More distant or more local control? - From the Cluttered Desk with Keith Roulston

Last week, Ontario’s Minister of Education Paul Calandra told the municipal councillors at the annual convention of the Association of Municipalities of Ontario that he thinks school trustees are “outdated” and “old” and he’s thinking of getting rid of local school boards. It was a shocking proposal.

 

Not that many voters would notice such a change - with the government mandating that there are now two-county school boards, I doubt that many readers could even name who their trustee is, or even that there are nine trustees on the Avon Maitland District School Board. 

 

How things have changed. I’m an old man now, but I remember when there was a one-room school every couple of miles along concessions and county roads. Most of these became private residents or machinery sheds when the province decided that there should be consolidated schools, such as the ones still present in Ethel and Londesborough.

 

But I was still in school when that change came about. Such was the situation before that, that my father, a shy man, took his turn as a trustee in our neighbourhood north of Lucknow. We didn’t actually have a school anymore because it had been so worn down but our neighbourhood board purchased services from the big public school in Lucknow. Every school day, we walked a mile up to the corner of our county highway (where the school was) and got a ride to town on the high school bus.
That school was supervised by a board of trustees from the village who had both an elementary and a high school in their jurisdiction. It was also more active (and definitely more community-centred) than we think of trustees being today. For instance, they provided annual visits for all students to our local dentist. This not only gave us superior dental care in an age when many parents couldn’t afford that service, but supported the village’s dentist. 

 

There was also a local scholarship that they began when a miser from the area died, leaving a small fortune. That fund helped boys from the area further their education at university (the miser didn’t believe in education for girls). I won that scholarship when I graduated from Lucknow District High School, but I was in the last graduating class and there was confusion of how that scholarship would be delivered now that students would be going to F. E. Madill Secondary School and I had to enlist the help of MPP Murray Gaunt before I got the money.

 

By the time I got my first job as editor of the Clinton News-Record in 1970, we had county school boards and an old factory on Clinton’s main street had been renovated as the headquarters of the Huron County Board of Education. But the centralization moves continued. Soon the province mandated that the schools in the counties of Huron and Perth should only have one board. We went from dozens of trustees being involved in the community and integrating schools as part of the community, to today’s distant rulers of education: nine trustees in two counties, most of whom we don’t know.

 

The distancing of education from the community continued in early in the 2010s when the school board, funded by the province, decided to close schools in Blyth, Brussels, East Wawanosh and  Turnberry and bus all the students to a big new school attached to F.E. Madill. I remember Brock Vodden, then a Blyth councillor on North Huron Council, fighting valiantly to try to save local schools, but losing. 

 

Today, Blyth parents can decide if they want their children bused all the way to Wingham or a couple of miles to Londesborough. Many have chosen Londesborough so they have more contact with the school. But how long before some distant decision-maker decides that this school is unnecessary?

 

Our schools have become more and more distanced from the community. It’s hard to imagine trustees today who could see, as the trustees back in Lucknow did more than 70 years ago, that they could help the community, as well as local school children, by subsidizing students to visit the local dentist.

 

We have become more and more distanced from the community we live in and from our neighbours. We shop regionally now at Walmart or Loblaw instead of in shops on our main streets. Our students are bused (at great cost) to distant schools. Our healthcare has become more regionalized, rather than community-centred.

 

And it has all been so gradual that it can seem natural. Since boards of education are so distanced from the people they supposedly serve, why bother with them? Why not just let the province rule education?

 

I know I’m old, but if I was in power, I’d be trying to find ways to give power, and education, back to the community and its people.