But Four Closures Blocked By Community Organizing
By Errol Young – BASICS Issue #20 (July / August 2010)
The most direct attack on public resources in Toronto is currently being made by the Toronto District School Board, with its plans to close and sell up to 100 local schools in the coming years.
The Board wanted to close 12 schools this year alone, but due to community resistance only eight will be closed: Briar Hill Jr. P.S., Kent Sr. P.S., Silverthorn Jr. P.S., Pringdale Gardens Jr. P.S., McCowan Rd. P.S., Heron Park Jr. P.S., Peter Secors Jr P.S. and Brooks Rd. Jr P.S.
Many communities fought against these closures, each in their own way. In one predominantly middle-class area, Willowdale, the community worked behind the scenes to keep their schools open.
The Accommodation Review Committees (ARCs) that the TDSB has been using to “consult” communities about the closures has been a complete sham. In a more working class area like Jane/Finch, staff actually lost control of the public meetings.
On February 2, parents refused to be split into discussion groups led by hired coordinators so that community issues could be discussed as a community. Staff closed down the meeting immediately.
As a result, the TDSB will not be bothering the Jane/Finch community for a while and the Shoreham Public School will remain open.
Many parents have complained that the ARC staff do not listen to their concerns. Parents have said that the TDSB staff has a preordained agenda at each community meeting that they do not vary from; meetings are called and cancelled at the last-minute; difficult questions are consistently ignored; and the agendas of public meetings are engineered to sidestep the issue that a school is planned to close.
At one meeting, staff recruited former students and others to speak in favour of school closing in order to skew public meetings in favour of the Board’s agenda.
However, the fact that the “consultative” methods that the TDSB has been using to convince people to go along with school closures has worked in eight communities is a testament to the disorganization of our class.
This rush to pull resources away from the working class and sell them off to the private sector is about following the neo-liberal agenda that is trying to mine the public sector to increase its profits.
From the perspective of the cash-strapped TDSB, which has been pointing to its $2.8 billion backlog in deferred repairs when justifying the closures, there are potentially hundreds of millions of dollars to be gained from the sale of school lands.
Our job, as citizens, is to fight this process. We have to make it very difficult, politely at first, for any board to close a school by asking those difficult questions and sometimes being disruptive.
This does not mean that schools will not, and sometimes should not, close. It does mean that when a school does close, the decision should have gone though a rigorous and legitimate community consultative process. And when a school is closed, the public should retain the land and building for its own use, either as a future school or for some other socially-necessary function.
For more information see saveschools.wordpress.com.
Related posts:
