The merry month of May has brought us beautiful,
seasonal weather here in Peterborough
– perfect for outdoor community events
in public parks.
Two such events held last week in central Peterborough focused on local public
secondary students and their communities.
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| PCVS Drummers (photo: Save Our Schools) |
The second, on Saturday afternoon, was a grassroots initiative
by the “Save Local Schools” group in
Confederation Square
beside PCVS that brought local citizens together to address the Ontario government’s destructive
obsession with closing schools, in solidarity
with other communities across the province - costing taxpayers nothing, and hoping to save them millions.
KPR administrators, possibly having been told they should organize
something for “Education Week” and “Mental Health Week” to justify their
sizable publicly-funded salaries, announced in an April 30th press release
that “over 1000 Peterborough secondary students will
participate” in an event called “Highlight!”
supposedly aimed at “expanding positive relationships among students, schools
and the community.”
The imperative implicit in the phrase “will participate” was made plain ten days later after only a handful of students returned permission
forms allowing them to attend the event. Estimates of the number of PCVS
students who returned the forms ranged from 8 to 16, and interest was
reportedly little higher elsewhere.
What was KPR’s answer to the lack of enthusiasm for an event unable to elicit interest from justifiably skeptical students? On Wednesday, administrators suddenly decided that permission forms weren’t necessary after
all – and that attendance for grade 10 and 11 students would be compulsory. Imagine how teachers trying
to cram in curriculum requirements only four weeks before exams felt about that
last-minute call.
In this Examiner article, KPR Chair Diane Lloyd insists that nearly 900 students attended
– an obviously inflated figure,
more than double the count made by
the Examiner
reporter. An hour before the end of the event, there were observed fewer than 300 students listening to a student jazz band playing “St. James Infirmary Blues” on the Folk
Festival stage.
The “featured performer” at Highlight! was Cameron Hughes, a man who gets paid by
professional sports teams to get up from his seat and do funny dances and strip-tease routines. If you want see
what KPR spent $4500 of your tax dollars
on, watch any of Hughes’ videos on YouTube, starting here. Yes, you read that right – $4500 for a “motivational
speaker” whose claim to fame is taking
his clothes off at hockey games. One student assessed his performance at Highlight!
as more obnoxious than motivating. But hey, why pay a qualified classroom teacher
for a month when you can
hire Cameron Hughes for one hour?
As if Hughes wasn’t enough, KPR also decided to spent over $6000 buying 1200 neon yellow, green and orange
t-shirts – about three times as
many as were actually needed. Organizers then forced the students who showed up
to wear them in a botched attempt to get people from different schools to
mingle with one another. The scheme was to distribute the t-shirts randomly, then put the matching colours
into “teams” for group shouting activities, hoping to get students from
different schools to mingle. But with only three
colours, everyone could easily find dozens
of people from their own school with
the same colour t-shirt to hang with
– and they did. Why buy class sets of textbooks when you can buy 1200 matching t-shirts?
In total, KPR spent a staggering $14,000 on the event. Lloyd, now highly experienced in defending
terrible KPR decisions, reportedly told the Examiner
“it was worth it.”
Another day, another KPR
boondoggle. No wonder they can’t afford to keep schools open.
Cutting back on such boondoggles evidently isn’t the
direction KPR wants to go. Instead, they’ve now drafted a letter calling for
the province to merge KPR with the Peterborough Victoria Northumberland
Catholic School Board, as reported by the Examiner. If you were the Catholic board, would you want to touch KPR with a ten-foot pole? Didn’t think so.
The last few lines of this article confirm this suspicion.
Meanwhile, PCVS student leaders were busy with other duties.
Some were up at Trent
doing leadership activities with elementary school students, while Collin
Chepeka was being interviewed for CBC’s news program The National. Chepeka echoed the feelings of thousands of Peterborough citizens when
he told the National that KPR’s decision to close PCVS continues to “boggle his mind.”
When confronted by the CBC, Lloyd continued to pump out the misleading
and simplistic KPR party line, stating that Peterborough has 4000 secondary pupil places and only 3000 students to fill them. Of course, she left Crestwood out of the equation, which if
included would make about 4000 students
for 5000 places. More importantly,
she left out the fact that over 600
of those “empty places” are at one
school – TASSS. Have a peek at
the enrolment charts listed on the sidebar of this blog and see for
yourself.
Sanity thankfully was restored as the next day the “Save Local Schools” group held their
own community-building event across
from City Hall that didn’t cost taxpayers a penny. The rally provided good vibes, free entertainment, and information for anyone who wanted to
come by of their own volition. Nobody was forced to wear coloured t-shirts,
yet, amazingly, people actually introduced themselves to one another, as
students, parents, residents, alumni, activists, musicians, and public figures mixed
and mingled.
Local doctor Paul Cragg set up a boat-turned-parade-float as a stage on George Street with City Hall in the
background, creating a perfect backdrop for a celebration of community, education, and democracy. Longtime Peterborough stalwart and entertainer "Reverend Ken"
Ramsden, who lived for many years kitty-corner to PCVS on Aylmer Street, dropped by to tell a tale
of a PCVS student protest back in 1919. Ramsden then joined in with Cragg’s trumpet on the PCVS school song as the assembled went on an energetic march down Water Street to Market
Hall and back up George Street
to the park.
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| Bull, Bruce and Chepeka in the front line (photo by Josh Gillis) |
Former PCVS principal Shirl Delarue, one of the affiants in
the Peterborough Needs PCVS judicial
review case, took the stage to inform the community of the state of the
legal proceedings. The affiants will be cross-examined in the coming weeks,
then lawyers and judges will convene in a Toronto courtroom in the first week of June. Don’t forget that KPR administrators will be
spending even more of your tax dollars paying lawyers to
defend themselves against charges of incompetence.
Errol Young, a former Toronto
school board trustee, spoke of the disturbing situation in Toronto, where the board is being told by
Queen’s Park not only to close
schools but to sell off the
properties. His anecdote about one school which was closed, then later
re-opened due to renewed demand for its facilities, showed the folly of selling off public property.
A blog post by one of the Toronto speakers about Saturday’s event
features some fantastic photos and a rundown of the day. Another post on the Save
Our Schools blog looks into the psychology of power that trustees often
become possessed by.
A host of local musicians entertained the assembled over the course of
the afternoon, including PCVS students Kirsten Bruce, Evangeline Gentle, and
Devlin Flynn, PCVS alumni Candle Cave Ensemble Part II, and a student
rock band from TASSS. The Examiner report on the
afternoon is here.
Such events are what public parks should be used for – community-building
arts and consciousness-raising gatherings, open to all. It’s too bad KPR
administrators didn’t avail themselves of the opportunity to participate. They
might have learned a thing or two
about the people they’re supposed to be serving.
Sadly, we’ve long since ceased expecting KPR managers to show much interest in either learning or community.
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