NOVA SCOTIA POLICY REVIEW
education & culture
1387 words
Imagine fewer schools
By Chris Benjamin
"We used to have banks, grocers, and retailers; now we have a needle exchange, homeless shelters, a high concentration of prostitution and a halfway house."
"The penal system costs far more than investing more supports and resources into our community."
Howard Windsor (aka the Halifax Regional School Board) has hired a team of consultants, led by Maureen O’Shaughnessy of CS&P Architects, to collect innovative ideas from schools, communities and the broader public to meet educational needs.
“The intent was to find the best way to look at current and future school facilities to best deliver education programs,” O’Shaughnessy told me over the phone from her Toronto office. The consultants held four community consultations attended by more than 800 people, conducted focus groups, and consulted all the plans, visions, missions and strategies Halifax Regional Municipality could throw their way.
The result is a 134-page, 10-year master plan for all 137 schools managed by the Halifax Regional School Board. The plan, called Imagine our Schools, has some beautiful elements: new spaces for playgrounds and lunch programs, an expansion of alternative education into the junior high level, improved accessibility for students with special needs, life-skills training, and the revolutionary concept of daycare programs at all high schools for student-parents. “We’re recommending fairly dramatic improvements to the remaining schools,” O’Shaughnessy explained, “but people are only talking about school reviews.”
‘School reviews’ is the dreaded euphemism for the proposed closure of schools. CS&P’s final report essentially recommends closing 14 schools, four of them on the Halifax peninsula. O’Shaughnessy’s team is trying to address a declining school-age population, under-used schools, other schools that are over-full, and the unpredictable nature of urban development. While HRM’s planning staff is drafting up a new era of skyscrapers and urban density for the peninsula, Imagine Our Schools acknowledges that even if the city bucks migration to the suburbs, urbanites aren’t having as many kids these days. Or, at least, it acknowledges this trend in north-end Halifax.
The latest blow to the north end’s multicultural face comes in the form of wrecking balls aimed at three elementary schools: Joseph Howe, Oxford and St. Joseph’s-Alexander. In the south end, Gorsebrook Junior High is being spared, because of expected population growth. Yet the main focus of HRM’s sweeping downtown growth plan is the north end, particularly around Cogswell and Gottingen – streets walking distance of two of the schools slated to close.
Denise Allen, a member of the Halifax-Central education committee, helped organize a protest against the school closures in March. She said north-end Halifax is getting shafted, as usual. “All schools under review for closure are in an area with large concentrations of indigenous blacks, Mi’kmaq, elderly and immigrants,” Allen explained. “The Board is taking advantage of the area least likely to organize against school closures.”
Allen noted that north-end and central Halifax have the highest rates of school dropouts and crime, and the lowest levels of education, on the peninsula. She said we used to have “banks, grocers and retailers in these neighbourhoods, which all left. Now we have a needle exchange, homeless shelters, a high concentration of prostitution, and a halfway house.”
There has been an historic lack of investment in these communities and Allen suggested that despite the extensive consultation process of Imagine Our Schools, the needs of students in north and central Halifax would not be met, because the plan does not address the root causes of high school dropouts. “The school board is worried about money, but we’re always competing with the streets. The penal system costs far outweigh the cost of investing more supports and resources into our community.”
She predicted the remaining students would be more likely to drop out once they had to travel farther to school and leave the comfort of their own communities. “The reason these schools are up for closure is that they are under-utilized, but doesn’t it make sense to invest more here, to help families in need thrive, rather than take away the only successful institution left?”
Janet Barlow, the coordinator of the Active & Safe Routes to School program, is also concerned about the increased walking distances that would come with school closures. O’Shaughnessy said walking distances would remain within provincial and municipal guidelines. But Barlow and others have stated that 1.5 kilometres is a half-hour commute, each way, for six-year-old legs.
Barlow pointed out that increasing the distance to school would increase traffic congestion and greenhouse gas emissions. She argued instead that “to reduce bussing costs and our impact on climate change, we need to reverse the trend toward building big box schools.” Barlow also noted discrepancies between the population projections of the school board and those of the municipality.
In scrutinizing the Imagine Our Schools process, she is not alone. When CS&P presented its final report to Howard Windsor, many of the parents from the Halifax peninsula walked out in disgust. “Why don’t you just kill the north end!” one irate mother yelled.
Challenging the recommended school closures has since become the main focus of discussion at citadelschools.ca, a Web site by and for parents in the Citadel family of Halifax schools. These parents charge that CS&P pulled a bait and switch with its consultation process, committing to work closely with student advisory committees and then including them only as participants in focus groups.
Waye Mason, who manages the site, told the school board: “The process of consultation run by CS&P was inadequate and has failed to meet its goals... The conclusions were reached without significant or meaningful public input into the process.”
Some parents have gone so far as to assert that the whole Imagine Our Schools process was little more than pretty dressing over the board’s untenable desire to save costs by closing schools. O’Shaughnessy disagreed. She said her recommended $35-million infrastructure plan would benefit all students. “Every decision was about student achievement and equity.”
Community advocates maintain there are alternatives to closing schools. For example, Barlow suggested renting out unused school space to community groups and non-government organizations. But on a deeper level, the opposition reflects the community’s mistrust of government-initiated, consultant-led, grandiose plan-making. For we the people, perhaps being invited to large information sessions doesn’t quite count as participation.
“It’s not really consultation”, Isaac Saney of Dalhousie’s Black Student Advising Centre told me. “It’s feigning consultation. The closing of those schools is really an attack on the black community.” Saney emphasized the need for the black Nova Scotian community to lead its own response to the educational challenges it faces. “The community knows what problems their children face and the main thing is that they need to lead their own interventions, whether it’s black schools or whatever.”
Saney was referring to the idea of Afrocentric schools, such as the one recently approved in Toronto. Two years ago in Halifax, a vice-principal, Wade Smith, sparked a media controversy when he suggested the idea. Even sports columnist A.J. Walling took a swing at the idea, saying it would take us back a hundred years. Sylvia Hamilton, who wrote and directed the documentary Little Black School House, begs to differ. “There is a real distinction in geography and legislation between segregated schools and Afrocentric schools,” she told an audience at Dalhousie recently. “In the past, people were forced into schools with poor conditions. Now it’s a desire for an education that’s appropriate and inspiring. Many Canadians don’t even know we had segregated schools.”
The desire for an education that’s appropriate and inspiring is perhaps the one thing everyone in Halifax can agree on. But what Walling, the sports writer, doesn’t understand, is that while things have changed since Nova Scotia legislated for segregated schools back in 1836, the specific needs of black learners in central and north-end Halifax have been largely ignored in large-scale decision-making processes.
“We’ve had no response from the school board to our protest or our comments,” Denise Allen told me. “I’m not sure I believe in Afrocentric schools, but right now, the curriculum is Eurocentric. It doesn’t account for different realities. A lot of black learners are taking care of younger siblings. Whatever plan we have for these learners has to address social needs and economic burdens, pay more attention to what’s going on at home, provide a healthy learning environment right in our community, engage learners with what they like and help them find their niche.”
The Imagine Our Schools plan does attempt to address social needs. But its intent to close central and north end-schools, against the will of these communities, is a failure to listen, and thus a failure to serve.
Chris Benjamin is a freelance writer in Halifax. He hopes for a more collective and inclusive planning process in the city, so that one day he can play with his great-grandchildren in a fair, just and healthy Halifax.
