Tagged: Cape Breton-Victoria District School Board
Why school budgets keep growing
Kill the Friendly Giant.
That’s how Cape Breton University political science professor Tom Urbaniak describes the response of school boards and the Nova Scotia Teachers’ Union when the Dexter government sought ideas for reducing the education budget.
That’s the tactic the CBC used a few years ago when the government announced a cut in its budget: The cuts would force it to cancel Canada’s favorite children’s show. Parents and children rose up, and the cuts got cut.
As former education bureaucrat Wayne Fiander wrote to Contrarian recently, “the school boards and the teachers’ union… know this play in their sleep.”
In the face of these tactics, the province held the boards to something better than a draw. Budgets will fall slightly in recognition of plummeting enrolments. If you want to know why this is hard, look no further than the following map:
Point A is Holy Angels High, a beloved but decrepit, energy-guzzling, half-empty, structure that’s currently the subject of an overwrought save-our-school campaign, featuring the usual litany of weeping schoolgirls, outraged parents, and posturing politicians. Point B is Sydney Academy, a more modern and efficient, but likewise half-empty high school 12 blocks away.
Two half-empty school, 12 blocks apart. Isn’t the solution obvious? Yet MLA Gordie Gosse and many others who ought to know better are lobbying the province furiously to keep both open and operating. Doing so would amount to mismanagement bordering on larceny, but how many times can governments be expected to face down a public conditioned to believe it can drink champagne but pay for beer?
When the latest effort to “save” Holy Angels came a cropper on the hard reality of costs, Cape Breton Victoria District School Board Chair Lorne Green tried to blame local contractor Danny Ellis. Ellis had offered to buy the school from the Sisters of Charity, and lease it back to the board on what looks to this outsider like a barely break-even basis, with the board picking up maintenance and operating costs.
That wasn’t good enough for Green, who told the Chronicle-Herald’s Mary Ellen MacIntyre: “It’s like you walking in and saying ‘I’ll save your school for you’ but you’re doing nothing for (the students) — it’s all for yourself.”
I happen to know Ellis, who has a long record of community spirited projects, including the conversion of a former school in Whitney Pier into an active and much-used centre for local business. It’s no surprise the board doesn’t want to be on the hook for operating and maintenance costs on a 55-year-old building that has outlive its usefulness, but it should have the gumption to say so, instead of blaming Ellis for not taking on a problem that isn’t his.
Unholy angels
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That schools in the Cape Breton-Victoria School District will close is obvious. Enrolment here has dropped 22 percent over eight years, with no end to the decline in sight, while costs have risen 25 percent over the same period.
That Holy Angels High tops the list of candidates for closure is equally obvious. The geriatric Catholic order that owns the school wants to unload it, and has offered it to the board for $750,000. The board estimates it would need another $8 to $10 million in repairs, while newer schools nearby have lots of space.
The prospect of closure has provoked the usual outcry from students, grads, and parents, but the province faces a budgetary crisis brought on by previous governments, and made worse by its own senseless campaign promises. Reality requires deep cuts to P-12 school budgets, not new spending to keep decrepit surplus buildings in service.
That’s the factual background to last week’s visit by Holy Angels students to the legislature to protest against closure. Here is what the students encountered:
- Manning MacDonald, a Liberal on the verge of retirement, who represents the school’s catchment area and seems bent on a scorched earth campaign to ensure his replacement will not be a New Democrat.
- Cecil Clarke, a neighboring Conservative MLA openly embarked on a quixotic campaign for the federal seat that encompasses Holy Angels.
- Marilyn More, the Education Minister, whose party knows MacDonald’s seat will be up for grabs in two years and harbors the illusion that a New Democrat might take it.
It was a recipe for pandering on a grand scale.
“Keep them there, buy the school, and let them continue with the excellent programs they’ve had there since 1885,” thundered MacDonald, who knows perfectly well this would be lunacy.
“The NDP’s abysmal failure to support excellent young women and the Sydney community [is just another example of] this failed NDP socialist experiment,” railed Clarke, trying out the Tea Party rhetoric that will be expected of him as a Harper flag-bearer. (Clarke did not explain how resisting political pressure for reckless spending constitutes socialism.)
Minister More spoke vaguely of innovative solutions, and hinted that the school might be kept together as an administrative unit sharing premises with another school.
When Nova Scotians complain about a lack of leadership, this is the sort of thing they mean. MacDonald, Clarke, More, and the other 49 MLAs all know keeping Holy Angels open would be foolhardy, but they perceive a short-term interest in pretending otherwise, so pretence is all they offered.
The students got a dishonest display of faux outrage before going home to a school the glad-hands of province house know will close, as well they know it should.
A nation of ‘fraidy cats?
This is what a snow day looks like in Nova Scotia in 2010:
Ridiculous. Ludicrous. How does this happen? Is it yet more proof that Environment Canada/CBC weather hysteria has destroyed our ability to distinguish normal weather from that which is dangerous? Is it further evidence of our society’s atrophied ability to assess and manage risk? Of our obsession with danger? Have we become a nation of ‘fraidy cats? A friend offers an alternative explanation:
They haven’t filled their quota of snow days.
Gotta get ‘em in, in other words, like the employee who makes sure to take all her available sick days, lest she “lose” them. And it’s well to remember that the school officials who manage these decisions belong to the belong to… the teachers’ union.
