Town Ward subtract PCVS = the only school-free ward in Ontario!

Now that we’ve had a look at a variety of scenarios in other Ontario cities comparable to Peterborough, let’s put the situation of PCVS into perspective.

If KPR administrators and out-of-town trustees have their way, Peterborough will become the only city in Ontario where an entire city ward is home to no regular English-language elementary or secondary schools, in either the public or Catholic systems.

It’s true – Town Ward, Peterborough’s most densely residential ward, with a population of 15,000 people, would be the only city ward in Ontario not to have any regularly accessible schools at all.

How could such a travesty of planning come to pass? There must be some imaginary version of Town Ward that exists in the minds of people who work at Fisher Drive and the out-of-town trustees who rubber stamp their plans – a version bearing little resemblance to reality.

Town Ward’s population density is twice as high as any of Peterborough’s other wards. There are no golf courses, large park lands, industrial areas, sprawling commercial spaces, or major public institutional properties. Except for Peterborough Square and the Market Plaza, every commercial strip in Town Ward is also residential – often right above or right beside businesses and offices. In fact, there’s hardly any area in the entire ward that isn’t residential in some capacity.

The only ward that comes close to Town Ward in residential orientation is Northcrest. With just a few more citizens living in an area twice the size of Town Ward, Northcrest is home to no fewer than four public elementary schools, two Catholic elementary schools, and one public high school with an intermediate wing (Adam Scott).

Town Ward has in recent memory lost Central Public School (beside the police station), King Edward Public School (where the new YMCA is), St. Peter’s Elementary (now residences, just off Reid St. west of downtown) and Sacred Heart near Lansdowne (now Monseigneur-Jamot, a tiny specialized French-Catholic board school).

The only regular English-language school in the ward today is PCVS.

The map below shows the distribution of schools in Peterborough – with PCVS removed. Secondary schools are represented by name, and elementary schools by a small pentagon – red for public schools, blue for Catholic. (Crestwood and James Strath are considered to be in Monaghan Ward, though at the moment they remain technically just beyond the city limit.) The city ward map is here.

                         Pub. elem.     Cath. elem.   Pub. sec.    Cath. sec.     Total

Northcrest             4                      2                      1                      0                      7

Monaghan              4                      2                      1                      1                      8

Otonabee                3                      2                      1                      1                      7

Ashburnham       3                      3                      1                      0                      7

Town Ward           0                      0                      1                      0                      1

The only other city wards in all of Ontario with as little as one school are the Trillium and Williamsville wards in Kingston. Both wards have considerably fewer residents than Town Ward – only about 10,000 – and Williamsville is a mere one square kilometer in area, while Trillium is an unusually laid-out ward just north of the penitentiary, divided by a river and large green space.

Sudbury recently saw the Rainbow school board re-invest in the historic, central Sudbury Secondary School, substantially rebuilding the facility with an emphasis on performing arts space, as you can read on NorthernLife.ca. With a population of 108,000 divided into twelve wards, each of Sudbury’s wards is home to many fewer people than our own Town Ward – yet each has not just one but several schools.

Even in Sault Ste. Marie, where the absence of public secondary schools from a more than 20 square kilometer area in the center of town has helped create a ghetto famed for prostitution, each of the city’s six wards is home to several schools.

Cities not using the ward system – such as Belleville, Niagara Falls, and Sarnia – if divided up in any rational geographical way into four or five areas roughly the size of Peterborough’s wards would have no fewer than four schools in each.

The planning standard for municipalities is an absolute minimum of one school for 10,000 residents – as indicated by the city of Peterborough’s recent documents indicating potential need for a new elementary school in the planned subdivision south of the 115 bypass near River Road.

The provincial rule of thumb for urban planning is that there should be almost no residences more than one kilometer from a publicly accessible school of some kind.

This is the case in every Ontario city in any way comparable to Peterborough. Even cities which have experienced zero population growth for decades, such as Windsor, Thunder Bay, and Sarnia, maintain this standard. In none of these cities are there any substantial number of residences further than one kilometer from a school.

Belleville, our nearest neighbour, with a population of about 50,000 is only two-thirds the size of Peterborough. Yet if we divide it into west, central, east and north quadrants (the central split by the river, and the north end being the newer neighbourhood close to the 401), each area has at least five schools. No Belleville residence is farther than one kilometer from a school. The city maintains two Catholic high schools and three public – including one, Quinte, right downtown.

Sarnia’s population has actually declined over the past two decades – at 72,000, it’s now smaller than Peterborough (nearly 80,000). If we divide Sarnia into north-east, north-west, south-east, and south-west quadrants, we find that the one with the fewest schools, the north-west – an area dominated by parkland, a golf course, and a cemetery – still has two public elementary schools, plus one Catholic. The historic, central Sarnia Collegiate remains alive and well.

In Niagara Falls, a city with a population almost exactly the same as Peterborough, only a very few residences in the northwest corner of town are slightly more than one kilometer from a school. The massive, historic Stamford Collegiate remains in operation close to the city's downtown.

If KPR administrators have their way, it won’t be a case of just a few residences in the corner of town. Thousands of central Peterborough residences will be 50% farther than this standard. There will be no regular English-language schools at all in the nearly 13 square kilometer area between Lansdowne and Parkhill, the river and Monaghan Road.

You can either live near a grocery store – or near a school. Close to the river – or close to a school. Near downtown employment and culture – or within walking distance of a school. You won’t be able to have both, if KPR has its way.

The geographical center of Peterborough is the corner of Charlotte and Monaghan. Families living in this neighbourhood will be a minimum of 3 km from the nearest public high schools (Kenner and Adam Scott), and 4 km from TASSS and Crestwood.

Titles Bookstore, the only new-release bookstore downtown, just announced that they’ll be closing, as reported by the Examiner this week. If there’s no high school – or indeed any school of any kind within walking distance – what chance will there be for anyone else to succeed in maintaining a new bookstore downtown?

Welland and Sault Ste. Marie have shown us what will happen if KPR is allowed to close PCVS – an institution built and still paid for by Peterborough citizens. Without any schools in the center of our community, we will join them in the sad parade toward American-style inner-city burnout, while residents in other Ontario cities take pity on us from afar.

How can we thank you, KPR, for this rare opportunity to become an Ontario leader in urban mismanagement?

Talk to the Hand

The bizarre and self-destructive behaviour of trustees and administrators at the Kawartha Pine Ridge District School Board continues to defy exaggeration.

In the past few posts, we’ve seen how misguided school board proposals to close central, historic high schools in other Ontario cities were met with community resistance. In Kitchener-Waterloo in 2003 the school board reversed its decision and kept KCI open. In Brantford in 2007, the school board reversed its decision to move Brantford Collegiate to a suburban location. In Barrie in 2011, the school board postponed the proposed closure of Barrie Central Collegiate while opportunities for partnerships with other educational institutions were pursued.

In the town of Chesley (in Bruce county) in 2011, an unpopular plan to close Chesley High was reversed after the mayor, MPP, and MP spoke out and a community member came up with a novel idea to save it. Just last week in Port Dover (on Lake Erie), the ARC appointed by the Grand Erie school board recommended against the administration’s proposal to close Port Dover Composite School, due to community concerns.

What do we get in Peterborough?

Talk to the hand.

Not satisfied with having provoked ordinary citizens into launching legal action – not satisfied with refusing to include municipal officials in planning discussions – not satisfied with ignoring the city’s official plan and the province’s Places to Grow Act – not satisfied with attempting to deprive their own staff and students of the rights to free speech – this past Monday night KPR trustees showed themselves eager to tarnish their images still further, while stoking the fires of citizens calling for their resignations. 

The Board meeting got off on the wrong foot as trustees attempted to prevent members of the public from even entering the publicly-funded board room at Fisher Drive to attend the supposedly public meeting. They posted a last-minute notice indicating their refusal to hear any delegations on the subject of PCVS, supposedly because of the legal action currently seeking a court injunction to halt the school’s closure. Anybody could guess that trustees have been instructed not to speak about PCVS while the case is before the courts – but what does this have to do with members of the public who want to address the board? It’s not like trustees have ever seen fit to verbally respond to delegations on the subject in the past anyway.  

When well-spoken student leader Kirsten Bruce attempted to express her well-founded concerns over the disregard KPR officials have shown for the safety of PCVS students who had been previously bullied at other schools or have been recently threatened or taunted, she was interrupted by Board Chair Diane Lloyd, and told to speak to her principal about the problem. Like many of Lloyd’s comments, this one made little sense, and was delivered in the condescending tone parents, students and members of the public have come to expect from her.

The ensuing train wreck of the meeting makes for entertaining viewing, captured here on video for posterity by PCVS student Zan Bilz. The Examiner report on the evening is here.

Not intimidated by Lloyd’s attempts to shut her down, Bruce insisted “I have a right to be heard. It’s not related to the closure, it’s related to my own safety.” Lloyd responded by telling Bruce she had mentioned the word “PCVS” three times already in her speech – as if these venerable initials were now “beyond the pale,” like certain other four-letter words. “We want you to sit down,” Lloyd told Bruce, as if they were in a primary school classroom. She then announced the name of the next speaker on the list – who happened to be Bruce’s mother.

Undaunted, Kirsten continued her presentation, pointing out to trustees the ramifications of KPR’s “divide and conquer” strategy which has fanned the flames of adolescent rivalries between high schools. Before she could finish, trustees ordered Bruce’s microphone to be turned off. Still, she persevered. When Bilz brought her camera to the board room door, the security guard forcibly attempted to prevent her from filming, covering the lens with his hand and telling her that “no video-cameras are allowed” in the board room –  in spite of the obvious fact that video-cameras from CHEX-TV have been routinely permitted.

As Bruce insisted that student safety is fact their responsibility, trustees suddenly adjourned the meeting. “The safety of my friends and my peers is my priority and it should be yours as well,” Bruce told the trustees, who showed their respect for this idea by getting up and slinking out the back door.

The conversion of the KPR board room into a primary classroom was complete, but with the adult-child relationship reversed, when PCVS student leader Collin Chepeka attempted to address Brighton-area trustee Cyndi Dickson and was reportedly met by a hand held up in his face and the comment “this means I’m not listening.”

Strangely, when Dickson ran for the position of trustee in 2010, she pledged that she would “always listen to any question, suggestion, concern or problem, or input that will have an impact on our schools.” 

The chanting of students in the Fisher Drive foyer so disturbed the remaining KPR officials that they threatened to call the police, as you can hear in the video. Educational Decree #49 – no chanting will be allowed on school board (aka “public”) property.

 

Students found the trustees’ behaviour so inappropriate that it actually made them laugh, as expressed in the video by senior student Wes Collette-Taylor. Indeed, as Plato observed, there is a surprisingly fine line between tragedy and comedy – and it seems that KPR has just crossed it. 

Former Monaghan Ward city council candidate Rennie Marshall wasn’t as amused by the trustees’ utter lack of diplomatic skills and inability to carry on a public meeting. Marshall had planned a presentation on KPR’s cavalier attitude toward asbestos in their schools. Unimpressed by the farce that the KPR boardroom has become, Marshall proposed meeting with MPP Jeff Leal to demand that the province appoint a supervisor and remove the trustees. “My father did not fight in World War II for this kind of democracy,” said Marshall.

When asked by the Examiner last week to comment on the legal action seeking a court injunction to halt the closure of PCVS, Diane Lloyd continued to maintain that the Peterborough community should simply roll over and accept having our city be steamrolled by people who don’t live here and don’t represent us. 

Worse, Lloyd continues to take a “blame the victim” stance, claiming that the joint student-parent-community resistance – not the forcible disemboweling of their school community by the school board – is what is making life “very difficult for the students.”

Ouch.

Echoing the courageous women who vocally challenged the public acceptability of men forcing themselves on females in the 1980s and 90s, we must ask Ms. Lloyd and her KPR cronies “what part of NO don’t you understand?”