Closing schools should not be a cost-cutting measure, according to the Anglophone East District Education Council Chair.
This comes after a suggestion from the Holt government that closing schools with 100 or fewer students can potentially save money.
“The Minister of Finance has identified that schools with fewer than 100 students could potentially be closed. That’s a general statement that was put out there. We have three schools in Anglophone East that fit that criteria,” Dominic Vautour told our newsroom.
Riverside-Albert, Havelock and Dorchester Consolidated schools could be impacted if the province decides to go that route.
Vautour explained that there is a provincial education policy called Policy 409 that deals with the opening and closing of schools. He added that they evaluate the feasibility of any schools with fewer than 100 students on an annual basis.
Beneficial to the communities
“We have year over year looked at these and decided that, no, these are not schools we can cut. These are schools that are beneficial to their communities. We do not want to see students on a bus for longer than they have to. We don’t want to see students educated in communities away from their own community. We feel that it’s very, very important to keep people, students, and also staff members close to their own communities,” Vautour stressed.
“There are benefits to larger schools as well. More facilities, more opportunities for different classes to be given, for example, but there’s certainly an argument to be made for small community schools as well,” Vautour added.
Student services could be impacted
As the Chair for the District Education Council, Vautour is in regular communication with the Education Minister and expressed that the DEC strongly opposes the closure of any school.
“We’ve experienced massive growth, so we certainly don’t want to see any schools closed because we already have overcrowded schools. If they choose not to close schools, there’s also the very real impact of a major budgetary cut being floated around. They floated 10 to 15 per cent, and that’s a massive number. There is no way we can do any type of cut of that magnitude, without seriously impacting student services,” Vautour emphasized.
He stressed that healthcare and education should not be where the government is looking at cuts, “We have to take care of our people, and we have to educate our children.”
