By Tom Muir

January 19th, 2017

BURLINGTON, ON

Part 4 of a series:
Tom Muir, an Aldershot resident, has been an active participant in civic affairs or more than 25 years. He has been described as “acerbic”, a fair term for Tom.
He has outlined, in considerable length, a large part of why the parents at Central and Pearson high schools are in the mess they are in as a result of the recommendation to close their schools. In this article, one of a series Muir suggest what he feels are obvious solutions to the problem the Board of Education believes it has. There is a lot of material; it gets dense at times. Living in a democracy means you have to accept the responsibility of citizenship and stay informed.

I have set out what I think is the background reason for the situation Burlington parents and their high school level students face with the possible closing of two high schools in the city and I have suggeted that the mess we asre in is one we created for ourselves.

How do we get out of the mess?

Where does the Board staff appear to sit?
The Board seems to be into closing schools. Almost all the options close schools. Some seem nonsensical. I was surprised by this very limited plan.

They say 1800 empty seats is not sustainable long term.  And the Board staff data is said to be accurate now, and and has been accurate in the past.

Go back to the Board data for 2010 when there were 495 actual empty seats, and 92% space utilization, in the 6 then existing schools in Burlington.

They developed plans, with no evident justification, to build another school in Alton – add 1200 seats plus about 280 in portables.

Build school, open in 2013, fill with about 1400 students by 2017, mostly from schools within the six existing high schools. These 1400 now become empty seats in the south Burlington six high schools.

This adds up to about the 1800-1900 now cited as unsustainable.

This is based on the past and forecast data that is said to be accurate.

So it can be said with accuracy that the Board created the 1800 empty seats that they now say are not sustainable. Why and how?

Building Hayden in Alton can be said with accuracy to be a blundered construction of most of the 1800 empty seats.

So they now want to close two schools of the original six that housed all these students, before Hayden, within the comfortable 90% utilization.

So the Board itself created this so-called unsustainable 1800 empty seats, and they did it with accuracy.

They have also gotten away with this unexplained blunder with no accountability for what is incompetent planning in my opinion, based on the face of the so-called accurate data.

So how does this work that the Director isn’t sure now what the residents/public of the south Burlington six expect from him and the Board?

Well, what I expect is that the Director offer innovative and management solutions to clean up the mess you have created.

And don’t tell us that your forecast data are accurate. It’s seems to be a new age for housing costs and form, so families will likely have to more and more occupy higher density.

The historical pupil yield curves used may be too low in this new age. That’s what happened in the Alton community, and the Board data didn’t catch it.

Don’t make more mistakes and cost the community dearly by closing schools based on methods and attitudes that actually created the mess.

It is possible to use the toolbox to keep all the schools open. Go to that toolbox and show us how we can make the empty spaces of use.

Don’t impatiently make irreversible quick decisions that we will all have to live with in regret.
That’s what people expect, among other things, I think.

What about the efficiency and sustainability of 1800 empty seats?

But if we accept that 1800 empty seats are not sustainable, at face value, what does it imply about the strictly business end of producing student spaces?

In 2012 the utilization of SRA 100 Burlington spaces was 87%, so there was a minimal excess over the Board target of 90%. It was also projected to fall and is now at about 75%. But it only fell because Hayden was opened and students were transferred there, and this continues to date, filling up portables and a projected student surplus of about 600.

What the hell is going on here may I ask, with the Board sense of planning? And this just looks to continue in this PAR.

The point being for our business model, is that there is no apparent rationale, no business case, to build Hayden, as there was no shortage of supply of student places. There was already some identifiable surplus.

With such an excess supply identified, and projected to worsen, on the basis of this issue definition, what reason existed to build additional supply of students spaces at Hayden? In fact, we still don’t need Hayden on this basis.

If most people made this kind of business decision, they would be in deep doo-doo, and in deeper when there are serious consequences, which there are, but not for those who made the decisions.

This decision by the Board had no justifying business case in terms of student spaces, but created an excess which is now being used to justify closing schools to make up for their mistake.

Everyone knows this has just made things much worse and created a divisive mess for which no one is being held accountable.

Regarding the provision of student opportunities as a reason for the PAR, there was never any evidence provided to show that Hayden provided any opportunities that didn’t already exist. And there is still no evidence provided that closing other schools will provide any additional opportunities that also don’t already exist.

In fact, closing schools will require that 500 to 600 additional students are provided, rather “necessitated”, the “opportunity” to ride the bus to school instead of walk, which most of the would be displaced do at present. Some opportunity this is.

Hopefully, you can see the thinness of putting the issue as just about excess student spaces. The Board itself created the excess. It didn’t exist before Hayden.

Why was Hayden built? Where’s the cost-benefit analysis of what has been created?

The only thing I have even remotely heard, is that the people in the north of Burlington, in Alton, were entitled to, or “needed” schools in their neighborhood.

Which begs the question, what about the rest of Burlington, now under the gun because of the Board building a Hayden not needed for student spaces.

And here is where the real issue mess lies, the part left out of your issue definition.

Because the students were transferred in ever greater numbers, even overflowing into portables, exceeding the Hayden built supply of places, from the existing schools, and then their feeders, thus creating the excess in those schools.

So that’s where this logic of this issue definition takes us. Based on this definition, Hayden should not have been built.  Is anyone going to be held accountable for this?

If Hayden neighborhood residents and parents and students “needed” their own school, whatever happened to the rest of us down here in the south? Do we not count in this?

This is the real mess that this issue definition is too thin to manage. It is much more than excess student places, which is a red herring.

What have parents, residents and students to say about their concerns and what they want?

A perusal of the Gazette archive will get at least some sense of what some people are saying and/or want.  As I noted earlier, one key thing that is missing on the accessible website are enough years of the LTAPs and reports to go back to the time that Hayden SS in Alton was being rationalized and justified. I described this situation in detail above.

So if the Trustees know that set of facts, and others do as well, what do they think resident feelings and concerns are?

Tom Muir is a resident of Aldershot who has been a persistent critic of decisions made by city council. He turns his attention to the current school board mess. He recently suggested to Burlington city council that “If you are so tired of and frustrated by, listening to the views of the people that elected you, then maybe you have been doing this job too long and should quit.

Muir explains that the PARC will only get what people send in, what they come up with from their own efforts, and what they ask/demand from the board. They have to decide what they want and go after it ruthlessly. They will have to fight with tooth and claw and take no prisoners.

Previous articles:

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

 

By Tom Muir

January 18th, 2017

BURLINGTON, ON

Part 3 of a series:

Tom Muir, an Aldershot resident, has been an active participant in civic affairs or more than 25 years. He has been described as “acerbic”, a fair term for Tom.
He has outlined, in considerable length, a large part of why the parents at Central and Pearson high schools are in the mess they are in as a result of the recommendation to close their schools. In this article, one of a series Muir suggest what he feels are obvious solutions to the problem the Board of Education believes it has. There is a lot of material; it gets dense at times. Living in a democracy means you have to accept the responsibility of citizenship and stay informed.

The Board of Education advised its trustees that there were 1800 empty seats in Burlington’s seven high schools. The Director of Education, Stuart Miller, brought forward a number of recommendations. The trustees decided to create a Program Accommodation Review Committee (PARC). That committee will begin its meeting later this month.

The PARC will review the data – there is tonnes of it, and send a recommendation to the Director of Education who will then make his recommendation to the trustees who will make a final decision as to whether or not any high schools should be closed. The schedule calls for this to be done by May of this year.

Other ideas are suggested by residents in the on-line conversations in the Gazette. There are other more inclusive lists of such ideas elsewhere. Surely, the Board staff and consultants, and education researchers, have a cornucopia of ideas that just need to be unleashed. As Rudyard Kipling said, “there are 99 and 9 ways to make tribal lays.”

This, I think, is a way to go to get to a plan fitting with the times, changing demographics and adaptability to such changes, fairness, and the patterns of the Growth Plan for Halton.

It is just not right that existing residents are required to give up their schools, in order to build new schools in areas where the high growth in population is being directed under the force of the provinces’ orders in the Growth Plan.

Why should this be a forced confiscation in service of the province’s growth orders? Why should we pay for another part of the growth with our schools?

As I said, things are being taken too far in this insensitive and unlimited logic of efficiency, narrowly defined, leading to fewer and fewer schools in existing neighborhoods.

Once these school sites are gone, they are gone – there are no other places to site new schools. What kind of municipal and community planning is that?

And for those seeming to be okay with the closure of two high schools, as inefficient, and needing to be eliminated, I have to ask if they have ever considered what might be the limits of their criterion or their logic?

Do they propose to applaud this process year after year until “most efficient” and “biggest” become synonymous with “only”?

Do these schools have any value not subsumed under the heading of “efficiency”? And who benefits by their closure?

Is “any” degree of “efficiency” worth any cost in our schools?

Can progressively closing more and more schools be treated with such regardlessness, by merely asserting a justification that leaves out all the cultural and community values that they embody?

The point being that there must be limits imposed to this process before our cultural institutions of education have been corrupted to calamity.

This process is leading to no good, and is rotten politics.

Some things the Trustees can do.
Hayden has 500 to 600 pupils too many in the LTAP forecast. The Board moved 600 to 900 from the area of concern, such as Pearson, Nelson, Bateman, and Robinson.  You can see this in the capacity utilization rates in the Board reports and reproduced in the Gazette.

They can simply move some number like the 600 back, as they have the power to do that, just like before, when they moved them out. We need to know what the numbers by school were that were moved to Hayden.

They can even shuffle students from Hayden around the Board SRA 100, which is also in the plan but only at a low scale. Shifting students and programs around all of Burlington, including SRA 100, can be considered.

Closing portables and using the bricks and mortar OTG capacity for students fits into using excess spaces, and is something that parents and students have expressed the desire to see. It will certainly be better for students.

Closing the 2 schools mentioned is reported to mean almost 600 more students from them need to be bused, increasing the number from 1000 to 1600.

So no closures, and moving students from Hayden back to the other schools – some of which is in the Option 19 for French Immersion at least – is a perfectly logical thing to do.

It will also save significant busing dollars (not specified in the reports I saw), that won’t need to be added to the already $15 million transportation bill of the Board as a whole, and will avoid big disruptions to students lives.

At least one or two SRA 100 schools are close enough that busing of students is not needed.

Again, shuffling the excess around, and changing the catchments accordingly are all possible and will facilitate the adjustments.

The Halton Board has many programs scattered around, and these can be expanded perhaps by shifting some to schools with surplus space.

The Community Partnerships and Hubs outreach, partly funded and touted by the Province on their website as involving schools, can be tapped to expand uses of space.

The existing daycare at Pearson is exactly what the province mentions as one of the possibilities. What happens to that with a closure of Pearson and Central?

Where are these options in the plan? These things are obvious solutions.

I’m confident that the PARC members also have a great number of ideas, and they are much more intimate with the schools and what they want than I am.

Tom Muir is a resident of Aldershot who has been a persistent critic of decisions made by city council. He turns his attention to the current school board mess. He recently suggested to Burlington city council that “If you are so tired of and frustrated by, listening to the views of the people that elected you, then maybe you have been doing this job too long and should quit.

Muir explains that the PARC will only get what people send in, what they come up with from their own efforts, and what they ask/demand from the board. They have to decide what they want and go after it ruthlessly. They will have to fight with tooth and claw and take no prisoners.

Previous articles in this series:

Part 1

Part 2