PHRD cancels senior high school at Fort Assiniboine School

The senior high school program at Fort Assiniboine School will be closed come the new school year.

Pembina Hills Regional Division No. 7 made the decision on March 16 to close the program, which will affect students in grades 10 to 12. Trustees voted 6-1 in favour of the motion, with trustee Dale Schaffrick opposed to the motion. Schaffrick represents the community of Fort Assiniboine around the school board table. Furthermore, the board will develop a plan to pursue the feasibility of the re-establishment of the program at the end of a three-year period. The plan will involve looking at how PHRD delivers educational programming to students, community development and discussions on ways to address rural education and its challenges.

The closure means students who were to enter grades 10, 11 and 12 at Fort Assiniboine School will now be bussed to Barrhead Composite High School. PHRD is setting up an express bus route between Fort Assiniboine and Barrhead. In order to have the Fort Assiniboine students home in due time, they will have an early dismissal of 3:10 p.m.

Because BCHS’ utilization rate for 2010-11 is projected to be 64.08 per cent, there is available room to accommodate the students from Fort Assiniboine. The number of students who will need to be relocated as a result of the closure will be 25 in 2011-2012, 26 in 2012-2013, 21 in 2013-2014, 25 in 2014-2015 and 24 in 2015-2016.

It was a decision no trustee made with any degree of ease, said board chairman Doug Fleming. However, by allowing the program to continue, it would have a negative impact on the rest of the school, he said. The school’s reserves will be depleted come the new school year, and the school will begin to experience operating debt, compounded each year by annual operating deficits.

“I feel terrible, absolutely terrible,” Fleming said. “This was an issue even for the previous board. Fort Assiniboine has been on the radar screen for about three years with its declining enrolment.

“You just can’t continue to offer quality programs if the students aren’t there. This was a very difficult decision for a small rural community.”

Trustees weighed many factors in making this decision, Fleming said.

“It’s just really a tough decision, and it’s probably the toughest decision this board will have to make,” he said.

Fort Assiniboine School council chairman Peter Keulken said he understands the fiscal responsibility behind the decision, but it’s one that will have a devastating impact on the community.

“If I were to view this from a fiscal perspective, then they made the right decision,” Keulken said.

“For us as a community, it’s devastating, because we will pay for it. Every parent who has a kid now going to BCHS will spend at least another $1,500 a year just to come to Barr-head and engage with their kids in this community. If you look at it from the perspective of our rights and freedoms, then we’re being discriminated against by government policy, and that’s a challenge we have to try and overcome. We can’t do it alone, and it has to include MLAs and the people we elected.”

Keulken said as long as schools do not start to get support from MLAs, and open communication between the province, school boards and municipalities, then people will continue to see rural Alberta die. He said area MLAs have been given all the information, but there has been no response from those elected officials.

“We haven’t had any interest from our MLAs in what’s going on here,” Keulken said. “The school board has really been working on advocating for that to happen. The reality is, our MLAs are elected by the people of these communities. They have not done anything, and we are the victim.”

Keulken said Fort Assiniboine School’s next step is to follow through on the second part of the school board’s decision, and that’s to support them in the feasibility study. He called it a template for change for education in Alberta, and not just in rural Alberta, because he is cognizant of the fact this is happening all over the province.

“There’s a huge deficit in education, and not just in money, but in how policies, funding formulas and the creativity of school boards are being jeopardized with policies from 1995,” he said. “The work now starts for us on the three-year prong and see to it that this actually happens.”

With the lack of resources of PHRD, it will be difficult, he said, so the community is going to have to try and find those resources. That being said, he added Fort Assiniboine has a municipal government that has really opened up to try and solve this problem, and they’ve stepped up to the plate.

“If it comes to interim funding, I think they’ll step up to the plate again,” he said. “If you want something to happen badly enough, then it will. This is an unfortunate reality, but it’s also an opportunity for change.”

A total of 16 people showed up to the meeting, held at the Senior’s Drop-In Centre in Barrhead. Keulken said that’s due to the fact Fort Assiniboine residents were under the impression that the venue was going to be set at the school board office.

“We chose only people who were intimately involved with this issue to attend,” he said. “We even turned down a lot of people, because we thought there wasn’t going to be enough room for everyone.”

His fellow Fort Assiniboine residents will be devastated, he said.

Superintendent of Schools Egbert Stang said the board had a very difficult decision to make, and that each trustee wrestled with this issue. However, in light of PHRD’s financial situation, the number of students, and the ability to deliver programming, the board was faced with a very tough situation.

“We know the impact on the community and the school will be hard, and at the end of the day the trustees really do deeply care about the kids and want to do the right thing,” Stang said, and added with the closure, there are a number of other things that are going to have to happen.

For example, PHRD will be setting up a transition plan to ensure this change happens as smoothly as possible, Stang said. The board will also follow up with the Fort Assiniboine students once they are at BCHS to ensure their success and make them feel more comfortable in their new environment. Finally, the board will assign a teacher adviser to help them through any challenges they may have in the transition.

Fleming said trustees will be meeting with the Minister of Education in April to discuss such issues as distributed learning, distance learning and partnership, issues that could be viable options for Fort Assiniboine School.

“There might be something that comes out of that meeting, there might not be,” he said. “It’s unfortunate that we weren’t able to meet with him before the vote, but I was advised that the minister said he doesn’t interfere in local decision making, unless the process is compromised. We followed the process to a T very deliberately to ensure everybody’s voice was heard.”