By Pepper Parr
December 27, 2016
BURLINGTON, ON
For the parents of students at Central and Pearson high schools the question – Why are we in this mess? Is not unreasonable.
Ward 5 school board trustee Amy Collard
Where were the trustees and why didn’t we know about this several years ago? Another good question and the answer to that one is – the trustees for the most part weren’t there; of the 11 people who serve as trustees four represent Burlington and just one of those trustees has been in office for more than one term. Amy Collard, trustee for ward 5 was acclaimed in 2010 and again in 2014.
This was the recommendation the Halton District school Board staff gave the trustees
We can’t find anything that Collard has written or said about the student population problem at the Burlington high schools.
The other three Burlington school board trustees, Grebenc, Papin and Reynolds, were all elected for the first time in October of 2014 – they’ve been in office a little more than two years. The smarter ones were aware of the problem but we could find nothing in the public record in the way of comments they may have made.
Milton school board trustee Donna Danielli who is the trustee sitting on the PARC – Program Accommodation Review Committee.
The two trustees who have been on the board for the longest time are Kathy Amos, the current chair who represents Oakville and Donna Danielli who represents Milton.
Both have been in office for more than 12 years and they certainly did know or should have known that there was a growing problem that was only going to get worse.
The current Director of Education Stuart Miller has been with the Halon District school board all of his career and had to have been aware – however he was made Director just over a year ago.
His predecessor, David Euale, did not have all that much to say on the subject other than when the LTAP (Long Term Accommodation Plan) was being discussed.
The HDSB web site is not exactly a fountain over flowing with information (it is better than it used to be) and what is there is not all that easy to dig through, especially if you want to go back a number of years.
Many parents are having a problem squaring the staff recommendation with the facts.
How did we get into this mess – demographics is a science – most of the data needed was known – has been known since the late 90’s Few of the trustees in place now were on the board then but they were given updates each year when the LTAP was reviewed.
Was is disturbing and disappointing is that those trustees with several terms of experience have not said a word publicly about how the mess Burlington is in came to pass.
They owe the public an explanation
There is much more to this story – stay tuned!
This problem with schools has been going on since the beginning of time. Demographics change so a school is closed and then it shifts back and a new school is built. This cycle will continue forever.
Why not build multi use buildings that could be easily converted as demographics change and then changed as demands change?
The buildings could even accommodate multi uses at the same time.
As long as we continue along this present path we cannot expect different results !!
Re: “Why not build multi-use buildings that could be easily converted as demographics change and then changed as demands change?” – I would go a step further and hand the land and buildings over to the Region, to be managed as a regional asset. This would get school boards out of the real estate business altogether and the increase in flexibility would be significant.
If/when a school was no longer needed for students, the Region could find a new purpose for it, keep land for a park, or sell it. If/when a new school was needed, the Region would acquire the land and build it.
I have a few more comments to make that seem timely to think about and get on the record for people to see and perhaps use.
I can tell, more broadly from my study of this, there is a lot more of this issue still underwater, and coming, but it’s understated there in the LTAP reports.
My general impression is that new schools are planned for, and built in the growth areas when grants are available. If there is too much excess students spaces elsewhere, the Board goes there, does a PAR, and takes back – closes – those schools somewhere else.
That’s like what’s being done here but parents and residents aren’t really being told about that part. But it is in the LTAP reports.
There seems to be no limit to this, just the timing. It’s outrageous and a ripoff, as we paid for the schools in the first place, and now have to pay twice for new ones – the province funds new schools with our money, then takes back some old schools, so we pay again, but with an added insult.
This is what I fought back in 1998-2000. This time, it has been hidden. You see it in the LTAPs, but it’s subtle.
Burlington SRA 100 catchments (which can be changed, and were changed for Hayden) are in mature communities, and with Hayden, are not now growing enough students to completely fill schools built in another era.
This Burlington area is also not taking on the endless growth of other parts of Halton.
There are new schools in the pipe for this growth and the Board will be sooner or later coming for more closures to get the empty student capacity down to to some level to get the grants for the new schools for the growth. But these new schools will be somewhere else.
This will only cause more trouble in the future, and the suggested closures at present foretell this future trouble. The elementary schools are linked, and next for PARs – as stated in the current LTAP – and will be domino-ed if there are the proposed closures.
A couple of more things.
(1. Hayden has 500 to 600 pupils too many in the LTAP forecast. The Board moved 600 from the area of concern, such as Pearson, and you can see this in the capacity utilization rates in the Board reports and reproduced in the Gazette.
They can simply move 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.
(2. Closing the 2 schools mentioned is reported to mean 500 or 600 more students from them need to be bused. So no closures, and moving excess students from Hayden back to the other schools – some of which is in the Option 19 for FI at least – is a perfectly logical and clear thing to do.
It will also save millions of busing dollars and big disruptions to students lives. As well excess students will not have to use portables, which is certainly better for them.
At least one SRA 100 school is close enough that busing of students moved back is not needed.
Again, shuffling the excess around, and changing the catchments accordingly are all possible. Where are these options in the plan?
The Board is into closing schools. Almost all the options close schools. Some seem nonsensical. I was very surprised by this very limited plan.
I recall that Greg Woodruff noted this in a comment a while ago. He stated it as a, “what’s the problem?”, you can do this moving of excess students from Hayden to elsewhere obviously.
(3. The Community outreach, or whatever that program is, funded and touted by the Province on their website, 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?
Some things to think about.
From this information supplied, it looks like the province is only “into” scrapping old schools already paid for instead of upgrading them and retaining a walk-to neighbourhood education.
They are also “into” expensive and wasteful bussing big-time, creating lazier kids even while preaching physical activity and fitness in the classroom. Hypocrisy is alive and well.
The province encourages this by funding land acquisition and large school construction at the expense of neighbourhood schools. The bussing removes enough kids to “justify” closing older schools. I think it is the Ministry of Education that is the bad guy here. The trustees can only go where the province points them. It would however be nice to see the trustees as a group stand up to the Ministry and expose its misguided mandates.
The Trustees of course work within the provincial rule book, but they definitely DO NOT have to choose to close schools.
They have a tool kit that they can pick and choose from so as to spread the student numbers around, together with the dollars, and innovate to keep the schools open.
However, the Board has chosen to make pretty much all the options presented as mostly about closures. As far as I’m concerned this is the bureaucrats in them defending their past decisions that led to this messy situation.
The Trustees have the authority to change this, and to give the Board marching orders to come up with another plan that uses all of the tool kit.
One problem that is foreseeable is that the Trustees are played off against each other depending on the part of Halton they represent. Milton is projected to grow a great deal in population, and Oakville is next in numbers.
Milton and Oakville each have 2 elementary schools in the planning pipe for 2018 to 2021, and these are not yet funded. Each also has a high school in the planning pipe for the 2019 to 2021 period and these are not yet funded either.
These proposed schools are all for students and parents that are not even here yet, but are projected from the future growth driven by provincial orders.
This is the rub. Will the Milton and Oakville Trustees put these possible future students, that are not even here yet, before existing students, already here, in schools somewhere else, in Burlington?
Will these trustees turn against their colleagues and neighbors and vote to close their schools so they can have some new ones for people who aren’t even here yet?
They don’t have to vote that way, but who knows? People are strange. However, they do have the power to unite and stick together. They can put together another plan that keeps schools open.
Such a plan may contain innovative elements, such as those suggested by Monte below. There are other more inclusive lists of such ideas elsewhere. 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 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 planning is that?
This process is leading to no good, and is rotten politics.
As JQ says, Trustees unite – you can do it.
With John providing quotes from Board reports here’s another. Note this is from 2012/13.
I went back to the LTAP for 2012-2013. It quite clearly states that opening Hayden was going to cause problems. Here’s something I copied out of that report (my underlining). SRA 100 contains the 6 Burlington High schools, besides Hayden the new one.
“BURLINGTON – Secondary Review Areas
With the development of the new SRA 101 Burlington NE High School (1200 pupil places) in the Alton Community, a school boundary review process was undertaken and completed in June 2012. The opening of the new high school would result in students being redirected from SRA 100 to this new school.”
“Enrolment projections indicate the utilization of space in SRA 100 secondary schools is currently at 87% in 2012, which will decline to 60% in 2022. Moreover, given the capacity of the schools, it is projected once the new high school opens there will be 2503 secondary pupil places available in 2022 within SRA 100.”
“In reviewing SRA101, it is projected that the new school will continue to grow in enrolment to the point that by 2019, OTG building and portable capacity could be exceeded, with a utilization rate of 131% by 2022.”
“Overall for Burlington, by 2022 the OTG utilization is projected to be 72%, with approximately 2129 empty pupil places. It would appear that within the next few years, consideration should be given to undertaking a
PAR for all secondary schools in Burlington.”
So you can see the building of Hayden, and the rationale for filling it, was a root cause of the current problem.
Looking at another Table shows that the actual student numbers in SRA 100 was 5530 in 2012 and was projected, that is determined by opening Hayden in 2013, to decline down to 4913 in 2013.
So the Board moved at least 617 students from the SRA 100 to Hayden, and then would drain feeder students greatly to get to the overshoot of capacity that they are at now.
The Board report put it another definite way elsewhere.
“School enrolments (for SRA 100) are below OTG capacity and will continue to decline from 87% in 2012 to 60% of OTG capacity in 2022.
This is a result of the opening of the new school in the Alton High School.”
So there you have it in the Boards’ own words, and the Trustees seem to have been completely unaware and feckless. What do we need them for given this being asleep at the switch?
And the Board just lets this pass by the trustees with no emphatic warning to parents, residents and city Council, of what was coming?
If you are asking the question “whodunnit” to us, the answer is, “the Board dunnit”. They created this awful mess and our so-called “Trustees” have just been sleepy collaborators in this doin’.
And with craig seeming to be okay with the closure of 2 high schools,as inefficient, and needing to be eliminated, I have to ask if he has ever considered what might be the limits of his criterion or his logic?
Does he 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.
It appears that being a Trustee is little more than following Provincial curricula and minding little else in the way of representing communities of student and their parents. Shame about that, eh?
And we thought they were minding the store, when they’ve only been stocking the shelves.
School occupation has always been cyclical because it is a function of natural demographic changes.
As I recall, White Oaks SS in Oakville was nearly closed once; a few years later it was overcrowded and using portables. Events like that cause stakeholders to question the effectiveness and validity of the Board’s accommodation planning.
Someone should have seen this coming. the situation at Hayden should been obvious given the experience this very school board has had in Milton. New schools in new areas are ALWAYS overcrowded because there are way more kids living in those neighbourhoods than predicted by the ministry formula.
What makes no sense to me is why they put an FI program at Hayden in the first place. That should never have happened. They knew the school was going to be insanely overcapacity – they had to have known. Now that the FI program is there the parents are going to fight like hell to keep it. If they’d shipped those kids to MMR in the first place things would be in a better position.
Does it really matter now as knowing wont fix the mess. We had the same issue years ago at elementary level and a number of schools closed/sold off. Bottom line too many seats not enough bottoms to fill so something has to close goal is which do you close that is best for all of burlington not one community vs another. Boundaries obviously need to chnage for Hayden especially if the 500 or 800 home subdvidion by tremaine happens. It appears obbious that one school south of qew needs to close not so sure about North of QEW with new growth coming and Hayden so over crowded.
“It is widely expected that the Halton Director of Education will request a PAR for six secondary schools in Burlington that are facing declining enrolment, namely Aldershot, Burlington Central, Lester B. Pearson, M.M. Robinson, Nelson and Robert Bateman, to commence in January 2015”
The above is a quote from Oct. 7 2014, that is just prior to the last election. The trustees were or should have been aware of the same information, this PAR is not a surprize.
Some Board staff and trustees may not have been involved in this issue directly – and can claim that it was not their responsibility to advise stakeholders – but surely it is part of someone’s job description at a senior level?