Reboot Alberta

Sunday, April 11, 2010

Don't Close Schools! Integrate and Adapt Schools into the Community!

There are more Reboot Alberta people speaking out in the Edmonton Journal's Letters to the Editor.  This time it is about school closures in Edmonton by the Edmonton Public School Board. 

This time Dick Baker is commenting and noting that communities need more say in what happens to a school. 

Also read the letter from Rebooter Christopher Spencer on school closure.

Full disclosure:  Last year my firm, Cambridge Strategies Inc. did  a conjoint study for the Edmonton Public School Board.  It focused on the key values that Edmontonian feel that should guide and drive issues and approaches to school closure.  Here is a link to the Powerpoint on the survey findings that underscores the points being made in these letters from Rebooters

The most important values attributed to a school to a community were dominated by two criteria.  There is the balance between space and cost issues but the dominant need was for a focus on being able to provide a quality education.  Distance from school was not so critical povided kids did not have to go beyond 3 kms.

Schools were seen as vital to the health and vibrancy of the overall community.  So the school closure issues are much more than cost, it is about education quality and the sense of community. There was a dominant value focus on keeping a school open and adpated to meet community needs regardless of enrollment statistics.


The education focus of a school was the most important consideration.  That was seem as providing extensive programming, with a focus on an adaptive school culture that really prepares students for their future.  The key education element there was seen as a focus on creativity and social integration skills, preparation for post-secondary.  Other important educational concerns was about developing the individual skills of students to prepare them for the workforce and also deal with citizenship and character development. Standardized test results were not highly vallued as measures of quality education.

This all begs questions of governance and how the province, school boards, municipalities and community groups work together to not only save a school but turn it into a community facility that provides quality education and better integrates and also serves larger community needs.  It is a culture shift that is all about integration of uses and recources to meet more community needs including education.
 
The studies have been done and wrap-around schools are concepts that are well proven to work and benefit education and community outcomes.  The full cost and life cycle accounting methods for multi-use adaptive facility design is ready to be made the new standard for educational infrastructure decisions.  The political will is there to make this cultural shift from the current Minister of Education.  There a need for a more effective collaborative linking of the local community, the municipality and school boards to serve the greater good of neighbourhoods and students best interests when considering school closure decisions. 
 
The question is larger than just enrollment levels.  It  is about what we "value" as a society and not just about what it "costs" in dollar terms alone.  Citizens know this and have told us that they value community needs and school services as integrated wholes, not as isolated silos.  It is time for some comprehenseive, forward thinking good governance coupled with a dash of political courage.  We need to change the old culture about such decisions where school closures are mostly about dollar costs and not the value of a school and its facilities to serve community concerns.  Simply closing a school forecloses the adaptive and imaginative opportunity costs and chances for community capacity building.  Those options are lost in a shortsighted school closure decision.

5 comments:

  1. Maybe we should go back a hundred years when the communities looked after the schools and teachers, keep politics out of our class rooms. Today's politics is what is killing our society, to many politicians in the system that are their for themselves, whether it be for money , power or ego; to many are in it for the wrong reasons.

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  2. Ken I agree, "a dash of political courage" is required in many areas of the political spectrum. I'm sure you'd agree that political courage is snuffed out by the "command and control machine of fear." Having said that, it is possible that the Board of Trustees may be feeling as if they "are" being courageous by closing down the schools since there seems to be very little public support for the move.

    I agree with you that simply shutting down schools may not always be the most creative solution, although I have far from all the facts...you at least present an interesting alternative discussion surrounding priorities.

    The culture of government in general is completely and utterly broken. Public servants operate in a culture of intense fear and working under the thumb of decision-makers who often have lost their creativity or the will to learn and then "apply" new ways of doing business. Open Government is precisely about changing this reality and which is why I'm such a proponent.

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  3. Thank you for your insights, Ken, and your link to my letter in the Journal.

    Advocates of the community school model will meet on Tuesday, April 13, 5 p.m., in front of the Blue Building at One Kingsway Avenue, across from the Royal Alexandra Hospital. We will be supporting an approach that would maximize the potential of the five and a half schools under threat of closure. The usual suspects (opposition party MLAs) will be there, but I think this is an issue which transcends political boundaries. As Albertans interested in a better future, we need to move beyond the silos of ideology and bureaucracy and consider the big picture in all we do. We can't just think about what's best for institutions. We have do to what's best for people (especially kids) and communities.

    If you are not usually inclined to attend rallies, because you don't identify as a conservative or a liberal or a socialist or a capitalist or a libertarian, but rather as a person, this is an event for you. We need to stop parsing things into segments. I think that applies to how we raise children and to good governance.

    To a doctor, a child may be a bronchitis sufferer, to a math teacher, she may be a learner of trigonometry, to a coach, she may be a goaltender. She is different things to different specialists, but too rarely is she a whole child to any of them.

    That's a paraphrase of something someone once said about the community school concept, but it applies to the way we are governed: we've been categorized to death, with the consequence that we no longer have a vision of the whole picture.

    Whether it's the school board or the city or the province, "Not my department" is not an acceptable answer anymore.

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  4. Laurie Simpson3:45 am

    Thank you Ken for providing a much-needed point of view. My apologies because I need to present this as two separate posts due to length.

    I believe that the type of collaborative linking that you are proposing can only be achieved through collaborative thinking. The appearance is that there are very diverse groups with very different agendas. There are those who want to hang on to their inner-city schools and those that want new schools built in the suburbs. There are those who are trying to stretch education dollars and those who fight to keep smaller schools open, regardless of enrolment. As of now, these groups are perceived as polar opposites, each fighting for a share of a dwindling pie.

    This, ladies and gentlemen is a false debate, a mere distraction that keeps us fighting each other instead of searching for real answers. It is my hope that by eliminating the misconceptions we can all go back to working together.

    Misconception # 1) Closing schools saves money. I have researched this heavily utilizing the EPSB website and data and I have found nothing that supports this argument.

    a) The Alberta government allocates funds on a per student basis and the funding follows the student. X amount of students equals X amount of teachers, period. The students are moved due to school closure, but they still require the same ratio of teachers. No savings here. At best, one could say that you are saving on support staff (administrative and custodial), but this is not significant.

    b)There must be an incredible cost in the review and closure process. I do not have any hard facts here since EPSB does not break their financial reports down to a level which would indicate this one way or the other. However, they have a huge expenditure on consulting and I am sure that this encompasses services such as Dialogue Partners, the facilitators of the sector review process.

    In addition, having been through a school closure, I have witnessed the enormous amounts of staff that planning allocates to this process, and most of these meetings occur after regular office hours so I speculate that these are probably costs that are billed as overtime or are recompensed in some other manner suitable to the specific contract of each employee. These services are by no means free. Other costs involved in the closure process, and this list is by no means exhaustive, but rather just what I can come up with off the top of my head: translation services, accessing data, maintaining public websites specific to the school being considered for closure, mail-outs to all of the parents, public notification in print, etc.

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  5. Laurie Simpson3:46 am

    Part Two

    c)transportation costs and other significant and provable costs of closure: At last night's board meeting the Capilano and Fulton Place elementary schools were voted for closure. The thinking was that the students would be re-allocated to Hardisty, currently a junior high. The public was informed that this transformation would incur a cost of $580,000 to 'retrofit' Hardisty and make it suitable for elementary students.

    Further in last night's meeting, we were informed that the transportation costs to bus the students from Eastwood and McCauley was now at $900,000. This is an expense that is never going away and that is incurred yearly. Clearly there are no savings here.

    c)power and maintenance costs: This one is tricky and I am not sure how to address it, but I will give it a go anyway. The argument from administration is that if they close the schools they will not have to pay this cost and this is where real savings will occur. Now it seems to me, that unless they are planning to rid themselves of the building, this cost will still be incurred. Planning's counter to this argument is that typically they lease out the building and the lessees cover this cost. On the surface, this appears to be a perfectly valid argument and one that most thinking people would accept. However, most of the inner-city schools have leasing partners of one sort or another. Typically, if you stroll through the hallways of one of these under-utilized spaces you would be hard pressed to find empty space. Tenants in these schools are contributing to the building utilities and maintenace, but this is a fact that is rarely mentioned, and is certainly never considered in discussions about school capacity. Apparently tenant contributions are entered into the equation only when schools are closed.

    d)costs to repair old buildings: I can understand that to an outsider who is only hearing the numbers, the financial burden of maintaining these old buildings seems excessive, and simply not worth the expenditure. Yes, there are costs to repair old buildings, but the numbers cited have thus far been ludicrous. At Woodcroft, we were told that it would be $400,000 to 'fix' our bathroom taps. These were fully functional taps, but ours had two separate taps and it was feared that the students could scald themselves. This had never happened in its fifty years of operation, but apparently now it had become a pressing problem. I am not sure who EPSB has as contractors but I do know that I replaced my own bathroom tap a couple of months ago at a cost of $45. A quick calculation shows that Woodcroft would have had 8,888 taps if they were spending a similar amount. Let me assure you that that was not the case or our ACOL numbers would have been substantially worse.

    Misconception # 2) The only way to get new schools built in new areas is by closing the schools in the old areas

    This is completely untrue. There is absolutely no correlation between closing schools and having new schools open. There have been years where many schools have been closed and no approval was granted to open new ones. There have been years where no schools have been closed and yet the province approved new schools. The ONLY correlation that I could find was that typically new schools were announced prior to a provincial election.

    This misconception is strongly held by both the older and the new neighbourhoods and it is particularly heinous because it divides and distracts us. If my post achieves nothing else, I hope that it rids us of this sort of divisive thinking.

    Misconception # 3) We want different things.

    No, we do not. We want the same things - for our children to have a school that is accessible, safe, and that provides a good education.

    SO - let's stop buying into the old cliches and let's combine our energy to work for a system that is the best that ALL of us can possibly make it. Together we CAN do wonderful things, but our first step is to GET together.

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