Dear Editor:

The premier of the province of B.C. sends her child to a private school as do many other residents of the province.

Providing the best education for their children is at the top of their priority list.

Many of us with the means pay for private tutors, send our children to places like the Sylvan Learning Center and enroll their children in music lessons or many other such endeavours in order to give their children the best chance to succeed in life.

Why is it OK for the wealthy in our community to subsidize their children’s education, while providing funding to keep our “meat and potatoes” government-run school in our town open considered a privileged that must be denied our children?

Why would you sentence local children to 10 hours a week on a school bus, that is equivalent to two days of class time, when they could be staying after school to get help from their teachers, doing homework, participating in extracurricular activities or experiencing their first part time job?

Any of the above would provide a more valuable learning experience than maybe having access to one more language or one more lab.

Special funding is provided to keep local schools in their community when approved by the Minister of Education.

How is special funding provided by the Town of Osoyoos in order to keep their secondary school in their community open providing an unfair advantage to their children?

All this money does is provide Osoyoos students the same opportunity as the students in the rest of School District 53.

Are the students of Osoyoos second-class citizens?

How could any sensible person not support such a reasonable proposal?

Osoyoos’s only crime is being five kilometres closer to Oliver than the 25 kilometre no busing zone, and for that crime they will pay dearly.

Their parents will lose the opportunity to participate in the most formative years of their children’s life and their children will be deprived of life skills that would have benefited them for the rest of their lives.

In a recent open letter to the Town of Osoyoos, our MLA Linda Larson indicated that the closing of the Osoyoos Secondary School would be no loss to Osoyoos as the town had no reason for families with children to live here.

Our MLA believes Osoyoos is comprised of senior citizens and summer time vacationers and is reflecting this belief to Victoria.

No wonder Victoria is turning a deaf ear to our request to keep our school open.

I am personally extending an invitation to Larson, Minister of Education Mike Bernier and Premier Christy Clark to visit the town of Osoyoos.

A quick tour of our town would quickly reveal how wrong our MLA’s perception is.

The Town of Osoyoos has a large quantity and diversity of businesses. These businesses, such as our own, are dependent on the availability of a young educated labour force in order to stay in Osoyoos.

How are we supposed to attract the talent so necessary to our businesses if there is no secondary school for their children to attend?

Osoyoos’s schools have fewer students than Oliver because it is backed up against the U.S. border, thereby limiting its draw area.

Thank you.

Martin Sadd

Osoyoos, B.C.