‘They don’t care’: The locals fighting the council’s plan
OUR education writer James Mcenaney spent a day travelling through the area to find out how people feel about the council’s proposals to mothball the school.
AS soon as you’re south of Dalmellington, the road tightens a little and starts to twist more earnestly as it cuts its path through the hills.
Within minutes of crossing into Dumfries and Galloway, I have pulled over at the side of the road to wait for Belinda, who is coming to guide me down the track towards her home near Knockengorroch.
Belinda’s son attends Dalry Secondary School. Their home is near the most northerly edge of the catchment area, so the council’s plans to transfer pupils to Castle Douglas, which would almost double the distance between them and their allegedly local school, would have a major impact on the time he has to spend travelling each day.
“They don’t care,” she says of the local council. “They’re not interested. It’s just about the money.”
Ultimately, she feels that the council has been “planning this for a while”, drawing a line from the introduction of a shared headteacher through the decline in subject provision to the falling school roll and, ultimately, to proposals to mothball the school and send the pupils elsewhere.
The council’s approach to engaging with parents, she adds, “feels like a sham”.
I leave Belinda and head off for Carsphairn which, once I have returned to the main road, is about five miles south.
Until a few years ago, Carsphairn had a primary school that was part of the catchment for Dalry Secondary; today, however, the building looks entirely lifeless and utterly abandoned.
I am joined by Sylvia, a local woman.
Sylvia tells me about efforts to “regenerate” Carsphairn, making use of funds from the multiple nearby windfarms to attract new people (especially families) to the area, but worries that the boarded-up school building presents a significant barrier to those plans. It’s hard to disagree with that belief, or with the view that this school has been closed rather than mothballed.
My next stop is a few miles north of Dalry, at a new and very beautiful house standing proudly between the road and the still grey water of Earlstoun Loch. I’m here to meet the owner, John Paterson, who is also the chair of the Glenkens & District Community Action Plan Steering Group, as well as Sarah Ade, who is a member of both that group and the local parent council.
The Glenkens, they tell me, needs to change, but is being held back by a council that, instead of looking for ways to encourage positive developments, has displayed a “lack of aspiration for the whole area”. I hear about plans to build new homes, and the intention to attract families with young children, but this is contrasted with the hard reality that some local parents are now considering moving out of the area if the mothballing plans for Dalry Secondary are successful.
Rather than closing their school, they want to see the council engage in a “grown up discussion” about the future of the entire area, with a view to reversing population decline and tapping into the considerable natural resources available to them.
A little further down the road I meet Sharon and Harriett, both of whom are parents of current and, they hope, future pupils of Dalry Secondary School. Sharon’s family has lived in the area for generations, and she sees the school as “part of the community”. Closing it is simply unthinkable to her.
Harriett agrees, and adds that the council’s plans will lead to Dalry and the Glenkens becoming “some kind of retirement area, an unbalanced and unsustainable community.”
In Castle Douglas, Linda Dorward, a Labour councillor, will also support the suspension of the council’s mothballing policy, and tells me that taking part in the recent bus ride through the school catchment area helped her to understand the issues that people in Dalry and the Glenkens are facing.
Linda wants the council to start a research project looking at how investment in Dalry Secondary School, and a potential expansion of what it offers to pupils and other local people, might help to attract more people to the Glenkens.
“It’s bigger than just the school,” she says. “And this is a big test for us a region.”
And as I drive back towards Glasgow, I get the feeling she’s absolutely right.