Re-Purposing inner & almost inner-city schools

[speedog]

Thought that this might be worthy of a thread of it's own after seeing some debate about re-purposing inner & almost inner-city schools in the "Calgary Construction XXI" thread.

Anyhow, our family has owned a home for 16+ years in one of these older communities (Highwood - mid-50's) where we have seen first hand the re-purposing of underutilized schools. When we bought our home here in 1996, our small community had a public K-6 school (80% French immersion/20% English), a public grade 7-9 junior high and an already re-purposed Catholic school. Over the past 16 years, we've seen the re-purposed Catholic school morph several times while the public K-6 school had it's English program shut down at the request of the parents of the attending English students (kids were transferred to Cambrian Heights public K-6) resulting in a 100% french immersion K-6 school which which was eventually shut down and in it's place we now have a Mandarin immersion K-6 program.

Personally, I believe that our small community was vastly overbuilt when it came to schooling but then again, who knows what planners thought back then. As far as re-purposing schools, it does create problems that most wouldn't be aware of - when the CBE looked at shutting down the 20% English program at Highwood Elementary some 10+ years ago, there was a committee formed and the end result was a first whereas the affected parents/families recommended shutting down the program instead of saving it as providing satisfactory education to the 20% English split was difficult when a school was only allotted so many teaching resources and the 20/80 split hurt the English program when it come to divvying up those resources.

So move ahead a few years and the French immersion program was eventually moved much to the opposition of the attending student's parents/families even though 95%+ of them didn't reside within the community. In it's place was placed a Mandarin Immersion program with 95% plus of the students coming from outside the community and this too is creating problems within the community which I'll detail next.

The problems of re-purposed schools - I would've never seen this but a year after the aforementioned English program was moved I happened to be walking by the Highwood Elementary school one morning and stopped to speak to the principal who was outside and asked how things were going since the English kids moved. What was surprising is that she said things were not going well as extra-curricular activities at the school which relied upon students and parent volunteers were proving difficult to manage. I asked why and she said that in the past most of the volunteer base was from students and parents who lived within the community that the scholl was located in and with a French only population which was 95%+ from outside of the community, they were getting virtually no volunteers and in fact, they were relying upon volunteers from within the community who did not even have children at that school. Fast forward to the Mandarin immersion program and the same situation is still occurring except that community volunteers are now not involved because of language barriers.

A second problem - traffic and parking. These re-purposed schools that bring the bulk of their student population from outside the community bring with them major increased traffic and parking issues - we have seen first hand a marked increase in personal school time traffic, both in personal vehicles and buses. One problem it creates is that these schools and communities were designed with the fact that most students walked to school and now with several hundred students being bussed or driven to school, the narrow streets just can not accommodate the increase traffic. At the Mandarin immersion school, we have gone from 6 to 19 busses and even more amazing is the sheer number of students being driven to/from school despite the available busing. We have seen, as a result, increased collisions in our community, parents parking where they please including in front of driveways, garages and even in driveways, double and triple parking and short-cutting/speeding through alleys - mu daughter two years ago when she was 11 had to jump off of the sidewalk she was walking on in order to avoid being run over by a Mandarin student parent who was driving on the sidewalk. Yeah, complaints to the city/alderman/police help in the short term, but the problem always resurfaces.

Third, community involvement and being good neighbors - our community's experience is that these re-purposed schools just don't make good neighbors. The administration of these re-purposed schools have made little to no effort to be good community neighbors - the original K-6 public and separate school were quite involved with the community, but now there is no involvement even though the community association and senior groups have reached out to them. Why - probably comes back to the fact the 95%+ of the students come from outside of the community and the administration sees no reason to keep a connection in place to the community. Additionally, the Mandarin program parents wanted to rent our community hall for a before/after school care program (didn't happen) despite the fact that they still owe our community monies from previous year's rentals - being a good neighbor includes paying bills on-time.

So what's the solution? My proposal would be to bulldoze some of these schools - I'd rather see some new, more dense housing in our community as opposed to the problems that these re-purposed schools are creating. People that would own homes in our community and contribute to our community as opposed to people that just drive their kids to/from school who then get upset because they're stuck in traffic jams on our community's narrow streets. Now I realize that there is a new breed of parent out there that fully believes that having a child in a special program school (immersion, charter/whatever) is the way to go, but let's seriously study where to place these programs - when 95%+ of a school's population comes from outside a community there has got to be a better way.