School program review worries parents

Mill Village Consolidated School parents, volunteers and staff are particularly worried about the future of their Grade Primary to Grade 6 school, which now has only 46 students and three classes, after attending a Jan. 15 South Shore Regional School Board public input session held to discuss the Program Review Process: School Utilization.

The school was considered for closure about six years ago. Community lobbying and transportation costs stopped it then.

School Advisory Committee Chair, Charmaine Stevens said, like in the past, parents do not want their children to spend well over two hours on a bus each day or lose opportunities for after-school programming.

She added the school could be used for other purposes, such as a pre-school, or for some pilot project, to provide revenue to the board and keep the facility open.

The primary reason behind the nearly three-year-old Program Review study is drastically falling enrolment figures as birth rates decline and families with children are forced to migrate to areas offering higher paying jobs. Provincial funding is primarily linked to enrolment figures.

Well-known educator and former superintendent, Dr. Jim Gunn facilitated the meeting. He pointed out his final report, which will be presented to the school board by March 1, is only a report, that school board members will make the final decisions, possibly by the following month.

Mill Village resident, Vicki Conrad said she hopes the board will provide an “opportunity for a community to get together and decide what other options are available.”

She used Greenfield Elementary School volunteers as an example. A community group is acting as the contractor to build a new school while saving the Department of Education hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Dr. Gunn agreed. “Can there be other options? Gosh, darn, I hope so.”

Port Joli resident, Darlene Norman said technology – for example, tele-education – offers opportunities for small school programming, adding, “We (provincial government) never seem to change our philosophy of how we educate our youth.”

Gunn also agreed with the technology aspects of her statements.

He added no school, if announced, would be closed until Sept. 2009 or beyond if the board decides to delay such a move for various possible reasons and that announcing a “review” is a step designed to study the issue, not a final decision.

In his opinion, he said, no elementary school should have less than 100 students, no junior high/middle school should have less than 175 students and no high school less than 300 students.

After the consultations, he said, “If I still think the same way, I’ll have to recommend some schools for review.”

Stevens argued if these figures are correct Queens Co. students, theoretically, would eventually be shipped “to Shelburne or Bridgewater.” Since impossible, she said other solutions must be found.

Dr. Gunn added most administrators and teachers have a difficult time offering good programming when a school’s student body is too small, or too large. For example, he said a school with one Grade 10 class doesn’t have much flexibility in giving students choices about which electives they want to take.

Whether a school is deemed isolated or not is also a factor, he said.

Other moves being considered – which will also be familiar to Queens Co. residents – are moving Grade 6 students to South Queens Junior High School and Grade 9 students to Liverpool Regional High School.

Superintendent Nancy Pynch-Worthylake said the board is looking at programming in terms of providing provincially mandated Public School Programs and then enhanced programming in the face of the above-mentioned declining funds.

Enhancement can include everything from enrichment and alternate programming to giving students more choices, including electives, more or continued literacy and numeracy support as well as specialists in, as only one example, such fields as autism.

However, Pynch-Worthylake said in general, “If we can’t sustain it, it doesn’t make it feasible.”

She reiterated the review’s four pillars as sustainability, quality, choice, and equity.

Equity refers, in theory, to offering all students equitable programming or, in simple terms, the same programming across the board’s jurisdiction.

Dr. Gunn said, for example, after-school programming is affected by transportation issues for students living far from their respective schools.

“There are equity issues. Not everyone can get to those sites.”

However, he said enrolment has declined about 18 per cent over the past 10 years and is expected to decline 25 per cent over the next decade, if something doesn’t change.

Past declines have been most severe at the elementary level, which will now affect the secondary level, he said.

He added providing a good education is the primary goal with finances second. However, he said the question of financing still looms large.

In Nova Scotia, however, he said, school boards only receive half of the original budget of a school if that school is closed.

Submissions can still be made to the review through the school board at www.ssrsb.ca