By Stephen Vance, Editor
The initial approval given by the trustees for the Bluewater school board for a plan that would move elementary school grades 4 through 8 to the Georgian Bay Secondary School building, while grades K-3 would be merged and housed at SVE, allowing for the closure of the Meaford Community School, is a reasonable solution to a problem that can no longer be ignored.
As was reported in the media last week, the oldsters now out number the youngsters in this country, and that is particularly evident in smaller communities like Meaford, resulting in lower enrolment in our schools.
Meaford is a small community, with a surprising number of schools. With two elementary schools, and a high school in a town where there seems to be just about as many adult scooters as there are kids’ scooters on the streets, it has been no secret that Meaford would lose a school. The worry has often been the potential loss of the high school, but the plan given initial approval by the board would save the high school, and while MCS would close, all of Meaford’s kids who want to attend school in Meaford, will continue to be able to do so.
Given the current day realities, I would call that a pretty good plan – though I have already heard complaints.
I’ve read and heard complaints that SVE is a little out of the way. What would be more out of the way would be to bus our high school kids to Owen Sound, making extra curricular activities, or after school jobs far more challenging.
I’ve heard complaints that younger kids shouldn’t be roaming the halls with 17 and 18 year old students – it just wouldn’t be safe.
First of all, there were many years when a single room would be used to educate kids from age five to 18, and somehow it worked. Secondly, it isn’t like little 8 year old Jimmie would have his locker beside the captain of the senior football team. It wouldn’t be difficult to block off a wing of the school for the elementary grades, with a separate entrance, and controlled access. If we can tear down heritage buildings in order to build combined retail and living space, we can certainly safely cocoon a bunch of elementary students to keep them safe from the big, bad high school kids.
Change is rarely perfect, and it can be difficult to accept that sometimes things simply have to change. We are an ageing country, we are an ageing community, and as a result our needs are shifting. Three schools might well have been appropriate for this community a few decades ago, but they don’t serve our needs well today, so we either change, or we sink while clinging to the past.
There must be more of this kind of compromise in the future. We must become more willing to merge services, for those services to share buildings and other resources. Gone are the days of building temples – expect more plain box buildings, and shared resources – and we might just have to travel an extra few hundred metres to get our kids to school, but it beats the alternatives.
Given our ageing communities, and given the number of schools across the province that will be closed in the coming years, if the province was smart they would be taking a long hard look at turning any schools deemed surplus into long term care facilities – surely that would be cheaper than building new structures to accommodate the coming needs of all those Baby Boomers.
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