ARC report recommends school closures in Upper Canada district
The future is not looking good for at least one English elementary school in the Prescott-Russell region.
The Upper Canada District School Board (UCDSB) received the final report on its Student Accommodation Review Committee consultation process (ARC) during the Feb. 15 board session. The ARC process began last year as the UCDSB tried to find ways to reduce its operation costs, in the wake of declining student enrolment numbers.
The UCDSB, like other school districts, depends on student subsidy funding from the province for the bulk of its operation costs. But the Education Ministry’s allocations to each school district depend on student enrolment. Reductions in total student enrolment for a district means a reduction in the annual student support funding from the ministry.
As stated in the UCDSB final report, the essential question for our school district throughout this (ARC) process remains, given the resources available to our school district, “do we have the right number of schools in the right places to support our vision for educational programming?”
The ARC review process examined student numbers at all UCDSB elementary and secondary schools, and determined which schools are under-populated, given the cost to maintain both of them in terms of staff, students, and services.
“The board has significantly more instruction space than it receives funding to operate and to maintain our schools,” the final report stated. “The board has significantly more space than it can generally use to demonstrate business cases to the ministry for capital upgrades to schools. The board’s excess inventory of school buildings continues to age which, in turn, is expanding its need for capital upgrades, and the provincial funding the board receives for all aspects of schools favours the consolidation of schools to demonstrate optimal levels of enrolment and efficient use of school space.”
For the UCDSB’s Prescott-Russell neighbourhood of schools, the ARC final report recommended Plantagenet Public School be closed as of September 2017 and its students transferred to Rockland Public School. The report also recommended confirmation by June 30 of this year about the boundary for the school catchment area, dealing with the area south of County Road 3, which includes the Village of St-Isidore. The goal is to determine whether in future, any UCDSB students from that area attend elementary and secondary schools in Vankleek Hill or in Rockland.
The ARC report includes recommendations dealing with other UCDSB schools in other neighbourhood catchment regions. The UCDSB board will make its final decision on the ARC report and recommendations at its March 23 public meeting.