On Tuesday night, trustees and officials will be in Osoyoos to hear what this community thinks about their proposal to close a school here to deal with a province-wide school funding crisis.
Local parents’ groups as well as town council are urging the people of Osoyoos to show up at the gymnasium in Osoyoos Secondary School at 7 p.m. on Feb. 9 to express their views.
If people come in the numbers that school advocates hope, not everyone will fit into the gymnasium. Still, it would be an important indication of how strongly the Osoyoos community feels about keeping our schools open.
This issue goes way beyond the inconvenience of giving up after-school activities to sit on a school bus. The loss of the high school would be a severe blow to this community’s aspirations to be home to people of all ages.
Families will move away or not come here in the first place and we risk losing businesses that are at the core of the community.
For that reason, we urge people of all ages to show up.
A meeting like this serves several purposes, not all of them compatible.
For the community, it’s a chance to make a political statement and show by our numbers that we believe our schools matter.
For School District 53, it’s a requirement of their school closure policy that the community be consulted before they move forward. Hopefully this will be a true consultation and not just a pro forma step on the road to a pre-determined outcome.
We can’t, however, lose sight of a third purpose of the meeting – to seek real solutions to the funding crisis, allowing the school district to keep our schools open.
Before the public meeting, school district representatives will also meet with teaching staff and town council in separate meetings.
We’re sure that our local educators will have good ideas on where savings can be found.
Town council is prepared as a last resort to provide funding to the school district, but they are also aware that this idea is fraught with problems.
Osoyoos should not by itself pay for what is a district-wide problem of declining enrolment and a province-wide problem of underfunding of education.
Nor should this become an annual contribution – it’s not what municipal budgets are for.
We hope also that some worthwhile solutions come out in the public meeting.
All too often this kind of meeting brings out strong emotions, but is short on constructive ideas. We hope that this one will be different, as some parents have been busy doing their homework.
Realistically though, such solutions can probably only buy time.
A school closure here is not an outcome trustees would want, but they want even less to close a school in their own communities. Hopefully the meeting won’t pit one school against another.
We also hope that MLA Linda Larson will be there to hear from the Osoyoos community.
It is, after all, the provincial government that controls the purse strings and under her government, public education has been getting a smaller and smaller share of the provincial budget.
That’s what this is all about.
