More schools needed to house those extra teachers

It is difficult to believe Premier Christy Clark and her Liberal MLAs have any defence for how shabbily they treated public education in the the last 15 years.

Despite being advised by staff not to proceed with Supreme Court hearings into the teacher’s class size and composition dispute, Clark pushed, vainly, on.

And, in the process, spent multi-millions of dollars on lawyers and government,staff time.

She and her MLAs lost. The teachers won, and now the system must struggle to catch up.

Finally, students can look forward to smaller classes with some extra help and reasonable support for challenged students.

But here is the rub. The Liberal government is way behind in the building of new schools with hundreds of portable classrooms throughout, B.C., many of substandard construction.

It is quite likely, as the better class sizes are implemented, that more portables will be added to schools to accommodate smaller classes.

The government may be forced to also open schools they had previously closed and even put some schools on shift to make the class size rules work.

Indeed, some students may end up spending most of their school years in portable classrooms. The new government must act quickly to build more schools.

Some public educators simply believe that the whole disruption to public education was intentional in order to foster the private school system and to make the public overcrowded.

Many still believe public funds should not be spent on private school education that have narrow religious creeds or promote elitism.

Clark has a son who attends a prestigious private school, which makes it look like she does not support public education.

She has done little to state or make it look like she is committed to public education.

There is no evidence that any of her MLAs argued against her attack on teachers and the public school system.

It is imperative parents of the generation of children who lost proper public education support, appear at all-candidates’ forums and question these actions vigorously.

The government must be held to account for a serious mistake, affecting tens of thousands of young people.

Watch for such meetings and press for action, especially on school building.

(The Central Okanagan Retired Teachers will host a forum April 25 at 7:30 p.m. at the Kelowna Community Theatre. The public may submit questions at the event.)

One of our local MLAs sits in his nice office just around the corner from a school that is over 60 years old with 10 portables.

Despite stating constantly that a rebuild of Rutland Middle School is their No. 1 priority, MLAs Norm Letnick, Steve Thomson and Clark, have failed to deliver.

Three hundred students are stacked in tin-can portables with no water, no bathrooms.

You have to wonder, where is their conscience as they blithely press forward with taxpayerpaid, government advertising that pretends everything is rosy?

Retired teacher Reg Volk writes on politics and local issues.