Perhaps the saddest part of the closure of Osoyoos Secondary School is that the trustees who voted to close our high school don’t live in Osoyoos and have absolutely zero vested interest in this community.

The pleas and cries from trustees like Rachel Allenbrand (who lives in Oliver), Rob Zandee (Oliver), Sam Hancheroff (Okanagan Falls) and Debbie Marten (Keremeos) that they were doing what was right for the entire school district was basically hot air.

It’s certainly not the fault of any trustee that the provincial government has failed in its responsibility to provide adequate funding to this province’s education system.

And it’s not their fault that they have to provide a balanced budget to the Ministry of Education by the end of June every summer or face being fired by the government.

But to suggest that they were doing what was right for the entire school district by voting to close OSS was disingenuous and basically a bald-faced lie.

The reality – and everyone who lives in Osoyoos knows it – is that the trustees who don’t live in Osoyoos had long ago made up their minds that they were going to close OSS.

As many Osoyoos residents have commented on social media sites, the decision to close OSS was made when the provincial government gave the school district a huge cheque to rebuild Southern Okanagan Secondary School (SOSS) after a devastating fire destroyed that facility back in 2011.

As detailed in a couple of articles that appear in today’s edition of the Osoyoos Times (front page and Page 3), another reality is that trustees who happened to live in Oliver never wanted OSS to be built in the first place.

The enmity, frustration and anger that has been caused by the decision to close OSS over the past four months was just as pervasive and palpable back in 1977 and 1978 when Osoyoos trustees like Virginia Cook and Don Brunner worked tirelessly to have a new high school built in Osoyoos.

Cook, who was a trustee with the former School District 14 for more than a decade, recalled that trustees from Oliver and Okanagan Falls were dead set against Osoyoos getting its own high school.

When the provincial government announced back in 1976 that Osoyoos was indeed going to be getting its own high school, trustees from Oliver and Okanagan Falls were not happy campers.

Kara Burton, the wonderful executive director of the Osoyoos Museum and Archives, spent several hours a couple of weeks ago scrolling through the archives to detail the chronology to get OSS built in the first place.

It’s truly unbelievable that trustees who don’t live in Osoyoos were willing to battle so long and so hard against this town getting its own high school. Some of the trustees fought against the idea of having Grade 11 and 12 students included in the new Osoyoos high school literally up until a few weeks before the school opened in September of 1979.

Cook stated eloquently that trustees and residents from Oliver have had this longstanding inability to understand why the good people of Osoyoos would want to enjoy many of the same amenities they’ve been blessed with in their little town.

The entire system that allowed trustees who have no vested interest in Osoyoos to have the power and ability to close our high school is deeply flawed. These same trustees were offered more than $1 million by the Town of Osoyoos council and an endless list of viable cost-saving measures that they totally ignored.

It’s not easy being a school trustee in this day and age, but having four trustees without any ties to our town make a decision that will negatively affect this community for generations to come is wrong in so many ways.

And they, as Cook said, should be ashamed of themselves. They took the easy way out and didn’t do the right thing.

This longstanding enmity between trustees in Oliver and Osoyoos resulted in our high school closing its doors and that’s just really sad on so many levels.