Osoyoos alone will pay the price for declining enrolment across School District 53 if the school board’s proposal to close one of our schools goes ahead.

The most likely scenario is that Osoyoos Secondary School (OSS) would be closed and students here would be bused to Oliver.

A second option is to close Osoyoos Elementary School, turn OSS into a Kindergarten to Grade 9, and send students in grades 10 to 12 to Oliver. This second option makes little sense and seems to be there only to create the illusion that we have a real choice.

The impact on Osoyoos of closing OSS would be devastating and goes far beyond the inconvenience to students of having to waste time on buses instead of engaging in sports, extracurricular activities or after-school jobs.

Young families with children will simply choose not to locate here. New businesses will give Osoyoos a pass, locating in Oliver instead.

The demographic of Osoyoos will shift even more to what former mayor Stu Wells calls “an old fogeys’ town.”

Property values could very well be impacted, as Osoyoos becomes a less desirable location for families.

In short, the economic costs to Osoyoos would be considerably higher than the money the school district might save by closing the school.

School district officials, however, have no mandate to consider economic impact on a community. They operate in a silo where their primary consideration is delivering education within a budget determined largely by provincial funding.

We don’t, however, know what the actual cost savings of closing OSS or any other school would be. Even the trustees didn’t have those figures when the voted last Wednesday – with little discussion – to move forward with this idea.

School board chair Marieze Tarr, an Osoyoos trustee, says that no decision has been made yet. There will, she adds, be community consultations and a chance to consider other options.

That’s not quite true. The school board did make the decision not to consider such options such as amalgamating the elementary schools in Oliver and Okanagan Falls or rationalizing the schools in Cawston and Keremeos.

Perhaps we’re being cynical, but it appears the school district actually made the decision to close OSS some time ago.

This was proposed already in 2010, but the community won a reprieve in 2011 when the school board decided not to proceed with closure at that time.

But with the extensive renovations to Southern Okanagan Secondary School (SOSS) in Oliver following a fire in September 2011, it seems the fix was in.

SOSS will only be at 63 per cent capacity in 2017, according to the school district’s projections. That’s even slightly lower than OSS, which will be at 66 per cent capacity.

More to the point though, SOSS was built with a capacity of 700 students, but 2017 enrolment will only be 438. This means there is room for 262 more students before the school is at 100 per cent capacity.

And guess what. OSS will have 215 students in 2017. It looks like SOSS was designed all along with them in mind.

The fact that other closure options aren’t being considered has nothing to do with the suggestion by MLA Linda Larson that provincial funding is being redistributed to where there is the greatest need. Rather, the choice was dictated largely by provincial grants that skew the system.

Closing Cawston Primary School would mean the loss of a $500,000 provincial “unique factor” grant.

Closing Okanagan Falls would mean the loss of a “small community” grant of $160,000 – in addition to the loss of per-student funding if children in that community go out of the district to Kaleden or Penticton instead of Oliver.

In other words, provincial policies make those schools cash cows for the district and tie the board’s hands.

The school district is boxed in by these provincially imposed financial constraints and in that light it made a rational choice.

But the impact on Osoyoos of closing OSS is far greater than the balancing of provincial education grants to the best administrative advantage.

The Osoyoos community needs to get behind OSS and push town council and the province to address the bigger picture.