“State of the Art” Adult Centre Not Such Big News

Maybe it’s just a slow news day or something, I don’t know. The morning news today made a big deal of announcing that Lester B Pearson School Board has just opened a new “state of the art” vocational training centre for anglophones. Much emphasis was placed on the fact that the two programs offered by the centre (electricity, and installation/repair of telecommunications equipment) are in such high demand that there is a two-year waiting list for them.

Oddly though, there was no mention of the “new” centre on the board’s own web site. Not on the front page of the web site, where we are instead told that an elementary school choir sang at Monday’s council meeting - and actually offered video of two songs they performed!

Not in the press release section, where the latest news is of the March 2008 resignation of the commissioner for Beaconsfield.

Not on the board’s adult and vocational education site, Pearson Skills. One page, which must not have been updated since early fall, states that the electrotechnology centre is under construction & is “due to open” in January 2008 (actually, the centre began accepting students as early as November 2007.)

Not on the pages that are actually dedicated to the Pearson Electrotechnology Centre (PEC.) Their latest news item is the beginning of evening classes in January!

What strikes me about all this (non?)news is that much emphasis is placed on how the centre is “state of the art” with “all new equipment” and it has been years in the making. The television news piece and the web site photo gallery both show a computer lab with sleek, black equipment - workstations with brand new keyboards and LCD monitors.

Now, I don’t know what kind of equipment is available in other elementary & secondary schools throughout the board, but I can tell you with a certainty that the equipment available at our local elementary school has clunky old CRT monitors. Even in the computer lab there isn’t even enough equipment for each child in a class to have access to their own computer. Going back a few short years, I can remember a time when a vandal had damaged some of the lab’s equipment and there was a possibility it would close because the school couldn’t fund new pointing devices. Luckily, some parents were able to arrange for the donation of second-hand equipment by a private company. So the little lab remains open, such as it is.

All that glitters is not gold, my friends. Is this school board really the cutting edge institution it appears to be? Or is all this glitz really a game of robbing Peter to pay Paul, with the goal of bolstering a failing institution’s reputation?

Lester B Pearson School Board has been consistently closing down its elementary schools and shuffling kids around over the past few years. The issue that is always addressed first is attendance: English school boards in Quebec are often heard to say that their declining enrollment is due in large part to the French Language Charter (aka Bill 101.) That wouldn’t do much to explain why school closures are also an issue in British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan and Ontario, of course.

Obviously declining school enrollment is a problem on a national level - or close to it. It seems to me the question that the media never examines is how schools come to be slated for closure/conversion. When our local school was (again) on the chopping block about a year ago we learned that the criteria are weighted heavily when it comes to the school’s attendance capacity, a number derived in large part from its square footage.

In this particular school there had been a number of rooms converted for adult education (science labs and such) which was later became useless space when the adult population was transferred to another facility due to concerns over young children and adults being educated in the same building.

Those classrooms sit empty now, as the laboratory equipment is not appropriate for primary aged students. However when the attendance to capacity ratio is examined, the area of those empty classrooms will always be considered by the board. As a result the school appears to have a chronically low enrollment which cannot be remedied, because the cost of removing the specialized equipment is greater than allowing the rooms to go unused. And just plain greater than the school can afford to deal with.

This school will likely be considered for closure each time the board needs to cut spending, unless and until someone can find a better solution for the unusable lab space. One wonders who originally decided to make such a costly renovation to the building - and what that person’s fate within the board has been….

Similarly, I understand another school in the board was closed because it required renovations to provide hot lunch facilities for students, and this was considered too expensive to be feasible. Students are now transported to another school while their former school was renovated to provide dormitory accommodation for 160 students recruited from other countries, who attend an international school that has also made the news rather prominently. The board’s three year plan shows that there are another five buildings simply standing empty at the moment.

While schools are targeted - sometimes repeatedly - because of issues around capacity/attendance or necessary renovations, the board’s latest $600,000 surplus from the 2006-2007 year. This is money the board said was going to be invested back in the schools - oh yeah, and the centres….

The board’s strategic plan for 2006-2009 identifies several goals it would like to achieve to improve itself, in four different categories. It is interesting to note that of the four strategies listed for improving graduation rates in schools experiencing difficulties in this area, one strategy is to “Affirm Vocational Education as a viable pathway to certification” (with an expected increase of 5% of referrals from the youth sector) and a second strategy is to “Promote Adult Education as an alternative and flexible path leading to certification/diploma and prerequisites for further learning” (again with a 5% increase in referrals by 2009.) (These figures apply to referrals made by high school staff, but further down in the list of strategies is the goal of increasing the adult enrollment itself by 10% as of 2009.)

While this seems to be a bit of a twist on the old practice of funneling students who don’t achieve into vocational education or waiting for them to drop out and later trying to pick them up as adult students, it’s not so very different perhaps. What is frightening is that it seems to be a higher profile and more acceptable plan now.

The other two strategies for improving graduation rates are to have the schools in question put their own plans into place (minimal board support,) and to provide more professional development for teachers who are instructors of the required math and sciences courses by means of “Board-wide and school-based team meetings” and “Review/study guides for teachers and students.”

Not as cool a plan as the “Regional initiatives grants and Professional Improvement grants” or the “Marketing measures and strategies targeting students, staff, administration, parents and professionals” suggested for increasing the vocational education referrals. The latter sounds to me like an all-out marketing plan, while the former could be anything from a sincere desire to create study guides, to an excuse to hold a couple of catered meetings and pay some overtime.

Were there other strategies to improve the student experience? Yes. Most of them involve teacher and administrator recruitment, training and support. Some had to do with updating physical plant and especially computer hardware/software, for which the board should be given a nod.

But it seems to me these are things that should be expected in a school board: a safe, clean environment in which to learn; adequate teaching materials and access to technology; properly trained staff. To my mind, these are the minimum requirements of a public school system. Without them we don’t have functioning schools, so they should come above all other priorities when choices must be made about where funds should be spent.

I did note that there was no mention of acquiring better books or other teaching materials, nor of working with the government and publishing houses in the province to see actual English-language textbooks produced for the secondary students who will soon be at a disadvantage when the curriculum reform rolls into secondary IV and V (see my post on this issue.) Instead, the board seemed more concerned with getting the word out about its students’ successes. In fact, specific modes for communicating these were identified and actual quotas were set. This is detail that was sorely lacking in the plans to improve graduation rates.

Wouldn’t it be great to see a school board whose elementary and secondary schools in the Lester B Pearson School Board being described as “state of the art”? I’m not naïve: I know that big publicity for adult centres and foreign language students means a higher profile board that gets better funding. But consider this: in a time of what is described as educational crisis, a board that put its youth students first and made sure they had the best of everything they needed to learn with would earn itself quite a reputation.

It’s a choice to be made, quite simply. Or not…

There are eleven senior high schools in the board. How many are well ranked according to the latest Fraser Institute’s school report card? John Rennie High School was rated a 6.5, and Beaconsfield High School received a 6.2 out of 10. These two institutions are considered the flagship schools of the board, their crème de la crème.

Rated on things like provincial exam marks, percentage of students who stay in school and graduate on time, gender equity, and how realistically school marks reflect the provincial marks, the high schools of Quebec’s largest Anglophone school board rated on average a 5.6 on 10. If that were a student mark it would be considered a failure in this province, as our public school pass mark is 60%.

Only one school out of eleven - and not one of the flagship schools - was rated in the top 100 schools out of more than 450 private and public institutions listed by the Fraser Institute. St Thomas High School was the top rated public school in the province. With a rating of 8 on 10, it actually ranked higher than some private schools. Sadly though, the three schools mentioned are the only ones in the board that received a rating of 6/10 or higher. Again, if we were looking at student marks that would leave the majority of high schools in this board with a failing mark.