A year ago at this time, Osoyoos Secondary School (OSS) was slated for closure.

The provincial government, knowing they would be heading into an election this year, had just announced a Rural Education Enhancement Fund (REEF) that would save several rural schools facing closure due to declining enrolment, including OSS.

Some School District 53 trustees were determined to close OSS, believing this would benefit schools in their own communities, and wanted to refuse the provincial funding.

The Osoyoos community had mobilized in great numbers to make its voices heard – overwhelmingly the town wanted our high school to stay open.

Fortunately, on June 30, the day OSS was slated to close, most trustees, with the exception of those in Oliver, voted to take the money and keep OSS open.

Since then, some of the pretexts for closure of OSS have proved to be unfounded.

Enrolment across the school district has actually spiked and numbers in Osoyoos at the elementary level are strong.

The larger elementary cohorts will hit the secondary level in the near future, proving the dire enrolment projections the school board relied upon to justify OSS’s closure were fiction.

Indeed, the school district’s projected deficit is turning into a surplus.

There are other positive signs.

The Town of Osoyoos has moved forward with the long-awaited Southeast Meadowlark subdivision, which will provide housing suitable for families in a community desperately short of this type of housing.

The town’s population has now surpassed the 5,000 threshold, which is not a good thing when it comes to the doubling of policing costs, but it is a good thing for a high school that needs sufficient enrolment to sustain it.

OSS Principal Mike Safek is especially proud of the school’s innovative flexible timetable introduced at the start of the current school year.

It was a scramble to throw the school closure into reverse and implement the new timetable, which gives senior students more course offerings. But it is to the credit of Safek and his colleagues that they achieved this.

When Safek retires this year and hands his office over to incoming principal Scott Tremblay, the school’s renewal will be well underway.

There remains the question of whether the REEF will remain in place now that the election is behind us and we could see a change of government in days.

But both the current B.C. Liberal government and their NDP opponents have made enough commitments to fund rural education that any government breaking its word would pay a huge price.

Right now, the future of OSS looks much brighter than it did a year ago. Let’s remind ourselves of that when we celebrate this year’s grad class – at a graduation ceremony that many thought a year ago would never happen.