Dear Editor:

I fully appreciate and recognize the desire of many in the community to start our own independent school.

The body language of trustees in the public meetings leading up to the school closure decision was enough to tell everyone the whole process was a sham and, therefore, our anger desperately needs a viable voice or outlet.

But enough about decisions that were made months ago.

We need to be very careful about modelling an independent school based on one that now operates in Rossland.

The Rossland model is simply a Distributed Learning (DL) model where students would work at their own pace on courses offered by one of the many DL centres around the province.

The funding for those courses would be directed to the district offering the service – it would not come to our independent school.

Which brings us to some vital questions.

How much are individual families prepared to pay to have their students educated by online learning sites and where are you going to get the teacher/supervisors to monitor this online learning? Also, do parents really understand that an independent school will look nothing like what OSS is and can still be?

The cost of textbooks and computers alone will make the pie-in-the-sky proposed tuition of $1,000 to $2,000 a sadly low estimate of costs for each student.

And teachers who are already employed by School District 53 won’t be inclined to give up their BCTF pension plans for the sake of working with students who may or may not want to do their courses by distance learning.

By the way, success rates for all students who take distributed learning isn’t great.

Students need to be self-motivated and self-directed to have any hope of success, even if they have a teacher supervising their work.

I also strongly think this model does not address fine arts and applied skills programs, nor the issue of school sports teams.

Further, going the independent route, regardless of how it looks, is exactly what the premier of our province wants.

Her goal for over a decade has been to dismantle the public school system and replace it with private schools where Ministry of Education funding is only 50 per cent of public school funding.

Think how much money our government will save on education if all schools were “private.”

I don’t think we should pursue this privately funded model to save Premier Christy Clark some cash that she could then spend on other ministries of her choosing.

The proposal to put pressure on politicians (regardless of the argument that school boards are elected to make local decisions) is a good one.

Simply because a board is elected to serve the interests of students and the community doesn’t mean they will, as we have just seen.

Everyone needs to start a letter-writing campaign, not only to  MLA  Larson but to all trustees and the Minister of Education, Mike Bernier, as well as Superintendent of SD 53, Bev Young.

After all, it was ultimately her direction to the board that has led us down this rabbit hole.

Political will is a powerful thing if we direct it in the right way.

I’m not sure we should be jumping on the independent school model quite yet. There are still other avenues to pursue.

Let’s overwhelm the powers that be with phone calls and letters.

If nothing changes by the April 27 final vote, then we’ll see about electing a new board of trustees next year.

And we will all have to make sure we vote to elect a board of trustees who will work to reopen OSS and also keep other schools in the district from suffering our fate, as will surely be the case in this era of underfunded public education.

Thank you.

Brian Rothwell

Osoyoos, B.C.