School boards not doing their job when they play urban planners

Trustees should focus on putting needs of students first

What is the job of Edmonton’s public school trustees?

To run schools? Or to plan the city?

For years now, Edmonton’s two major school boards, both public and Catholic, have faced a major dilemma. Enrolment in Edmonton’s older schools, in more established neighbourhoods, is plummeting. We’re not just taking about socalled “inner city” schools — but older suburban neighbourhoods like Brookside and Laurier Heights and Steinhauer and Duggan. Meantime, families are flocking to brand new neighbourhoods on the city’s edges, like Callaghan, Windermere and Ambleside.

In September 2010, nine big new suburban schools opened in Edmonton — three Catholic and six public. The public board has two more schools planned to open this fall, in the Hamptons and in Summerside. It sounds like a lot — but it hasn’t been enough.

The new schools are either full to bursting, or expected to be full within the next two to three years. With the new schools at or above capacity, kids from the newest neighbourhoods have no choice but to travel significant distances, past two, three or even four, closer schools, to find classroom space.

Yet while a new school like Esther Starkman is far over its built capacity, with 858 students in a space designed for 750, last year there were 17 public schools in Edmonton with enrolments of fewer than 140 students, including older suburban schools such as Lendrum, Duggan, Kameyosek and James Gibbons. By contrast, there are 104 kindergarten students, alone at Starkman.

One answer to this dilemma, of course, might be for the board to amalgamate clusters of older schools with dwindling enrolments, and concentrate capital dollars on building schools where the children are.

But Edmonton’s public board has quite a different philosophy. Last year, Edmonton’s new crop of trustees, many elected on a platform of vowing to keep older schools open, gave local administrators direction to make renovating old schools, not building new ones, the district’s top capital priority.

Now, as the administration prepares its next three-year capital plan, trustees are about to decide whether to entrench that philosophy for the next planning cycle.

At a board meeting just this week, trustees approved a long list of recommendations to help keep shrinking schools in older neighbourhoods open. Some of those recommendations — like lobbying the province to allow schools to be more creative about leasing vacant space, make perfect sense, and fall well within the board’s authority. But other recommendations stray pretty far from the board’s actual mandate — to educate our community’s children.

For example, trustees voted this week to advocate for family-friendly housing in mature neighbourhoods and to fight for more housing for seniors, so as to “free up” housing for families with children. The board also endorsed a plan to lobby higher levels of government to provide incentives for retro-fitting older homes, to make them more attractive to younger families.

But is it really the school board’s job to chivvy childless seniors out of their homes? To fight for improvement grants for private homeowners?

As a parent — and one who lives in a mature core neighbourhood myself — I’d far rather see trustees focus their energies on advocating for their students and their schools, concentrating on things like classroom size, teacher training, student achievement, and high school completion rates. Our school boards have a big enough job to do, as it is, without becoming urban planners, to boot.

As a city, yes, we need to take practical steps to keep our city core economically and socially vibrant. We don’t want a hollowed-out doughnut of a city.

This Thursday morning, in fact, the city’s own community sustainability task force, set up by Mayor Stephen Mandel, and chaired by former city councillor Michael Phair and busi- ness and community leader Teresa Spinelli, will release its own report and recommendations on improving the health of Edmonton’s mature neighbourhoods, the ones that predate 1970.

All three of Edmonton’s school boards, public, Catholic and francophone, clearly need to be a part of that discussion; it does no good to have them planning at cross-purposes.

That’s how we got into this dilemma in the first place — forcing boards to play catch-up with urban sprawl development.

But we can’t find practical solutions if the Edmonton public board is firmly committed to keeping low-enrolment schools open, no matter what the cost, or the implications for the quality of education in schools with tiny enrolments, three-level split classes, and limited resources. In this day and age, when couples marry later and families are far smaller than in the 1950 or 1960s, we simply have too many aging schools, in need of expensive renovation, built too close together.

No matter how much urban renewal magic we work, we will never be able to fill up all those aging schools — not unless we ban the Pill and the two-income family. Instead of putting all the emphasis on building new schools, or fixing up old ones, we need a pragmatic balance that serves kids in every quadrant of the city, without pitting the needs of one set of communities against those of another.