Superintendent Sadler and members of the PE13 Study Committee. Thank you for this opportunity to participate in the school closure and consolidation process in our community. I have a few ideas and opinions I’d like to share with you and everyone else here tonight, and I hope, in spite of my tendency to go on, you will find what I say of interest. I’d like to start by introducing myself, as a context for my delegation.

I have been a stay at home dad for 12 years. I have a wife who works for a bank in Toronto and I have three kids: two at Pine Grove, one at Morden. We have also been members of the Brookdale and Eastview communities in passing, and we even had a couple years at Woodside (now École Patricia-Picknell). I coach soccer and my wife coaches soccer and hockey. Our kids swim, take music lessons, are in jiu-jitsu, etc., etc.. I am a co-chair on Pine Grove's school council, and a parent volunteer in the school. Last year I spent approximately 600 hours in the haloed halls reading, supervising, copying, or cutting, and I have spent many more hours than that outside the school doing school council and West Oakville Family of Schools stuff. I have been a school council member in some capacity for six years, and I spent five years on the executive of the Hopedale Community Nursery School, two as president. It was in an effort to save Woodside School (the then home of our nursery school) that I was introduced to education politics. I learned quickly that calling Superintendents names in the press wasn’t a winning tactic. Woodside was eventually transferred to the French board and I moved on to mouldy portables, making a first and lasting impression on Director Papke. I am an advocate for French as a Second Language education and secretary of the Halton Chapter of Canadian Parents for French. I am one of the few audience members with a “reserved” seat in the JW Singleton Centre boardroom gallery (just kidding), and I can recite the names of all the trustees in alphabetic order by last name. This is partly why we are in the seventh year of a major renovation to our home, out of which I run a small business. I have firewalls and anti-virus software on our network and I do backups. I have a boss program on my PC so that when my wife walks into my office I can, with one deft keystroke, appear to be playing a game rather than sending yet another email to Superintendent Sadler. I occasionally attempt to use irony or humour in conversation. I am a typical, over committed, Southwest Oakville parent.

What I would like you to get from what will now seem a relatively brief delegation, is:

• that the Capital Strategic Plan asks Southwest Oakville to give up too many pupil places;
• that the parents and children in French immersion are committed to the program, and particularly to the delivery model in Oakville.
• that the Board’s accommodation and funding conundrum is recognized; and
• that this dilemma is partly the fault of the board, regardless of how much blame must be heaped at the feet of the current Provincial regime.

If you close the building that is now École Pine Grove Public School next year, you will displace 630 grade 1-6 students, about 300 from above the expressway and 330 from below. Another 60 or so of the 135 French immersion grade 7&8s at Eastview will also hit the road in 2004. If their destination is the North, then 16 more portables will sprout up at a school or schools in Glen Abbey. In the South, regardless of where immersion might find its home, a minimum of 100 hundred kids will end up in portables. In effect, nearly the entire elementary French immersion population in West Oakville will be "gypsies" in “trailer camps” beside two, three or possibly four schools in the area.

In all, 135 grade 7&8s generate approximately 5 portables (north or south, whether they are in them or not) and 400 of 650 grades 1-6s generate another 16 portables. So, we have French immersion using 10 classrooms and 21 portables in West Oakville. What's wrong with this picture? There will be 525 grades 1-8 kids in portables because QE Park and Pine Grove are closing.

For the sake of argument, I'm going to suggest too, that should you close Oakwood per the CSP, about 150 kids from east of Dorval Drive will join the French immersion gypsies in 6 caravans of their own. And the grass has just grown back on the Morden playground.

If the Board decides to close Pine Grove, Oakwood and QE Park, they will have taken 571.5 + 253 + 303 elementary pupil places out of the Southwest (and 744 secondary places). Ward 1 will be left with 1,000 places in two schools and Ward 2 will be left with 825 places in two schools and, of course, there will be a whole school’s worth of kids in portables that will persist for as long as Southwest Oakville can stand them. Each year for 25 years, Halton will receive $2.25 million for the spaces we will give up. In return the students living in Wards 1 & 2 will receive a hearty pat on the back and a “Don’t let the hit you on the way out!” as they say good-bye to their old schools.

Will shabby old portables at ill-maintained schools drive kids to the Catholic system and the private schools? It’s a tough statistic to track down, with information on private school enrolments only just becoming available on the Ministry of Ed website. I suppose that if the Halton District School Board wants to snuggle in more comfortably with the current government's initiative to disassemble public education, that's up to them, but I 'm not sure that's a strategy for survival.

The student focused funding model makes it very difficult for boards like Halton to generate funding for new schools. There must be students in portables to generate the funds to build. Well, we've managed to put 400 students in portables at West Oak PS, but that's not enough for a new school for 650. We've taken $900,000 from school renewal funding (which may in fact stave off closure for a school or two a year) to supplement new school funding throughout the district, but that's not enough either. All that's left is to take kids out of schools in the established communities and put them into the portables that are freed up in the growth communities when their new "air conditioned, well engineered, well appointed with specialty rooms, brand new SK-JK play grounds and equipment, and plenty of parking for staff and parents" schools are built. Closing too many schools in the south will just Generate portables in the north. Can we at least get some of the new, air-conditioned portables?

In the Spring of 2002, I had hoped that, this Board would have made the very difficult decision to submit a "deficit" budget. If the dozen or twenty other boards who were gnawing away at the bones of their systems to get to a "balanced" bottom line had just said “No!”, the minister of the day may have had trouble finding the supervisors to take charge of all the naughty boards and might have admitted that the funding formula was just too mean. Look at what's happening in Ottawa-Carleton, Toronto, or Hamilton-Wentworth: the supervisors are closing schools, and alienating staff, and they there’s less money getting to the classroom. They have been tossed a few million dollar bones and they can run the board at a deficit, but all in all, it’s worse to have a supervisor make these decisions than our elected or acclaimed representatives.

In the Winter, I turned my hope to Dr. Rozanski's recommendations for education equity. But in spite of government cherry picking, accommodation funding is still woefully inadequate.

So, having fired a warning shot across the Conservatives' stern and waiting patiently for a response, what choices are left? I guess I’m hoping for a gift from Ernie to keep Halton blue, or that Dalton slings some mud back, wins on October 2nd, forms a government, and legislates the public education system back into prosperity.

What does it matter where you put our kids if they're all mobile? Let’s find a central spot by a main road with plenty of washrooms, a big gym, a library and a spot for lockers. Add a couple portapaks and portables, et voila! Surely we can find such a location. It won’t cost any more, as the portables are already in the budget, at least notionally. This is a brilliant opportunity to turn a loss into a win. Support the French immersion model that has been proved so successful at Pine Grove, Sunningdale and Linbrook. Provide one single-track elementary school for West Oakville's French immersion students.

French immersion is a great program for any kid. My wife and I have grade 12 French, yet we are believers in the program and our kids flourish in it. They will reap the benefits of being bilingual. In immersion, some of the supports found in the English program are not offered, but this only serves to strengthen the community. School councils pick up the slack as do organizations like Canadian Parents for French.

In fact, CPF is launching a campaign to see where the additional French immersion funding each board receives from the Province is going. In Halton, French immersion generates about 1.35 million additional dollars. Over $600,000 of that is generated by kids in grades 1, 2 & 3. But Pine Grove's budget is exactly the same as any other school's. Those immersion dollars are used throughout the system to benefit all schools.

Thank you again for this opportunity. Like the other parents in Halton, I would like to see us with the schools we need. Like the other parents in Southwest Oakville, I would like to see us with schools that are as modern and as well appointed as the schools in the North. But above all, like the other parents in French immersion, I would like to see the program continue to flourish.

Please leave us the schools we need. Don't close too many, too soon in Southwest Oakville.

Please preserve the single-track French immersion model. Don't scatter our community to the four winds.