Tough choice
Either lose busing or lose French immersion: board
KITCHENER — The public school board has imposed a difficult choice on some unhappy families.
Parents can move their children to two new schools that open near their homes in September, but must withdraw them from French immersion. Or they can stick with French immersion but lose busing to their current schools.
“I’m pretty frustrated by this,” said Martin Ritchie, whose daughter would lose busing to French immersion at a school far from her home. “French immersion is a really important program. It’s a good program that they’re trying to encourage, but you can’t encourage it if you’re just going to pull kids out of it.”
Amy Dean said her two daughters love French immersion and don’t want to abandon it to attend a new school closer to home. But the family can’t figure out how to juggle a complicated schedule when the girls lose busing to their current schools.
“There’s no viable solution,” she said. “To just take this away arbitrarily from these students who have been invested in this since Grade 1 seems ridiculously unfair.”
Parents estimate up to 170 children are caught in the dilemma. After hearing from upset families, the Waterloo Region District School Board is considering options, including grandfathering school buses for affected French immersion families.
More discussion is planned in April, and it’s too soon to speculate on outcomes, a spokesperson said.
The dilemma was created when the board launched two new suburban schools without full French immersion programs. Groh Public School will open in southwest Kitchener with French immersion for Grade 1 students only. Chicopee Hills, long delayed, is finally deemed on track to open in east Kitchener, but without French immersion due to low demand, the board says.
Families in those suburbs say keeping their children in French immersion may force them to pay thousands of dollars for child care, before and after school. They warn of traffic chaos as schools see more parents driving their children. Families looked into private busing but found it expensive and outside school board rules.
To limit busing costs, the board typically doesn’t bus French immersion students to schools outside their neighbourhoods.
That’s wrong-headed, some parents say, arguing that busing would make a valuable program more accessible to more families and help stem its high attrition rate. “We think it’s definitely worth the cost,” Ritchie said.
French immersion, where students learn in French for half the day, is increasingly popular but faces challenges. One in four Grade 1 students at the public board is enrolled in the program, but it’s estimated that 40 per cent could leave by Grade 8.
Boards struggle to recruit French immersion teachers. Some critics argue the program undermines the equality of public education, by segregating middle-class children from poorer or special-needs children who are less likely to participate.