The elephant in the classroom amid school closings
Instead of pointless overspending, or painful streamlining, surely amalgamating school boards is the answer.

thestar.com
By MARTIN REGG COHN
May 15, 2017

School closings can be brutal. Students suffer and parents grieve.

Small towns lose out and everyone lashes out. People protest and the opposition pounces.

The government of the day - Liberal, PC or NDP - is accused of heartlessness. And wrongheadedness.

It’s a perennial narrative, not unlike the impassioned reaction to hospital closings and horseracing cutbacks over the years. Rural Ontario feels aggrieved because every school, every hospital, every racetrack is sacrosanct in every community.

There is a better way to deal with the systematic closing of schools, which are so often the hub and heart of a small town. It’s a more practical solution that puts the problem in a class all its own - utterly unlike hospitals, horseracing, highways or any discretionary expenditure that strains the treasury or requires tradeoffs.

But you won’t hear any politician from any party in the legislature suggesting the obvious remedy (just as you won’t hear any opposition MPP acknowledge that a single school should be closed). It is Ontario’s taboo, the proverbial elephant in the classroom, and it is this:

Our one province is blessed with four distinct school systems, divided along religious and language lines, which cut the pedagogical pie into smaller and less sustainable schools.

At the time of Confederation - a time of one-room schoolhouses - providence and politics decreed that Catholics should be educated separately from everyone else.

Today, that one-room schoolhouse is essentially extinct - and the modern school is not merely a classroom but a clearinghouse for learning, a place where specialized French teachers can be recruited along with math teachers who get extra training, where music classes and sports teams have the resources they need.

Rural schools often lack that critical mass because they are dispersed in outlying areas. School boards must strike a balance between centralized locations that require extra bussing and smaller (or undersized) schools that are close to every community.

It can be a difficult trade-off between proximity and pedagogy, accessibility and affordability. But at a certain point tough choices must be made, because no school is forever.

A rural area often bleeds its population base, while a suburban setting sees a dramatic influx of new students. No budget is unlimited, so the typical trade-off would be to close under-used schools while transferring funds to the overcrowded areas whose parents are clamouring to get their kids out of portables.

That’s why school boards across the province are reviewing as many as 300 potential closings - not because they love busing, but to make themselves eligible for provincial funding to pay for additional schools elsewhere. It’s a question of resource allocation - you want new schools, close old ones, don’t just ask for a bigger budget.

The reflexive response is to protest until politicians find more money. Never mind those opposition demands to reduce waste and duplication because local communities deem their local schools, hospitals and racecourses to be sacrosanct.

When the government tried to rein in our unsustainable oversupply of 17 racetracks, it provoked a rural backlash led by the Progressive Conservatives. Before the 2014 election, Premier Kathleen Wynne acquiesced to opposition demands that she prop up these purported rural lifelines - money that might otherwise be directed to vital social services.

Perhaps more money will now be found for unsustainably small schools to avoid overly onerous bus trips. No doubt the bureaucrats and politicians will redo their numbers.

But a better balance will one day be struck. Instead of pointless overspending, or painful streamlining, surely amalgamating school boards - on geographical rather than religious grounds - is the answer.

In recent years, the government has encouraged separate and public school boards to share more resources, such as empty buildings and libraries, to avoid duplication. That works well enough in big cities or suburbs where geography and demography support that kind of linkage. It’s more of a stretch in outlying areas.

Now, 150 years after the Confederation pact that divided Ontario’s school system in two, that historic arrangement is slowly coming apart at the rural seams. But you won’t hear any of the three major parties talking about this taboo anytime soon, because the political price - which is to say, the electoral risk - is still too high to justify the economic savings, even if they translate into shorter bus rides for schoolchildren.

And so the rest of us - students, parents, taxpayers - will continue to bear the cost.