OSOYOOS TIMES-December 1, 2010
School District 53’s board of trustees is faced with an unenviable task.
On the one hand, it is legally bound to keep the district’s budget balanced and not run a deficit.
On the other, it has to consider the needs of the district’s students and take into account how closing a school could affect a community.
It is not the board’s fault that enrolment is declining throughout the entire region.
Right now, there are 269 students at Osoyoos Secondary School, a facility built for 325.
That’s 83 per cent capacity.
In five years, that capacity rate is expected to drop to 64 per cent as the school’s 2015-2016 enrolment is projected at 209 students.
All but three of the district’s eight schools are predicted to have capacity rates below 70 per cent by the 2015-2016 school year, meaning large buildings that take a great deal of cash to heat, cool and maintain will have one-third of their space unoccupied.
District Superintendent Juleen McElgunn told a group of roughly 25 members of the public who attended the board’s Nov. 24 meeting that the trustees and district staff have worked together to deal with rising operational costs and shrinking provincial funding by cutting as many small items out of the district’s budget.
She referred to the process as nibbling around the outside of a cookie.
But now, she told the board and the gathering, the board must take big bites from the centre of the cookie, otherwise the district will go into unmanageable debt.
Unfortunately, it would seem that a solution to this problem is the likely closure of a school in the region and the shuttering of Osoyoos Secondary makes the most sense since its closure would save the district more than $700,000.
Some of the people in attendance at the meeting said there are other options to fix the district’s financial woes that would be less harmful to local students and the Osoyoos community.
Hopefully they are right.
Regardless, the larger problem of communities in the South Okanagan having difficulties attracting and retaining young families with school-aged children has forced a serious dilemma upon the district and its board of trustees.
The best role for this community in this matter is to offer the board ideas and guidance about how to navigate through this challenge.
They have hard decisions to make down the road and if there is a way to make that bite out of the cookie smaller and more digestible, we can play a part in helping the board find it.
