NO REAL PLANNING

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

Slick Sask. Party ads that extol the great planning of the Wall government must be scrutinized carefully in light of recent news items that report that our schools are full and that new schools are a top priority for province.

Our resource-fed economy has attracted 100,000 new residents, but it would seem that Premier Brad Wall’s government didn’t realize that many of them would be bringing children or would be having babies after they arrived. Does it think the school problem started yesterday?

The result has been that a school such as St. Volodymyr, which was built to house 375 students, must deal with 520 children. And the same thing is happening in schools in all major centres. Many recently arrived students also have difficulty speaking and understanding English, but the government also took away teaching assistants who could have helped with these problems. The present conditions make it difficult, if not impossible, for teachers to teach regular classes and also a second language.

The backlog of problems is forcing the government to play an expensive game of catch-up, obvious in its hurried P3 school building announcement.

Wall and his party have been busy planning advertisements praising themselves. If they had done some real planning to deal with the school population, most of the problems would have been avoided. But to cover their ineptitude, they present us with nasty, negative, American-style attack ads. Randy Nelson Saskatoon