Five Edmonton schools to close

EDMONTON — Edmonton public school trustees will close the doors of five schools at the end of June.

During a seven-hour meeting that stretched to 1 a.m. Wednesday. trustees voted to shut down the historic Eastwood, McCauley and Parkdale schools located in the city centre neighbourhoods northeast of downtown, as well as Capilano and Fulton Place Schools in the southeast Hardisty area, built during the baby boom. Trustees also decided to close the elementary program at Spruce Avenue School, so it can serve exclusively junior high students.

“There’s a certain drain on resources small schools make that larger schools don’t,” board chairman Don Fleming said after the meeting. “It raises a question of are we providing the quality of education we could be.”

Now, Fleming said, the district will have to deliver on the implied promise that closures will improve student learning. “We have to make sure those students receive the best possible education they can in the years ahead,” he said.

The votes mean about 1,000 children will have to start at a new school next September.

None of the closure decisions was unanimous, although all nine trustees did support the end of the elementary program at Spruce Avenue after Parkdale and McCauley Schools, which both served junior high students, were closed.

There was a clear divide among trustees during the debate about what was in the best interests of children, particularly in the four schools that belong to the City Centre Education Partnership.

“I want to say clearly I do not believe we have made the case there are significant financial savings in closing our schools,” Trustee David Colburn said. “I do not believe we have made the case there are significant educational outcomes in closing schools. I think we have made the case that we are very good at closing schools.”

Trustees made the decisions before a room that was packed at the start of the meeting with parents, community members, staff and even a few children, some of whom sang and chattered from their seats.

Some in the audience were among the approximately 100 people who participated in a rally against school closures outside the district office earlier in the day. With chants of “Save our schools” and “Put children first,” they waved signs on Kingsway, earning honks from passing cars.

Later, during the meeting, about 20 people delivered those same messages directly to trustees.

Rob Stack, vice-president of the McCauley community league, urged trustees to keep the school open and do more to create “centres of excellence” in city centre schools that might draw a wider range of students.

“It is unfortunate that knowingly, or unknowingly, our schools have been set up for failure,” Stack said. “This isn’t to disagree with increased resources for those who need it, but that needs to be in an integrated environment. Due to a lack of broad appeal, our schools are failing to attract even a majority of parents in our boundaries.”

Earlier, parents from southeast neighbourhoods made the case for trustees to keep their schools open.

“We have a vibrant, respectful and caring community at Capilano School,” said mother Anna Carlson, as she urged trustees to keep the school of 110 children open. “Maybe the school board needs to look at hiring someone to think of ways to keep schools open, not think of ways to close schools.”

With tears in her eyes after trustees’ 8-1 vote to close Capilano, Carlson said she and her husband would now have to sit down and decide the best move next September for their daughters, now in Grade 1 and Grade 3.

“We’re talking about our children. We’re talking about our future,” added a frustrated Wendy Wilton, who currently has one child attending Capilano. “They are living, breathing human beings. We’re not talking about numbers.”

Fulton Place School was closed by a 6-3 vote.

“This is tearing apart an elementary school,” mother Christine Hood said afterwards.

Hood, whose children were enrolled in the Logos alternative program at Fulton Place, said she will opt to home-school her elementary-aged children.

The last time trustees closed an Edmonton public school was in 2008, when they shut down Ritchie Junior High and Woodcroft Elementary. While those closures also generated heated debate, the current closure conversations are amplified by a much larger review of 70 other elementary and junior high schools just launched in the city’s core neighbourhoods.

District officials say those reviews — which could lead to further proposed school closures, consolidations or reconfigurations next year — are prompted by some of the same concerns that lead to the initial study of seven CCEP schools and a cluster of four schools in the southeast Hardisty area.

Planners said the city centre and Hardisty have among the most underused schools in the city, based on the provincial formula calculating a school’s capacity.

Those statistics have come under criticism for painting an unrealistic picture about how many children a building can hold in an era where features such as art classes or music rooms are expected. But district planners argued there are just too many classrooms going unused in the two areas not to consolidate.

“Regardless of the size of the building or how we count the space, without consolidating students in both of these sectors it will become increasingly more challenging to provide access to high quality programs and programming,” associate superintendent Tanni Parker said.

In Hardisty, a key motive for the proposed closure of Capilano and Fulton Place Schools was to maintain junior high programming at the vastly underused Hardisty School by creating a new K-9 school in the large building.

In the city centre, top Edmonton Public officials argued that consolidating elementary students from McCauley, Parkdale, Eastwood and Spruce Avenue into three other area schools and merging all the junior high students at Spruce Avenue would improve learning opportunities for those students.

Students within city centre schools are listed among the district’s most vulnerable. All of those schools have hot lunch programs and two, Parkdale and Eastwood, operate on a modified school calendar, starting three weeks earlier than other schools to help bridge the gap between grades.

But district administrators believe current student numbers mean that both teachers, specialists and social agencies are stretched too thin across the seven CCEP schools. By combining students, the split classes common in many of the schools due to small student numbers instead join schools with multiple classes in each grade and have more extracurricular activities.

While a majority of trustees voted to support the first two closures on Tuesday’s agenda, some expressed concerns about the decisions.

Throughout the discussion, parents opposed to closure and opposition MLAs in the legislature have urged Education Minister Dave Hancock to intervene.

Hancock made it clear both in an interview with The Journal and on his blog that he will not do so.

“This is in the hands of the local boards and appropriately so,” he said.

Hancock did say in his blog he thinks it is “bizarre” that many school boards do not coordinate their school planning with municipal governments. Still, he said he will not mandate collaboration.

“To me, ‘mandated collaboration’ is not collaboration at all,” he said, adding later, “I would much rather encourage boards to work with other community organizations to meet the needs of their children in the best way they can.”

ciltan@thejournal.canwest.com

sodonnell@thejournal.canwest.com

This article was published in the Edmonton Journal on April 14, 2010. Read the full article on the EdmontonJournal.com website.