Dear Editor:

When I was in Grade 5, and 10 or 11 years old, one of my teachers chose me to mentor and train for speech festivals.

I was from a single parent family of meager means, so this was a real opportunity for me.

For two years, I stayed after school, memorizing and practicing poetry to recite in speech festivals.

I always placed first or second, competing against other kids my age that had elocution lessons.

I didn’t have a bus to catch after school.  Had that been the case, this opportunity would likely have escaped me as we didn’t have a car at the time, nor did my mother drive.

The Osoyoos senior boys basketball team is currently ranked in the top three in the province. Many of them are able to stay after school to practice, enabling them to enjoy competing with other schools of the same calibre.

Maybe some of these students would not have that opportunity if they had to bus to and from school.

Is it really fair to once again put the priority of our students below that of other agendas?

In the Jan. 20 edition of the Osoyoos Times, the front page featured the possibility of closure of Osoyoos Secondary School.

There were letters and articles from our former mayor and others pleading against this and offering solutions to keep the school open.

There are currently many young families in Osoyoos. In fact, the elementary school is running at near full capacity, with more little ones due to enrol in the coming years.

If there is the baby boom going on we keep hearing about, isn’t it likely we could end up having to build another school to accommodate rising enrolment by being so shortsighted?

And where would that money come from?  In the meantime, why not have Grades 7 – 12 at the high school to increase that school’s enrolment.

I have often wondered why, with such low enrolment, we don’t have one principal for both our schools and two vice principals?

And why we don’t amalgamate with the Penticton School District office?

It seems we could operate from one board office for the Central/North Okanagan and one for the Central/South Okanagan.

Every time the government and the teacher’s union get into a dispute, the kids pay the price.

It seems extremely shortsighted to offer as a budget solution, closing our local high school, which could potentially affect our demographic dramatically, as well as having a negative effect on the kids once again.

I thought our senior administration within the school district has always abided by the motto that, ‘Kids are our priority.’

If you ask some of our long term residents what it was like being bused to Oliver to attend high school when they were teens, they will tell you they didn’t like it.

They were branded as “those kids from Osoyoos” and didn’t feel the same ownership they would have in their own local school.

It seems our hierarchy and the powers that be who are supposed to make decisions in the best interest of the kids and now our town, are once again going to cause the kids to pay the price.

There has been lots of warnings about budget shortfalls and measures to be taken.

It seems our decision makers haven’t been proactive enough to come up with better solutions. Shame on you!

It will take some creative thinking and farsighted vision to come up with alternative solutions to closing our school, but isn’t it only fair to our kids and their education to find a better way?

Katie Foster

Osoyoos, B.C.