The ARC That Should Have Been, part seven: Thomas A. Stewart, East City, and the Centre for Individual Studies

In the previous four posts we’ve taken stock of Peterborough’s northern, central, western, and southern neighbourhood elementary-secondary school networks, all of which seem to be stable, though the situation at Kenner isn't perfect. Now we turn our attention to the east side of the Otonabee.

In the nineteen-century, the village of Ashburnham was a political entity unto itself. Around the time that Peterborough was made a city and the current PCVS building went up, the village of Ashburnham was annexed by Peterborough and became known as “East City,” officially Ashburnham Ward. For most Peterborough residents, East City means the Liftlock and the Canal. Some of us might go across the river for the Museum, the Folk Festival, the PowWow, or tobogganing on the awesome slope of Armour Hill. The view from up top of the hill is inspiring, affording a view of all the surrounding townships.

Ashburnham Ward is really three proximate but distinct neighbourhoods – the TASSS-Trent neighbourhood north of Parkhill, the pre-war East City between Parkhill and Maria, and the south-eastern area centered on Lansdowne, including the Marsdale subdivision north of Lansdowne and the Coldsprings/Collison Heights area south of Lansdowne, in which Otonabee Valley public school is located. These areas stretch along a long, narrow strip of territory on the east bank of the river which has been kept narrow by the Trent canal, the city limit, and its position on the wrong side of Peterborough from Toronto.

The central East City area has a small-town feeling, with idiosyncratic, small-scale houses, many on deep lots originally meant for gardening. The unique waterfront residential areas around Wallace Point on Little Lake and up the Otonabee just south of TASSS have an homey atmosphere you won’t find anywhere else in Peterborough. The Rotary Trail has been a boon to East City, allowing easy biking, blading, or baby-buggying from Ecology Park near Beavermead all the way up to Trent, and thence to Lakefield.

The character of East City in recent years has been much like contemporary small-town Ontario, dominated by retirees. In central East City, some of those retirees have been selling their small, manageable houses to young couples in recent years, and the area’s character is starting to show the change, with more small children around. The area north of Parkhill, however, remains the domain of the grey-haired. Retirement high-rises greet you as you enter the Rotary Trail at Parkhill, and what follows is two consecutive kilometers of retirement condominiums before you get to TASSS. Across the road from TASSS is a golf course. Behind the golf course is the canal.

It’s true – TASSS was built in the middle of a retirement community.

Sandwiched by Trent in the north, seniors to the south, the Otonabee to the west and the golf course to the east, TASSS has had virtually no natural walking community until the recent development of the Frances Stewart subdivision. Nor is there any commercial district, or any potential for further development in the immediate area.

Located just off the county roads at the north end of town, TASSS was built to serve large numbers of rural students, and did so admirably in the not-so-distant past, including many from as far away as Omemee.

Planners back in the late-sixties were perhaps feeling overly optimistic about the potential for growth in the area around the new Nassau Mills campus of Trent University. In fact, Peterborough’s growth since then has been almost entirely in the opposite direction, leaving the north-east with a semi-rural feel in places.

Today TASSS serves students from only three feeder schools: Armour Heights, King George, and North Shore in Keene.

The peculiarity of TASSS’s location is matched by the peculiarity of the proximity of Armour Heights and King George to one another. In a curious bit of planning, Armour Heights was built on the north side of the same hill that King George occupies the south side of. In general, students from north of the hill attend Armour Heights, while those on the south side attend King George, but all attend Armour Heights for their intermediate years. Those living way down south of Lansdowne, however, attend Otonabee Valley, and from there go to Kenner. Both Armour Heights and King George have a capacity of about 300 but currently host about 200. The actual KPR planners have already proposed closing one of the two schools in last May’s accommodation report.

One of KPR’s first projects in the Peterborough area was to build North Shore Public School in Keene, consolidating a number of older, small rural schools. North Shore was built to accommodate 429 students, but attendance has been dropping steadily since then and is now, like its Armour Road counterparts, down to about two-thirds capacity with 285. Moreover, these numbers might continue to drop because the number of tax-payers in Otonabee-South Monaghan township has actually been falling in recent years, according to the Trustee allocation chart – as has the population in all the townships east of Peterborough. KPR is currently considering closing South Monaghan Public and directing students from the Bailieboro area to North Shore as well. 

	cap.	KPR projections
		2009-10	2010-11	2011-12	2012-13	2013-14	2014-15	appr.	per grade	classes
TASSS	1290	764	707	642	533	451	385	50%	150
King George (JK-6)	305	214	212	209				70%	26	1.5
Armour Heights (JK-8)	305	233	217	215				70%	17	1
North Shore (JK-8)	429	316	305	285				65%	28	1.5
total elementary	1039	763	734	709				68%	70	4
"half-total"	570	380	370	355

The most important information you’ll glean from the chart above is the massive discrepancy between the capacity of TASSS and the capacity of its feeder schools. If TASSS currently has over six hundred students, some of them must be coming from elsewhere (including members of the Peterborough Petes, who are sent to TASSS), or all of them must stay for five years, because the “half-total” capacity of the feeder schools is only 570. This is by far the worst match in the city. There is no way for TASSS to be more than half-full under the current configuration, even if the three elementary schools were to be overflowing with portables. 

If North Shore students weren’t being directed to TASSS, there would be no sense in maintaining the high school at all. King George and Armour Heights grads from central East City could walk across the London Street footbridge to PCVS, which could easily accommodate the tiny graduating grade 8 class, numbering less than 50 this year, while students from the TASSS area could walk across the bridge by Joanne’s Health Foods to reach Adam Scott, which is only one kilometer from TASSS.

Even with North Shore students being bused in, TASSS will likely take in only about 70 grade nines next year, while about 150 might graduate from grade twelve, resulting in the rapid decline in enrolment reflected in KPR’s predictions. The estimate of 385 for 2014 is roughly equal to the “half-total” for 2009-10, just as one would expect. This number might be expected to drop still further, given that the elementary numbers have declined even more since 2009-10. Eventually, we might see the East City elementary schools start to fill up again as today’s newborns hit kindergarten, but any increase there is more than ten years away at TASSS.

The fact is that TASSS was built to accommodate a large contingent of rural students that is unlikely to be there again in the foreseeable future. There’s no room for residential expansion in its immediate vicinity. Trent hasn’t turned into a large institution. Demand for houses in the neighbourhood is almost nil. The highway access is getting better, but there’s no commercial area around. Eventually the city might annex the area around Parkhill East up to Television Road, but there are no plans for significant new development there.

On top of the over-size problem, TASSS is a strangely-constructed building. Like Adam Scott, it was put up on a tight budget, and its facility condition index rating is nearly as low. Oddly, TASSS is really two buildings put together, with separate heating and cooling systems. Moreover, it’s filled with asbestos, and it’s going to cost over a million dollars to get it out of there. And another half-million to make the place accessible by wheelchair. As result of the real KPR administrators’ power-play, these renovations are already underway.



A birds-eye view of TASSS



On the plus side, the school property is large enough to host some good playing fields for athletics. There are greenhouses as well, a unique feature. There’s some good shop space, and a fine auditorium.

So what do you do with the biggest school in town, a relic of the 1960s baby-boom, whose extensive hallways are only sparsely populated with teens, whose massive parking lot hosts only a few buses each morning, and whose maintenance costs are now way out of line with the funding provided on a per-student basis, as identified by KPR documents?

Can we find more rural students to direct to TASSS? Bridgenorth is already being sent to Adam Scott, and the Millbrook-Cavan area to Crestwood. But what about points north?

Here’s the chart showing the Lakefield District Secondary regional school network, which includes Apsley, Buckhorn and Warsaw as well as Lakefield’s Ridpath Public. Take any of these feeder schools away from LDSS, and its student population would now be down to 50% capacity. Moreover, Lakefield District is a township school, serving the townships of Lakefield-Smith-Ennismore, North Kawartha, Douro-Dummer, and Galway-Cavendish-Harvey. Why bus students even further into a suburban setting when Lakefield District has plenty of space? LDSS is likely to be facing further declines in enrolment as it is, with the number of taxpayers in these four townships collectively dropping at the rate of half a percent per year, according to the Trustee allocation chart, and it already loses French Immersion students from Ridpath who proceed to Adam Scott for their intermediate and secondary education.

	cap.	KPR projections
		2009-10	2010-11	2011-12	appr.	per grade	classes
Lakefield	702	492	489	460	65%	110
Apsley (JK-8)	135	100	97	101	75%	10	0.5
Warsaw (JK-8)	181	150	148	143	80%	14	1
Buckhorn (JK-6)	112	118	113	100	90%	12	1
Ridpath (JK-6)	391	337	348	370	95%	45	2
Lakefield Inter. (7-8)	216	142	142	129	60%	65	2
total elementary	1035	847	848	843	81%	75

With redirecting rural students from LDSS not a good option, some years ago KPR tried moving the Centre for Individual Studies and some administrative offices to TASSS – including that of former TASSS principal Rusty Hick when he was Superintendent of Operations. CIS seemed to be a good fit at first, since TASSS has extra space and plenty of hands-on facilities. But the marriage wasn’t an entirely happy one.

CIS students are largely “problem students.” In general, they’re not attending CIS out of choice – they’ve been sent there by the Board to get their acts together because their previous schools didn’t want them anymore, typically due to poor attendance and failure to earn credits. Their lack of performance in their regular schools may have been due to a variety of family and personal problems. It’s tough for any school principal to welcome teens who’ve been kicked out of other schools, let alone when some of them may have developed further problems with chemical dependencies.

Moreover, TASSS is distant from the central and southern areas of the city in which most CIS students live. If they couldn’t get to their own neighbourhood schools regularly, how is their attendance going to be if they have to get all the way up to TASSS?

Thankfully, the 200-plus CIS students and their teachers a few years ago found a home on Bonnacord Street, just south of Jackson Park and east of Monaghan, in some unused Sir Sandford Fleming space beside the skateboard park. Teachers there have made use of the adjacent Bonnacord Community garden space and Jackson Park for outdoor education. The location is ideal – walking distance from downtown, but not right in the core where temptation may too easily strike during school hours, and away from regular secondary schools, giving CIS the ability to keep track of its students and eliminating any potential negative impacts on KPR’s regular-stream students.

The actual KPR administrators, of course, want to change this setup. They want to move CIS to the PCVS site, creating an educational ghetto right across from city hall, and putting at-risk students right back in the middle of temptations.     

So how else can we justify keeping TASSS, if we can’t import any more rural students, and CIS has been tried and rejected?

Ah ha! The Integrated Arts program! If we can pluck that program from PCVS, we can oblige hundreds of students from all over the city to hike all the way up to TASSS for their specialty programming. And if PCVS’s student population is thus reduced, why bother keeping the institution alive at all? We can just move CIS there! So we engineer a rigged city-wide secondary accommodation review pitting one city neighbourhood against another, putting the public on the defensive and distracting them so they won’t be able to imagine the accommodation review that should have taken place. And we’ll be careful not to include CIS in our review, or even mention it.

But wait a minute – let’s not forget that we’re not the actual KPR administrators. We’re not going to play any Machiavellian games, or disrupt the existing fully-functional school networks in other parts of town. We’re not going to attempt to take away Town Ward’s last remaining school, the most successful and venerable school in the entire Board, thereby inviting public outrage, legal action, and tax-revolts.

We’re going to do the logical and sensible thing and recommend to our imaginary Director of Education and fictional Trustees a full-scale accommodation review to determine the future of TASSS and its three feeder schools, King George, Armour Heights and North Shore.

It’s clear that the status quo on the east side of the Otonabee doesn’t make sense. Something has to change. Since we’ve got a proper accommodation review policy, we’re going to call a group of representatives together and give them a definite mandate, plenty of time, and accurate information. We’re going to keep Board staff and Trustees in non-voting roles. And we’re going to be up front about our “preferred option.”

We’ll play out this imaginary scenario in the next post.

The ARC That Should Have Been, part six: Kenner and the south end

Kenner CVI, named after longtime PCVS classics teacher Dr. H.R.H. Kenner, whose son Hugh Kenner went on to become an influential English professor in the U.S., was built in 1952, at the southern extreme of the newly-built tracts of bungalows whose creation effectively extended the “South End” of Peterborough all the way to the river. The Kenner location was as far away as they could get from PCVS, which up until then had been the only high school in town.

At times over the years, Kenner has gotten an undeserved bad rap. Serving the working-class part of town located between the older GE area and the newer industrial areas around the Parkway, it hasn’t had the opportunity to host many privileged students. But the neighbourhood integrity of the south end is high. Some families have lived there for generations, and residents justifiably take pride in their neighbourhood school. Kenner has developed a reputation for a solid “tradeschool” education, and has abetted this in recent years with the International Baccalaureate program.  

The truth is, however, that the rate of decline of enrolment at Kenner has been sharper than at the three schools we’ve considered so far. Because it was built right near the river, there hasn’t been much possibility of its immediate residential neighbourhood expanding.

Nevertheless, the south side of Peterborough is clearly the growing side. With Lansdowne Place and the Memorial Centre as anchors, and Home Depot, the YMCA, the Evinrude Centre and the Canoe Museum all located nearby, this area has become a commercial and cultural center for automobile-driven families, just as the downtown core has been for pedestrian-oriented families.

In addition to the immediate neighbourhood kids from Roger Neilson, students from the east side of the river who graduate from Otonabee Valley cross over to attend Kenner, and Keith Wightman students from north of Lansdowne also come down to Kenner.

As the chart below shows, however, the total numbers of students from these three feeder schools isn’t really enough to sustain a school as big as Kenner was built to be. And unlike Adam Scott and Crestwood, it doesn't have any rural feeder schools to boost its numbers. In fact, though Kenner's enrolment looks low in comparison with those two schools, the number of students attending from the city of Peterborough is about the same.

  

		2009-10	2010-11	2011-12	2012-13	2013-14	2014-15	appr.	per grade	classes
Kenner	918	721	701	644	610	552	477	70%	149.8
Keith Wightman (JK-6)	312	254	210	193				62%	24	1
Otonabee Valley (JK-6)	441	277	272	275				62%	34	2
Roger Neilson (JK-6)	346	242	245	216				62%	27	1.5
Kenner Intermed. (7-8)	306	225	235	233	196	191	212	75%	115
total elementary	1405	998	962	917				65%	90	4
"half-total"	700	500	480	460

The “half-total” capacity of the three schools is only 700, while Kenner’s capacity is 918. Even if the elementary schools were full and sending all their graduates to Kenner, the high school would be only at 76% of capacity.

About eight years ago, KPR designated the Kenner Intermediate wing, with a capacity of about 300. All three feeder schools send their graduates on to Kenner Intermediate, so it’s easy to see how many students are likely to be occupying the high school halls in a few years by the numbers in the intermediate halls.

What does the near future look like? Kenner Intermediate’s enrolment trend over the past three years shows a slight increase. They’ll be sending about 115 students on to Kenner CVI next year, while about 150 might graduate with their high school diplomas at the same time. KPR’s projections show this expected drop of about 35 students.

But what about the following years? Otonabee Valley’s enrolment is steady as she goes, but that of Roger Neilson and Keith Wightman has been dropping quickly. All three schools are operating at 62% capacity. The total number of students they’ll be sending to Kenner Intermediate each of the next few years looks more like 85 than 115, so we might expect a further drop of about 30 students per grade at Kenner five years down the road.

With only 85 students in each grade, we might expect Kenner CVI’s total population to drop to about 400 eight years from now, and this is the course that KPR’s projections do in fact suggest. At this level, the question must be posed: how small is too small for an urban high school? With only 85 students in each grade, how feasible is it to offer the range of courses one might desire? At what point can’t we justify maintaining the shop space? What’s the effect of a small student population on extracurricular activities?

But wait – before we answer these questions, let’s have another look at the map. The “Coldsprings” area south of Guthrie Drive and west of Wallace Point Road is slated for extensive development. This is a chunk of land annexed by the city and being readied for residential and commercial development. You can read all about the plan in a city-comissioned report on the subject, by clicking here.

With highway 115 running right through the industrial area around Bensfort and Ashburnham and joining up with highway 7 at Television Road, one might have expected that the area would eventually be ripe for development. The city has for ages designated Lansdowne East as a commercial growth area, but developers have responded by fixating on the Parkway side. Now, however, it seems that Coldsprings will be the next significant new neighbourhood in Peterborough. Much of the property is owned by major local developers AON Inc., and plans are being laid for housing for more than 10,000 new residents, presumably over a long span of time, likely about 20 years, going by the provincial demographic estimates suggest for Peterborough’s overall population growth.

KPR was consulted on the plans, which suggested that, if the full development came to pass, there might be a need for not one but two new schools. KPR administrators gave their opinion that given the ways demographics have been shifting, one school might well suffice. 

These same administrators also told the City that any residents moving to newly-constructed homes in the Coldsprings subdivision prior to a new school being built there would be attending North Shore Public School in Keene, then sent up to TASSS for high school. Check page 22 of this city report on the Coldsprings development and see for yourself.

Imagine – you’re looking for a new house for your expanding family. You’ve been living downtown in apartments for a few years with your partner. Now you’re ready to have kids, or maybe you already have a toddler. Older downtown houses are expensive, and finicky to maintain. Like so many young couples before you, you find yourself getting curious about just buying a newly-built house in a subdivision on the fringes of town. Why not? It’s close to the highway, and you might have to commute to Toronto or Oshawa one day.

You assume you’ll be sending your kids to Otonabee Valley school, just one kilometer away, on the north side of the highway where River Road turns into Bensfort. You go to the school to introduce yourself. “Coldsprings?” they say. “You’ll be going to Keene.”

Hmmm, you think. Maybe I'll try St. Patrick's, right around the corner. Maybe the Catholic board has more sense than KPR.

It’s true – KPR plans to be the only school board in Ontario to bus students out of a city to a rural school 20 kilometers away when there’s an existing school with a hundred and fifty free pupil places just up the street.

The bus companies must love KPR administrators. But how quickly do you think the new Coldsprings houses are going to be selling when this information gets out?

Why would KPR want to try to persuade Coldsprings parents to let them bus their kids all the way to North Shore?

Because North Shore feeds to TASSS.

Yes, although Kenner is only one kilometer from the Coldsprings development area as the crow flies, and only about 5 km as the car drives, KPR plans to bus Coldsprings teens 8 km up to TASSS.

When was this consultation done? In the summer of 2010, some six months before the accommodation review for Peterborough secondary schools was called by the Board of Trustees.

This is yet another piece of evidence showing that KPR administrators had already decided that TASSS was going to remain open in the long term prior to actually beginning the accommodation review. More evidence can be found in the “Making a Farce out ARC” series from October’s blog posts.

What would happen if the Coldsprings students were to be sent to Otonabee Valley and then to Kenner?

We wouldn’t have to pursue those questions about “how small is too small?” Kenner wouldn’t need to be put under an accommodation review. The south-end residential community wouldn’t be faced with the prospect of losing their neighbourhood school.

But still, you might say to yourself – Coldsprings is on the east side of the river, in Ashburnham Ward. Sure, it’s a long, long hike all the way up to the northeast corner of town to attend TASSS, but it’s not exactly convenient to drive around the river to get to Kenner either. And as we’ll see in the next post, TASSS is in much the same boat as Kenner when it comes to enrolment patterns, but with even more excess space.

What can we say about the Kenner school network, in conclusion?

The student population of the three JK-6 schools is probably going to sit at 60% for a while before increasing. That means that Kenner Intermediate might fall to 50%, and Kenner CVI below 50% before demand rises again.

So our question becomes, how small is too small to maintain over the short run? If Coldsprings parents insist on sending their kids to Otonabee Valley in the short run, the kids are going to want to go to Kenner with their friends, and the “short run” might be quite short. If KPR manages to persuade people otherwise, Kenner might have to struggle along for a while with a student body numbering in the four-hundreds.

With Keith Wightman, Roger Neilson and Otonabee Valley at 60% capacity, partnerships for schools must be considered. In previous posts, daycares have been suggested. This is an idea which was vigourously promoted by the highly-respected Fraser Mustard, whose Early Years Study suggested integrating early childhood education with existing public school facilities, creating a seamless transition for children and making schools more than ever community centers. Mustard’s study influenced the current government’s decision to implement full-day Kindergarten.



Fraser Mustard, "Renaissance man" and education expert,
says put pre-school programs in schools



A truly progressive-thinking school board with some free spaces in its buildings (like the Board we imaginarily work for) might jump on this idea and start some pilot projects. It looks like these three south-end schools might be just the place. Let’s start the dialogue on this with young south-end parents, early childhood education providers, and the school communities at large, including teachers and principals.

We can easily guess that the families of the south end aren’t going to want to give up Kenner CVI, forcing their children and grandchildren to bus all the way up to PCVS or out to Crestwood. We might surmise that even if we try to force Coldsprings parents to send their kids to Keene, most of them are going to refuse. Some of them might bite on TASSS – but some might not.

All this considered, before recommending that Kenner CVI and its neighbourhood network be made the subject of an accommodation review, let’s wait a year to have some discussions around how early-childhood education integration might be a part of the future of Keith Wightman, Roger Neilson and Otonabee Valley.

While that’s going on, we can take a good look at the situation around TASSS.

What is it about TASSS that has made KPR administrators want to try to direct Coldsprings kids all the way to Keene so they can later be sent up to TASSS for high school? We’ll find out in the next post.