SASKATOON – No one should believe that closing more rural schools will save scads of money, say two rural trustees from opposite corners of Saskatchewan.
Allen Henderson, a local school board trustee for Gainsborough in the southeast, says Arcola and Gainsborough schools are sharing maintenance staff and a director of education and “we don’t see the savings now.
“We closed a school in this division five years ago and it didn’t lower any taxes.”
On the other side of the province, Larry Caswell, a trustee from the Swift Current area, said while his group doesn’t believe every school should stay open, such decisions should be made locally and not because of an outsider push to centralize. He is a member of Concerned Rural School Trustees which sent a brief Sept. 25 to education minister Pat Atkinson outlining its ideas following a six-month consultation process that ended last week.
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While Manitoba and Saskatchewan are both slowly moving to amalgamate their large numbers of school divisions, other provinces like Alberta and New Brunswick have quickly forced school division consolidations and taken charge of school finances and eliminated most trustee positions.
To avoid such hasty and sometimes unpopular changes, Saskatchewan’s education department held 96 meetings in communities around the province since April to discuss the future for its 119 school divisions with parents and ratepayers. The meetings were attended by over 5,000 people and the results of their discussions will be released by the department in January.
Caswell’s Concerned Rural School Trustees said in its brief the savings from closing rural schools will be minimal since most of the higher costs are due to the nature of rural communities. While department statistics from 1994 show a rural student cost $716 more than an urban student, $531 of that cost was in transportation – a cost that will remain regardless of the size of a school division. Another $140 is due to the operating loans rural divisions take out because they don’t get their tax levy collected until the fall, versus early summer for urban divisions. The brief says that means the real cost difference between rural and urban is $45 per student.
The rural trustees brief says some of the push to centralize and eliminate more rural schools is the perception that the quality of education is worse in rural areas. It disputes that view and uses the education department’s own figures to show little difference in grade marks between rural and urban students.
Not much difference
Henderson agrees there is not much difference in the quality of education between the cities and small towns. He said in the Gainsborough school of 48 students in kindergarten to Grade 8, there are three grades in one classroom. However he said that is probably a better situation than having 30 or 40 students in one grade in one class, as is common in the cities. Rural schools allow the teachers to spend more time with each student and closing more of them would force younger children into longer bus rides.
The consultation meeting in Henderson’s area preferred to stay with the status quo and make savings or amalgamate where the local people decided it made sense.
“Government shouldn’t regulate if they don’t participate in the funding,” said Henderson.
That’s also the feeling of the Concerned Rural Trustees who say larger school divisions become more bureaucratic and less responsive to local concerns.
“You can’t be sensitive and large,” said Caswell.
That’s a reality that has come home to parents in Carievale who heard at the meeting that their school is subject to closure since the province changed the small schools funding formula to address transportation costs. Terry Ireland was one of the parents at the meeting and she said the threats to Carievale and Storthoaks schools are “a bunch of politics.
“We’ve all talked about it. Everyone says someone should do something but we don’t know what.”
