While the tough new policy targets many of almost 800 schools across Ontario whose student loads fall short of capacity by a total of nearly 327,000 students, it is the Toronto board that will be hardest hit by the scrapping of top-up dollars for declining enrolment.
Across its 461 elementary schools, the board has 48,030 fewer students than its official capacity. In its 98 high schools, it is operating 23,397 students under capacity. Those statistics leave the board’s enrolment falling short by the rough equivalent of 143 elementary schools and 28 high schools at their current size.
“Closing anywhere near that many schools would cause destruction to our system and we’d start to go down the path of American cities that have had the heart taken out of them by losing schools,” warned board chair Chris Bolton.
While he admitted the board “will have to consolidate schools — and we can, we’re not slouches in this regard,” Bolton warned that closing too many too fast could “destroy people’s confidence in the system; they’d start worrying when they buy a house that the neighborhood school could close two years later.
“You don’t want to drive people from public schools,” he cautioned. “But as trustees, we’re going to have to have some hard, heart-to-heart conversations.”
Those talks promise to be heated. Trustee Cathy Dandy called closing schools “the most wasteful, inefficient, myopic thing any government can consider, and (it) flies in the face of what every progressive jurisdiction is doing.”
She called it foolish to close schools “at a time when kids have increasingly complex needs and we could be putting in mental health centres, health centres and programs for seniors” to better serve communities.
Dandy also dismissed as “ridiculous” the way the province calculates a school’s utilization rate, because it fails to include areas such as lunchrooms amd parenting centres.
But Education Minister Laurel Broten said Thursday she is removing the cash crutches for under-enrolled schools in urban areas because “it’s not prudent fiscal management to keep be turning on lights and heating for schools that are not operating at capacity. We’re looking at tough choices outside the classroom so we can protect full-day kindergarten, a cap on class sizes and teaching jobs.”
Curbing grants to keep schools open will save the government an estimated $43.7 million in 2013-14 and $72.5 million in 2014-15.
The government is giving boards a year before withdrawing the funding, but the way the province requires school boards to close schools can take at least two years — one to consult the public on a cluster of schools in a given neighborhood, and another year to prepare the buildings for change, warned Daryl Sage, the TDSB’s director of strategy and planning.
“We undertook 10 (school closing) reviews in 2009-2010 and it involved 97 meetings and took two years to complete — and with our resources, that’s about as many as we can handle in a year,” Sage noted.
“If we needed to close, say, 150 schools, and we closed 10 schools a year, it would still take us 15 years to reach that goal — yet the top-up grants are ending next year.”
Sage added that enrolment is complex; many schools are overflowing — that’s why the board has 500 portables in use — and some schools that seem under-enrolled are used by the community in ways that don’t count in the formula.
Bolton said the board is hammering out a new long-range blueprint for enrolment and school buildings that will be ready this spring, but added that no school closing reviews would start before fall.
And with enrolment starting to creep back at the elementary level, plus the arrival of full-day kindergarten and all the neighborhood intensification underway downtown, Bolton said he worried about closing schools the board might need in future.
However Sage said the board expects it will take until 2035 for enrolment to climb back to the rate it was at in 2002, and that still wouldn’t fill all the empty seats.
Original Article
Source: Star
Author: Louise Brown and Kristin Rushowy
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