Future 'tough but not bleak'
SRSB delivers warts-and-all assessment of region's educational outlook
MULGRAVE - A delegation from the Strait Regional School Board (SRSB) delivered a series of blunt home truths about the region's educational future at a Mulgrave council meeting on Monday night.
Providing a diverse, quality range of programs for students and the ongoing battle to retain teachers in sparsely populated areas were listed as key "challenges" facing the board and schools in the area.
The presentation, aimed at securing the council's continued support of the SRSB, also contained a stark assessment of the biggest problem: decreasing student numbers.
"The problem is declining enrolment. We spoke about it before and over the last three or four years we've lost over 1000 students…at that rate in 20 years we'll have no students," SRSB Chair George Kehoe told the council.
"I'm waiting for these numbers to level off but it looks like the decline is going to go on forever and that should be our number one concern. We're disappearing as a race."
When asked how that trend might be reversed, Kehoe said it wasn't his position to offer such big picture answers but suggested "making it easier for a family to have children and making it easier for (residents) to earn a living".
"Right now we're in a society where two incomes are necessary and within 10 to 15 years three incomes are going to be necessary. If that continues there's going to be fewer and fewer children. It's a really serious problem - it's not one the school board can solve but we have to address it every day," Kehoe said.
Declining enrolment levels, Kehoe added, didn't make schools cheaper to run.
"If we had a school with 100 students and enrolment doubled, it wouldn't cost twice as much money to keep that school open," he said.
"But if the 100 students becomes 50, we're expected to keep the schools open with half as much money and we just can't do it. It doesn't work that way. And that's why the Strait Board has forever been under financial pressure. We have to have everyone pushing for the rural (school) boards so that Halifax…doesn't get all the funding."
When the topic of amalgamation was introduced, Mulgrave councillor Anne MacDonald expressed doubts whether bussing students to schools farther away from home was the best solution to the enrolment problem.
"Don't you think every community, no matter what the size is, has the same right to have a school for their children? Don't you think it's very difficult on kids…travelling 30-40 miles (to get to school)…to save money? It has nothing to do with benefiting the children," she said.
The delegation, which also included SRSB's Director of Programs and Student Services Jack Beaton and Guysborough County SRSB member Rosalee Parker, delivered a paper to the council that will be presented to other municipalities.
Among the concerning figures listed was a projection that 381 less students will enrol in the 2006-07 year than in 2005-06. If correct, that projection continues a trend that Beaton said began in 1972.
The delegation added, however, that the news wasn't "all bad".
Beaton said the information would be presented to all municipalities the SRSB worked with. He also stressed that students remained the SRSB's number one priority.
"We would like to emphasize that students are at the centre of things," he said.
"We hear that (schooling issues in the region) are about the Department of Education, it's about teachers, it's about administration. At the end of the day, our only reason for being is the fact that we have about 8400 students in four counties that we serve and we want to give them the best possible learning opportunities that there are."
After the meeting, Beaton said the Strait's educational future was "tough but not necessarily bleak".
"Yes, there's going to have to be some tough decisions made if the current trend continues and everything is funded based on enrolment - that will be tough," he said.
"Communities change, too. Where people work, where people shop, all those things are constantly changing and the communities look far different than they did 10 years ago and certainly much different than 50 years ago. So the whole concept of community changes as well.
"Change is so constant that to think the school system is going to stay the same really is an anomaly because (schools) are a product of the community that they exist in."
