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Michael Hoare
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Part 6 – The Final Fight to save the school

The final fight to save the school; Judy Hannonen and Erna Kemp, parents, the teachers and Jeff Kendall and Gail Nyberg discuss the last minute attempts to stop the closing of Midland Av C.I.

Catégorie

📚
Éducation
Transcription
00:00My name is Judy Hananen. I am a mother of a child that was attending Midland Collegiate.
00:17He'd only started at grade 9. I met Irma through our cause of trying to save Midland from closing.
00:25Irma Kemp, I'm a parent from Midland Collegiate. My daughter finished grade OAC last year and Jason is there in grade 11 now.
00:38It was November though when the provincial government decided in its infinite wisdom that the budget for all of the Board of Education across the country
00:54would no longer be able to be funded through their own municipal governments and that they were going to therefore be footing the whole bill and they were going to reconstruct the whole of the education system.
01:10So it started back then and the Board of Education, Toronto Board of Education, initially wanted to close 138 schools and a big alarm went off and there was so much confusion as to what criteria would be to keep a school open, keep a school closed.
01:27Everybody was upset and I think the ball got rolling then and then it went into the spring of 99 and they then issued another list of 30 schools, 37, they were going to close 30 over 3 years, so 10 each year.
01:45And that was mentioned in April and we found out at the end of April that our school was on the first list of 10.
01:52So, results, schools closed and parents get angry and I suppose parents try and do something about it, no?
01:59Yes. I mean, I think that's been the hardest, saddest thing has been watching parents whose schools are closing.
02:06We really, really tried to get parents not to do two things at the same time, to fight for their own school but to also to try to stay away from saying close their school instead, you know, which is your kind of natural inclination.
02:20But also to keep their eye on the whole problem instead of just their school to go, this is a provincial problem and it's because of the funding formula.
02:29But it's terribly hard. The process has been really awful, I think, in Toronto and in most places.
02:39I think it hasn't been very fair, it hasn't been, it's been very hard for boards to be brave enough to just say, we're closing your school no matter what you do.
02:47We've decided this, there's no way we can keep it open, we don't have enough money.
02:51Instead they go through, and they do this all over the province, this long process of consultation and we'll talk about it and we'll see if we can figure out different things to do.
03:00Except the end result always is, your school closes.
03:03There's been very, very few where they've actually taken it back. One school here, I think, in Toronto.
03:10And, you know, other places, even when that gets taken back for a year, it just gets closed the following year.
03:16And it's a really emotional thing. I mean, I know that when my kids' school was on the list,
03:22and that's when there was a huge list of schools that were going to close, I cried.
03:28And because it was my, I'd moved really a lot when I was a kid, and this was the longest I'd ever lived anywhere in my life.
03:34And it was my community. This was my, you know, I finally had a community, and suddenly it was going to be taken away from me.
03:41And it was really big, and I had no idea. I mean, I'd been blithely going around talking about it as a kind of political issue.
03:47But until then, it happened to me, and then I, you know, I phoned all the press in tears, which you're not supposed to do.
03:54It's not a very political activist thing to do. But it's really, I mean, that's been the hardest thing, you know,
04:01in terms of trying to explain to a government who doesn't see, who wants to, who's trying to just sort of get away with how cheaply they can do something,
04:11that to explain in a kind of an amorphous or weird sort of notion, like the emotional connection or the necessity of a community school or a school in your community,
04:24they just go, you know, show me the dollars and then I'll understand it.
04:28But the formula whereby you can figure out that, you know, and it's actually, I mean, it's horrible enough in the city when your school closes,
04:37but in little tiny towns when the school closes, it's appalling. It can be the end of the community.
04:43And it's, I think that, you know, the things that you can't measure or fund are that parents meet other parents in schools,
04:51that your, your, the neighborhood is enhanced. It makes a difference to business.
04:55It makes a difference to real estate prices. It makes a difference to, but it makes a difference to the, you know, the kind of quality of life.
05:01And that can't be measured and it can't be, you know, there's no formula for that and there's no way of putting dollars on it.
05:06And so they, it becomes this kind of hard clinical sort of exercise of we need to save and the, you know, both Toronto boards talk about it that way, this many square feet.
05:17You know, we've got two million square feet of unfunded spaces, space, and we've got to cut it. And so that's what they're doing.
05:25You had a new principal at this time, right?
05:27Nadine Siegel came on board in 98.
05:30And her reaction was that of the staff?
05:34Yes, she wanted to fight to keep the school open. At that time, we were under the misconception that the board would really listen.
05:43We really believed that in a democratic society that our elected officials would listen to us.
05:49And so we began a lobbying process. We started with the school trustees, the elected officials.
05:55We started with our MPPs, the member of provincial parliament. We thought they would listen to us.
06:03We went to the media. We thought they would listen to us. And as I say, it was a misconception.
06:09Were you part of a staff group or something?
06:11Yes, I was. The SOS committee, Save Our School committee.
06:14The beginning of May, we had a meeting at the school saying, okay, we're on the list.
06:18We have to get an area review committee together, which involved the principals of the six schools in our area, six high schools,
06:29and a parent from each school, a student from each school, and the superintendents and the trustee was invited.
06:38It was actually a quieter. They didn't have a lot to say. I went to every meeting. I never missed a meeting.
06:45But as an observer, we weren't allowed to talk. You had to sit and listen.
06:49You weren't allowed to speak up?
06:51No. And that was...
06:53What was the mandate of these things? What were they supposed to be doing?
06:56Well, I think the mandate was to find solutions to the closure, bearing in mind that there were criteria that you couldn't infringe upon,
07:06such as that you couldn't label another school to be closed, you couldn't...
07:12They were supposed to come up with an alternative.
07:14They were supposed to come up with an alternative to school closure, which was a foregone conclusion.
07:19However, we were not allowed to look at special programming.
07:24We were not allowed to look at trying to bring children in from other areas.
07:30They really strong-armed the arts.
07:34I thought it was a shambles. I didn't like the process the board adopted from the beginning.
07:39Who was the chair of that commission? Do you remember?
07:42They were local things. They were really local community committees that the board set up.
07:49And there was no chair. This was part of the problem. There was nobody in charge of the process to define what the mandate was and to define what the issues were they were looking at.
07:58And they brought in a mediator, who was a retired principal from Etobicoke, to help the group consider the issues and supposedly come to consensus.
08:08And from what I understand, he managed to aggravate and really frustrate a lot of people's attempts to look at what the issues were.
08:19And part of it is he didn't have the authority to impose an agenda on people and people weren't willing to adopt an agenda.
08:26There was too much disagreement around the table.
08:28Essentially what we had done is taken a school that was slated or proposed to close
08:34and put it at a table with 9 or 10 or 11 other schools that were not slated to close,
08:41who knew that if Midland didn't close, one of them would have to.
08:46How much cooperation can you get around the table like that?
08:50Do you turn it into a situation of us or them?
08:53And that's what the school board managed to do in their local committee process.
08:57This Area Review Committee, this was in fact the public hearing, right?
09:02Well, it wasn't very public and they certainly didn't hear.
09:08But yes.
09:09That was a sensible function.
09:11It's function is to give a public hearing to the decision.
09:13Yes, yes.
09:14But you weren't allowed to speak.
09:16It was a public hearing, but they didn't listen.
09:20That's right.
09:21Irma told me that.
09:23I found that rather surprising.
09:24In fact, it was something that they were supposed to review the decision, but there was not.
09:28But it didn't.
09:29I think they came into the Area Review Committee meetings with the decision already having been made.
09:34And I couldn't believe it.
09:36The so-called facilitator kept saying again and again,
09:41Well, when Midland closes, well, Midland is closing.
09:46And what are we going to do?
09:47And which school is going to get this?
09:50And which schools will the students go to?
09:55And we kept saying, aren't we supposed to provide you with proposals on how to keep Midland open?
10:01And then if the proposals don't fly, then we will consider Midland closing?
10:06Okay.
10:07Perhaps you can confirm something or not.
10:09Irma, I was talking with Irma, this is not last year, but she said that in the parents, amongst the parents, they felt that when SOS committee reconvened in September,
10:20they felt that somehow the teachers had been told to sort of put a lid on their protest.
10:25Was this true or not?
10:27I was never told personally, but I heard from some of my colleagues that yes, they hadn't called into the principal's office.
10:33And in very plain terms, told to cease and desist.
10:37The principal, over the summer when we had all our meetings, she was invited, she didn't get involved.
10:42We had a secretary that kept minutes and did give her copies of all the minutes, so she did know what was happening.
10:49It wasn't until the first week of school when the teachers were back getting, or the week before school opened, that the teachers that were involved,
10:57I guess there was a meeting at the school and they were more or less told, enough is enough.
11:02And that was the end of any teacher involvement.
11:06The attitude of the school trustees was what? I mean, did your local trustee support you?
11:10Oh, he was horrible. To put it quite bluntly, he had it out, he felt the school should have been closed years ago.
11:20He's a young guy, he hasn't been, he's not married, he still lives at home, he has no children, he doesn't understand.
11:27And we couldn't get across to him. The reason, this is a community issue, this is not a children's issue, this is not, you know, it's a community issue.
11:41You're ripping the heart of the community out when you rip out a school. It's what keeps people in the community bound together.
11:49And we tried to get that across to him. We tried to get him to see that busing, we're in a community where the kids would have to take two to three buses to get out of the area to get to a new school.
12:03I mean, he just, he just didn't get it. He was playing a political game where he was going along, following procedure.
12:14We just see him as being a trustee for his own personal gains. He wants to get into politics, and this is his stepping stone.
12:24So, he never helped the community, and the community will remember.
12:28How did you feel about this whole process?
12:29Well, of course, I was extremely depressed by the outcome, about the closure.
12:34I felt, as Bruce Elliott has mentioned, that the political will to keep the facility open was not there.
12:41We did have a dozen parents, however, who were active on the Save Our School committee, and they did mount a very vocal and ongoing campaign to save the school,
12:51such as letter-writing to the trustees, which was almost a weekly thing for many months.
12:56And certainly, a large number of parents did turn out to our evening at the board office at the Scarborough Town Centre.
13:05Yeah, they are, yeah.
13:06We filled the place. We had many students there. We had many parents there. We had parents speak at the evening.
13:12I think there were about 20 to 25 presenters that evening.
13:15That's right.
13:16The hall was quite there, so they were there in numbers. However, being new Canadians, the detriment of it being a new language, a second language for you, as English is for many of our parents,
13:27may be an inhibiting factor to political involvement. However, they made their presence certainly felt that night at the Scarborough Town Centre, that we made our presentation to the board to keep the school open.
13:38Yeah.
13:39I don't think that the letters that we sent on to the trustees really mattered. I think the mindset was to close Midland, and it was very difficult to fight against that.
13:50You always felt as if you were knocking your head against a brick wall because of that closed-to-mind situation.
13:57There was so much that was left with a big question mark, but they didn't want to deal with this. No, we're not dealing with that. We're going to get X amount of dollars by doing this.
14:05We're closed the school. We want to close the whole school. We wanted partial leasing. They wouldn't give us partial leasing because they felt that they couldn't make up enough money from partial leasing.
14:16They want to lease the whole school. And then we said, well, what about RH King? You're going to move some of these kids to RH King? You've got to upgrade the school.
14:27Well, the money will come from the closure. We'll take some of the proceeds from the closure and upgrade a school that is so terribly in need of...
14:35That's going to cost them a fortune.
14:37It is so bad. It would have made more sense to just move RH King, move the whole thing over to Midland because the kids coming into the area would be so much easier transportation-wise.
14:49It was just so, so poorly looked at.
14:53So this commission has its final sort of public hearing on the 9th of June, 1999?
14:59Not around then, yeah.
15:00Were you there at that time?
15:01No, I didn't participate in the local committees. I didn't see it as my role, too.
15:06Ultimately, as a trustee, I'm going to have to make a decision. And I'm going to have to make a decision on a committee report.
15:12And I didn't think it was appropriate for trustees to be influencing what that report would say and then voting on it at the board table.
15:19But you got, you've been contacted by the parents that put their brief to you?
15:23Yeah, I'd seen the information, yeah. And I met with them over the summer, too.
15:27Yeah.
15:28Yeah.
15:29So what did you think of their point of view? Did you think it was emotional?
15:33Or did you think there was some sort of rationale at the time being in their arguments?
15:36I think there's a bit of both.
15:38There's good reasons to keep any school open.
15:41And there's a lot of bad reasons to close any school.
15:44When we talked to school trustees, none of us took those jobs to close schools.
15:48It's not something we want to do. And I also actually believe in the value of having a small student population.
15:55I went to a school that had 120 students in it. So small schools, something I philosophically agree with.
16:02But not small student populations inside of huge plants, huge physical buildings.
16:07So there were rational reasons for keeping a school open. There weren't really rational reasons for keeping Midland open.
16:15And there were a lot of emotional reasons, as there would be for any school.
16:19And I certainly empathize with that. You can't, you can't not, anybody who's been part of a school would empathize with that.
16:25Because we know how attached we become to it. But from a rational perspective, it would be Midland, which was at about 50% of capacity.
16:38Or eight small elementary schools that were at 70 to 80% capacity.
16:47You balance that out.
16:49Those were the terms, and from your point of view that was the choice?
16:52That was the issue for me, yeah.
16:54The local trustee was a guy named Jeff Kendall.
16:56Oh yes, Jeff Kendall. Yes, he came to a couple of our meetings.
17:00He seemed to indicate that if we could come up with viable business solutions to what was essentially a business problem,
17:09the schools were losing money because of lack of enrollment.
17:12Jeff reiterated that the problem for a TDSB, Toronto District School Board, is money.
17:17And I've put money in capital letters.
17:19Funds are extremely limited and the envelopes are clearly separated into instructional funds and non-instructional funds.
17:27According to Jeff, there are only three ways to keep Midland open.
17:31A, find money in the budget.
17:33B, put money in the budget.
17:35C, come up with new money.
17:39So at that point, July 26th, this seemed to indicate that it would be possible for us to save our school if we came up with ways to generate money for the TDSB.
17:51The ways that would allow Midland to stay open but generate money.
17:56So we got all excited and we went out and we solicited lassees.
18:00And we had three of them who wrote letters of intent to the Toronto District School Board saying that they would be agreeable to leasing a part of Midland Avenue Collegiate.
18:10Some of the teachers say that you had said at one point that the choice was either to come up with new sources of money or else to move money around within the budgets and so on and so on.
18:22And their feeling was that some proposals which they had got onto paper about leasing part of the school hadn't been carefully looked at either.
18:31Carefully looked at, to some people, means not agreed with.
18:36If you don't agree with their decision or their suggestion, it wasn't carefully looked at.
18:40I don't have to look very carefully at suggestions, which I've already looked at carefully.
18:44In fact, none of the suggestions that were presented to either myself or to the planning staff were things that we hadn't considered before we looked at closing schools.
18:53And partial leasing of the school was really the crux of the recommendation of Midland.
18:58And it's just not tenable. You can't have a building that's a school that's built for access within it.
19:05It's not a building that's segregated off into parts.
19:08You can't start leasing that out to companies and other groups who want to bring their own people into the school.
19:14Because you can't control when they're coming in, who they're going by and what they're doing when they're in your building.
19:19It's one thing to lease out a whole school, and then if they have trespassers, it's their problem.
19:25But you can't lease out half of the school to different groups and expect to be able to maintain the security of the premises that we need to as a school board.
19:34And so what did the community lose? I mean, aside from the fact that, okay, great auditorium, great swimming pool, and so on and so on.
19:41I think they lost a very vibrant learning hub within their community.
19:45A hub that provided them with excellent facilities.
19:50And the facilities, I think, lift students.
19:53They inspire you.
19:55The fact that you go through halls and they're lighted and that you have access to a wonderful cafeteria that's a walled structure of glass that you can constantly look out into your community and have light come in.
20:11It was almost a kind of a reciprocal relationship between the school and its surroundings because you were always looking out into the community.
20:19It was a welcoming place because of the design, its structure, the wide hallways, the ample foyer, the two-story library, for example.
20:28The very structure of the building was student and staff friendly.
20:31And I think that that does something when you're entering such a building.
20:35It simply lifts you, it lifts your spirits to be in such a facility.
20:39And the community benefits from having ready access for their students to go into such a building.
20:45And again, it's a facility for the community to use in terms of its auditorium and pool as well, and a meeting place too.
20:52And I think that's lost.
20:54And simply having to have your students now commute, take buses, go out of the area to get to another school, that can be a detriment to student learning too.
21:04Because it's more difficult for those students to get the building on time, for example.
21:09Having to take buses, having to walk in in clement weather a long distance if they're coming to another school instead of a neighborhood school.
21:17All of that has an impact, I think, on success rates, on dropout rates.
21:22And so I think the community will feel for many years the impact of the school closing.
21:27Conclusion? Moral of the story?
21:30Well, I don't know. We fought the fight. We didn't, we feel like we didn't accomplish anything.
21:38I don't know that I would do it again. It just feels...
21:42Your opposition is too heavy or just not democratic?
21:45It's just not democratic. The decision had been made.
21:50Yeah. The decision was made and they just, it's, they're letting you, they're making you feel that, oh, we have a say, but it doesn't matter because they're, they've decided and you sit and you talk.
22:03And even while you're talking, a couple of them just go through papers and talk to each other and they're not listening to a thing.
22:10Anybody sit, not just me, anybody. It doesn't matter who's talking.
22:13When they talk at regular meetings amongst themselves, they get up and they walk out of the room and they do this, they do that.
22:19The decision is made and it's just like a final vote. Okay, we've listened to you. You can't say we didn't listen.
22:25I don't think it was an exercise in futility in that we had to fight the good fight, which was to do all that we could to save the school,
22:34to save it for the community, for the kids, for the staff, for everyone involved because we felt a strong loyalty, strong attachment.
22:44For me, the attachment runs back decades because as a student in Midland, I was on the SAC.
22:51I ran the yearbook as the editor and I was also the student editor of the newspaper as well.
22:56For me, the allegiance to Midland goes back decades.
23:01To not have struggled to keep it open, I would have felt quite empty inside.
23:06I would have let my own value system down if I had not attempted to, with all that I could muster, to save the school.
23:14I feel that we did the best we could under the circumstances.
23:18I think that groups that have come after us in other communities and other schools have learned from our activism
23:25and perhaps have been more successful.
23:27And I think the board has also changed as well in its makeup, in that it listens more to the community
23:34when the community comes forward with alternatives and with other leasing suggestions.
23:38And I think that if you look at the record now, there have been some schools saved because of that.
23:44So I don't think our efforts were futile.
23:46I think we paved the way for other parent, teacher, student, activist groups to go on and save community schools.
23:54I've had, but I can't get over the people that have asked, are you going to run for trustee?
23:59That's not me.
24:03That sounds like a good idea, remember?
24:05No, not at all. I'm not a politician and it's just, but it's amazing the people that have said,
24:09oh, you should run for trustee.
24:10The problem is we get too emotional about it. It's hard to keep the issue at hand because you do get wrapped up emotionally.
24:20I did. I got very wrapped up in this issue.
24:24I felt there was a lot at stake. I still do. I'm still waiting to see the fallout.
24:30But I couldn't sleep at night if all this was going through my head.
24:35Yeah.
24:36I'd be up walking the floor and writing some letters and pacing and, no, I can't do that.