Closing Central
The Barrie Advance. Editorial, Sep 23, 2010 – 6:00 AM
The elephant has been clearly highlighted in bright red pen.
Barrie Central Collegiate is on the Simcoe County District School Board’s radar in a bad way. After Tuesday night’s inaugural meeting, the Barrie ARC has set out to close BCC.
The thing is, who’s surprised?
Not the school’s students, not the school’s parent representative and certainly not us.
Not Barrie Ward 2 Coun. Jeff Lehman, who asked, “What did you expect? (SCDSB associate director) Carol McAulay said it six months ago.”
When you set a school up to fail from the get-go, you aren’t surprising anyone when you peg closing it as the best, most financially prudent option.
The SCDSB has harped on about how the school is prohibitive to repair, and how the boiler system is staring at imminent failure. Fine. But why not look at effective ways to fix these problems?
In other parts of the board’s jurisdiction, we have under-capacity schools staying open. Here, in Barrie, Central is at capacity in a part of town set to grow, yet the ARC has decided closing it is best.
But closing Central would see its students shuffled off to other schools already at or over capacity. It just doesn’t make sense. Central is an essential piece in Barrie’s downtown growth and closing it shouldn’t be the board’s first conclusion.
How can Barrie’s downtown grow effectively and become the complete, booming community the province intends when the board has already succeeded in closing the elementary school (Prince of Wales) and has now picked the same fate for the high school?
The only thing we can say is, at least the board’s being open from the get go.
Ward 5 Coun. Lynn Strachan, the city’s representative on the ARC, summed it up nicely: “I was really happy they came forward with this at the beginning, because we know what we’re up against.”
The fight is on to save Central.
