Ministry 'flipping' on closures
Maple Ridge-Pitt Meadows Times
June 27, 2008
By: Maria Rantanen

The Maple Ridge-Pitt Meadows board of education showed foresight in not closing any schools last fall, as the Ministry of Education is now telling boards across the province they might need extra space for full-day and junior kindergartens.

District superintendent John Simpson said after they heard the ministry might introduce full-day kindergarten, they realized they'd need more space than currently projected.

"There's a lot of implications in these announcements," he said.

Richmond school district secretary-treasurer Ken Morris said he and his colleagues heard the new message late last month from deputy minister James Gorman. "We gulped," he said, thinking of the many schools that have been closed since the Liberals came to power in 2001 and changed the funding formula so it no longer encouraged boards to maintain excess space….

It was "fortuitous" the local school board didn't close any schools, Woytowich added, because if the ministry decides to have full-day kindergarten and junior kindergarten, there will be enough space in existing local schools for them….

The ministry repeatedly said the district needed to close schools that are partially empty before they could get capital funds to build new schools in overcrowded areas.

The new message coming out of the ministry will have implications for the school facilities discussion, Simpson said, and board chair Cheryl Ashlie said trustees need to decide what's best for children instead of just taking ministry direction.

"They're flipping around too much," Ashlie said at the board of education meeting on Wednesday.

Ashlie said that as a district, they need to define what is right for students -- for example, keeping an extra room as a sensory room for a small number of children.

"This is what elected boards do," she said.

The district has been trying to get information from the ministry about whether an in-school daycare would be excluded from the excess space calculation and currently there are several applications from daycare centres to use school space.

The ministry is doing a feasibility study …. The ministry is doing its "homework" into what would be a "play-based" program, minister Shirley Bond told The TIMES in May.

She added that too many children are arriving in kindergarten not ready to learn.

How the new early childhood program would be funded is another issue, though, Woytowich said, and if the same money is "sliced and diced" to fund expanded programs, there will be less money for other educational components.

Irene Lanzinger, president of the B.C. Teachers' Federation, said she agrees boards shouldn't be closing schools, but said the space should be used for high-quality universal daycare, not kindergarten.