural schools in Midwestern Ontario that are on the chopping block. Zurich Public School and Hensall Public School. The Avon Maitland is using the usual crutch of falling enrollment. The Numbers do show declining enrollment for the two schools, however these schools are in small rural communities and according to the residents in these towns the school is lifeline of the communities. It also brings up a question, Is the province trying to kill off rural schools? Other school boards in the province have done their best at doing so. It also begs the question, How far ahead can school boards predict and plan for future enrolment,. Gil Owens a planner for the Thames Valley District School Board said they plan for 5 years ahead during the ARC Review for Ingersoll. Lets say that all the School boards have that same planning process, which begs the question do these planners ever ask themselves what happens if there happens to be a big surge in enrollment 7 or 8 years down the road. At the current rate of planning at 5 years it is possible in 7 to 10 years they are asking themselves why did they close schools and how do we deal with a capacity issue. There is one solution to all of this mess. Fix the Funding formula, it's flawed. There are area's in education that they could find room to cut to beable to put money into the funding formula.
I think there needs to be a moritirium on school closings untill the government gets the funding formula fixed. There also needs to be a mindset of before they close a school lets make sure 7 to 10 years down the road they wont have a moment of capacity crunch because they didn't plan on having a rising enrollment and a capacity crunch.
No comments:
Post a Comment