Manitoba’s government is helping some school divisions, and forcing others to amalgamate.
Education minister Drew Caldwell says the province’s 54 school divisions will be reduced to 37, a drop of about one third, by the October 2002 school trustee elections.
Rural Manitoba has 36 school divisions now, which will become 26 after the amalgamations are completed.
Some of the mergers are voluntary, such as those for Rhineland and Boundary, Frontier and Churchill, Mountain and Prairie Spirit and Red River and Morris-MacDonald. Others are being imposed.
The government is insisting the goal is to save money on administration, not further reduce the number of schools.
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NDP MLA Stan Struthers said he has heard some rural people worry these amalgamations are designed to cause more school closures, but that isn’t true.
“This isn’t a process to close small schools,” said Struthers, a former rural school principal who represents the Dauphin area.
“Small schools will survive this. If they run out of students, they won’t survive, but that won’t have anything to do with amalgamation.”
School division amalgamation has not become a burning issue in rural Manitoba, but many rural Manitobans are still wary whenever they see the government trying to “improve” rural services by centralizing administration.
Betty Mowbray is one of them.
“They never ever prove that they’re going to save money,” said Mowbray, a substitute teacher who lives on a farm near Cartwright.
“It’s like a bandwagon thing: somebody somewhere else did it so it must be the right thing.”
Mowbray was part of a community group that saved a local school during the 1990s. She worries that having fewer trustees will hurt the interests of small communities.
“The trustees will come from the biggest communities, and let’s face it, trustees tend to look after their own areas. It’s natural,” said Mowbray.
Caldwell said “the result of amalgamation will be more equalization of resources between divisions, lessening of inequalities and a levelling of the playing field between the bigger and smaller divisions.”
