PCVS and Mercer Make Noise Across the Country

 

The buzz about Rick Mercer’s coverage of PCVS keeps radiating out from Peterborough’s community center.

Rick’s “PCVS rant,” now posted on his website, www.rickmercer.com, has already received 15,000 views since its airing on the CBC last Tuesday, while the PCVS segment has been viewed 4,000 more times.

The Examiner, 980 KRUZ, and ptbocanada.com have re-posted Rick’s PCVS rant on their own sites. 

So has the Canadian version of North America’s de facto alternative online news hub, the Huffington Post. Michael Bolen, who posted it there, makes the observation that this rant differs from Rick’s typical modus operandus by focusing on the positive actions of young people rather than pointing out the shortcomings of Canadian politicians. 

Bolen calls PCVS students “a force to be reckoned with” and wishes them luck – joining fellow journalists Mercer, CBC radio host Jian Ghomeshi, and City-TV’s Breakfast Television host Kevin Frankish in expressing this sentiment.

Vancouver-based global education activist and teacher Antony Wilson posted Rick’s rant on the “changemaker network” site, while Vancouver rock band Trooper, whose song “Raise a Little Hell” was used to powerful effect by Mercer and the PCVS students in the “Spread the Net” sequence, posted that video on their band site (at which you can also watch William Shatner at the Junos singing the same song, if you need some kitschy comic relief).

Former TASSS student Harrison Perkins, now studying journalism at Loyalist College in Belleville, re-posted Rick’s rant, the PCVS “Spread the Net” segment, and the Examiner coverage of the in-school screening on his blog. Perkins remarked on the unfortunate disconnect between TASSS students (many of whom come from the Keene area) and PCVS students – a division which was cynically exploited by KPR administrators to create antagonism between the two school communities in the sick real-life “Survivor” game which the board tried to pass off as an “accommodation review” last year.

Perkins comments that the “stigma” attached to PCVS students by some TASSS students “isn’t right.” He writes, “I think this initiative shown by their commitment to help other people millions of miles away while at the same time showcasing their talents and proving they are a force to be reckoned with takes a lot of courage.”

PCVS graduate Sonia Gemmiti, now an artist in Toronto, re-posted Matt Finlan's Mercer-style "rant" and other PCVS-related videos along with a fine "slide-show" of photographs documenting PCVS arts, and also wrote an article under the title “My Love Note to PCVS,” all on the weld art-collective page. 

In her “love note,” Gemmiti summarizes her distress about the imminent loss of the unique environment at PCVS where, she writes, she learned nearly as much from the other students as from the teachers. Gemmiti remembers that “the usual severe social divisions that exist in high school were not as predominant at PCVS.” She quotes educational activist Eric Cooper’s observation that “arts education enables those children from a financially challenged background to have a more level playing field with children who have had those enrichment experiences.”

PCVS main hallway 

(photo: Jessica Melnik)

“I believe there is a ‘soul’ to a building,” Gemmiti writes. “PCVS students can walk outside their school doors and see the names inscribed of former students who fought in the First and Second World War.

“My graduating art class made ceramic tiles that were added along the arches of the stairwells; a little piece of me remains as part of my former high school. This is something no school trustee is going to care about or understand. You can’t simply pack up the history of a building and take it with you.”

Gemmiti concludes by remarking that “every goal I have achieved throughout my career is rooted in my early education. The faculty of PCVS went beyond their job description, it was a lifestyle for them. I know personally, had I have gone to any other school, my life path would have been very different. I was pushed to believe in myself and that a career in the arts was possible.”

Wherever you are across Canada, if you care about PCVS - if you care about educational success - if you care about community integrity - Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty needs to hear from you and your family now. 

Write to him here. 

Tell him not to let seven out-of-town trustees and a handful of administrators throw away one of Ontario’s most successful schools, whose development took decades of hard work by thousands of students and hundreds of teachers.

Tell him to respect the wishes of Peterborough’s own trustees, plus the city's doctors, business-owners, downtown residents, mayor, chief of police, and city councillors.

  

A few minutes of your time is all it will take to help make Canada a better place.