Manufacturing a Crisis: did Rusty Hick attend the Mike Harris School of Strategy?

Part one: How the heck did we wind up here?

In a span of only 9 months, KPR trustees went from approving a request to review programming alternatives for Peterborough high schools affected by declining enrolment to voting to close the city's oldest and most successful institution, PCVS, the only school which was operating at capacity at the time the review was commissioned.

How exactly did this bizarre decision come to pass?

On the 16th of December, 2010, the Director of Education for KPR, Rusty Hick, presented data to the Board of Trustees and called for an Accommodation Review of four Peterborough secondary schools – TASSS, PCVS, Adam Scott and Kenner. Also to be included in the review were the intermediate wings of Adam Scott and Kenner. The minutes of the meeting are here.

The data sheets provided to the Trustees about each school included enrolment figures over the previous ten years and projected enrolment figures for the next four. You can view them here for yourself if you like.

Strangely, the data sheets provide actual enrolment figures for what was then the current school year (2010-11) as well as projections for the same year. The two numbers are noticeably different in each case, suggesting that the projections had been made much earlier and throwing into question the accuracy of the rest of the projection. Putting an estimated 2010 figure into the projection made it appear as though a full five years were being projected, when in fact only four were. Now, almost a year later, the projections are only three years in advance.

Hick painted a picture of sharply declining enrolment for the Trustees. However, it doesn’t appear that he was asked to provide the source of these projections, or the system by which they were made. Were these numbers arrived at by simply adding up the current enrolment numbers from assigned “feeder” elementary schools? Were municipal demographic figures or census data employed? Were historical patterns of student preferences taken into account? Seven weeks later, when Norm Breitner, Manager of Planning Services, re-presented these same numbers to the first ARC meeting, he added only the most basic census figures which drew a picture of the past 15 years in Peterborough, with nothing at all regarding the trends of the future. In the ARC meeting's minutes, it is stated that Official Plans, development activity and demographics were taken into account in arriving at these figures, but there are no details provided for any of these. 

Nor is there any rationale listed in the December Board meeting’s minutes for the narrow four-year window into the future. This is puzzling, as one would expect to base major decisions such as the closures of schools which have been integral to the community for many decades to be based on much more than a four-year projection, and considered with far more care than KPR’s rushed ARC process would provide.

Here is a chart summarizing all the relevant numbers provided by Hick, plus estimates for Crestwood, which was excluded from the review for strategic reasons.

School enrolment figures provided by the Director of Education to Board of Trustees Dec. 16, 2010
		actual											project.
	capac.	2000	2001	2002	2003	2004	2005	2006	2007	2008	2009	2010	2011	2012	2013	2014
PCVS	848	980	975	978	939	921	948	932	893	887	834	849	706	651	589	539
		1.16	1.15	1.15	1.11	1.09	1.12	1.10	1.05	1.05	0.98	1.00	0.83	0.77	0.69	0.64
Adam Scott	1017	1029	980	949	896	866	825	802	783	773	795	808	797	831	870	901
		1.01	0.96	0.93	0.88	0.85	0.81	0.79	0.77	0.76	0.78	0.79	0.78	0.82	0.86	0.89
Kenner	918	859	889	833	807	856	852	792	742	714	721	687	644	611	553	477
		0.94	0.97	0.91	0.88	0.93	0.93	0.86	0.81	0.78	0.79	0.75	0.70	0.67	0.60	0.52
TASSS	1290	1097	1131	1057	990	1064	977	895	880	822	764	713	582	534	452	386
		0.85	0.88	0.82	0.77	0.82	0.76	0.69	0.68	0.64	0.59	0.55	0.45	0.41	0.35	0.30
Crestwood (est.)	1075	1075	1065	1055	1045	1035	1025	1015	1005	995	985	975	965	955	945	935
		1	0.99	0.98	0.97	0.96	0.95	0.94	0.93	0.93	0.92	0.91	0.9	0.89	0.88	0.87
Total first four	4073	3965	3975	3817	3632	3707	3602	3421	3298	3196	3114	3057	2729	2627	2464	2303
		0.97	0.98	0.94	0.89	0.91	0.88	0.84	0.81	0.78	0.76	0.75	0.67	0.64	0.60	0.57
Total all	5148	5040	5040	4872	4677	4742	4627	4436	4303	4191	4099	4032	3694	3582	3409	3238
		0.98	0.98	0.95	0.91	0.92	0.90	0.86	0.84	0.81	0.80	0.78	0.72	0.70	0.66	0.63

The problem with declining enrolment at the schools, Hick told Trustees, is that the “breadth” of programming and teaching expertise would become increasingly limited with a narrower range of teachers in each school and fewer students to warrant the offering of particular courses. He speculated that schools would soon be forced to offer certain courses only in alternate years or to place students in multi-year classes.

The minutes of the meeting do not report any of the Trustees questioning the massive scope of the proposed Accommodation Review, which would cover about 4,000 students. These reviews have taken place with greater frequency across the province in recent years as Ontario’s demographic balance shifts toward older citizens. In searching a variety of recent ARC documents from many School Boards, however, I could not find a single one which attempted to cover more than half as many students as this one proposed to. Had Crestwood been included in the review, the number would have been greater still.

The Accommodation Review Committee (ARC) was formed, and it held four public meetings during the winter and spring of 2011, one at each of the four secondary schools under review, as per Ministry guidelines. The committee was chaired by Don Blair, a superintendent with the Board, who was reportedly paid full salary to work on this issue, earning $60,000.

The meetings were not well organized and committee members reported not having access to the information they required. No non-public meetings were scheduled, due to a peculiarity in KPR’s policy requiring all meetings to be public. This stipulation does not derive from the Ministry of Education and is not standard policy at other school boards (more on that issue in another post).

At the conclusion of this somewhat pointless excercise, a contradictory non-decision was arrived at. The ARC provided the recommendation that Hick presumably desired – that the programming at the four high schools be combined into three schools. However, the committee also wrote that closing one of the schools should be a “last resort,” contradicting the previous statement.

The farcical quality of the review process and the recommendation was taken note of by community members and bluntly criticized in newspaper editorials.

Undaunted, Hick pushed onward.


A photo of Hick from 2008 when he was allegedly still interested in community integrity.