It’s fair to say that relations are frosty right now between Osoyoos town council and School District 53. And that’s not helping.

Mayor Sue McKortoff and her fellow councillors feel, with much justification, that they were blindsided by the school board’s abrupt decision to take the first steps toward closing one of the Osoyoos schools.

Like the rest of the Osoyoos community, council resents the way the school board has dumped a district-wide problem of declining enrolments and provincial grants onto the shoulders of Osoyoos alone.

For her part, Marieze Tarr, chair of the school board, argues that the school district repeatedly raised alerts about declining enrolments.

She feels the town failed to take action to address the population issue after Osoyoos Secondary School (OSS) was similarly threatened in 2010-11, but won a reprieve.

Tarr is upset at the way Osoyoos councillors spent much of the first bilateral meeting on Feb. 9 attacking the school district.

If a solution is to be found, however, it’s going to require both sides to put these grievances aside and work together in a spirit of co-operation.

It’s also going to require each side to better understand the other’s situation and their respective roles.

Tarr and former mayor Stu Wells may argue about who should have done what after OSS was spared in 2011, but we think both sides dropped the ball.

Only the school district has the expertise to deliver education and make its budgets balance. And only the town is able to encourage growth in Osoyoos that is needed to bring enrolments and provincial funding up again.

When the threat lifted in 2011, neither side was proactive in addressing the problems that remained, because the sense of urgency was gone.

Osoyoos now wants a one-year delay in order to explore a district-wide engagement process to find a solution.

This is reasonable and fair, but perhaps not realistic. It’s unfair, but the board has made it strictly an Osoyoos problem by taking all other options off the table before consultation started. Only Osoyoos has an interest in engaging.

As long as Osoyoos alone is taking the hit, other communities have no incentive to come to the table and negotiate with the same urgency.

Like it or not, if Osoyoos wants to keep its schools, it’s going to have to be prepared to work directly with the school district without the benefit of sharing the cost with other communities. It’s not fair, but it’s reality.

We think Osoyoos council needs to come up with two key things to offer up if it really wants to keep both schools:

  • It must provide the school district with a realistic population growth target for the next few years along with a plan for attracting young families to the community and growing Osoyoos;
  • It should be prepared to provide funding – with or without contributions from other communities – to help the school district through the present budget crunch.

In exchange, the school district should also co-operate by:

  • Taking the option of closing Osoyoos Elementary School off the table completely;
  • Delaying any decision on closing OSS for at least a year to allow time to develop a plan;
  • Exploring – with an open mind – cost reduction strategies suggested by parents and teachers, including a four-day school week and scrapping the luxury of the network leaders program;
  • Continuing to apply pressure on the provincial government to fund public education adequately.

These actions will be difficult for both sides to swallow, but the school district can’t be expected to grant a delay unless it sees a clear path out of the current financial mess.

Fair or not, Osoyoos has to do more to help the school district to make the right decision.