CBC Thursday, March 26, 2009
Editor – Superintendent Sandy MacDonald changes his story one more time.
This time kids from Eastern PEI can’t get into UPEI.
Maybe they should put in some disabled parking for a few of them and lower tuition for everyone.
Let’s see how many reasons does Sandy have: 1) saving money – no ; 2) quality of education – nope ; 3) teachers need a coffee clatch, not : 4) no music teachers – sure in PEI with more fiddlers per square mile and the best Celtic music in North America ; 5) you fill in the blanks on his lies. I’m bored with Sandy’s shifting prevarications.
CBC
Trustees for P.E.I.’s Eastern School District heard stories of academic achievement Wednesday evening about one of 11 schools recommended for closure.
Superintendent Sandy Macdonald was at the meeting to defend his report.Superintendent Sandy MacDonald was at the meeting to defend his report. The Morell schools, to the northeast of Charlottetown, had a say during the last of the scheduled public consultation meetings on a report that recommended the closure of the schools to deal with declining enrolments in the district.
About 150 people attended the meeting at Morell High School. Fourteen presentations were made by parents from St. Peters, St. Teresa’s and Tracadie Cross, the three schools under threat. Several parents highlighted student academic achievements as a reason to keep the schools open.
Michelle Gouthro showed the board of trustees a research project her six-year-old son did at St. Teresa’s school. Gouthro said St. Teresa’s has a long-standing reputation for quality teaching, and she wants proof it’s otherwise before she can justify sending her son on a much longer bus ride to Mount Stewart Consolidated.
“If I thought for one second that our teachers believe that the education at St. Teresa’s was not in the best interest of the children, then I would once again personally advocate to close St. Teresa’s doors,” she told the board.
The parents wanted to know why academic performance of students was not considered in the superintendent’s report.
Support services a problem
Superintendent Sandy MacDonald did not dispute that students at St. Teresa’s are getting a good education, but he said academic achievement across the district is lacking on the whole, with high school students unable to meet the requirements needed to enter university.
He said parents have to look at the bigger picture.
“If a child is not doing well, at St. Teresa’s or a small school, it’s very, very difficult to get the support services that they get at a larger school,” he said.
MacDonald said all three schools are lacking full-time resource and special-education staff.
If closed, students at St. Teresa’s and Tracadie Cross would go to Mount Stewart and those from St. Peters will go to Morell Consolidated. That could happen as early as this September.
tongue in cheek
I wonder why they don’t just hold off closing schools until the 2011 census comes out . From what I can see of the 2006 census compared to 2001 it does show a significant drop in children from ages 0 to 15 but it also shows a significant gain in people from 15 to 64 , which would indicate an increase of taxpayers ,however marginal it may be,the cost of running these small schools should not have changed dramatically in those few years.This data is probably what Myrtle Jenkins Smith based her reports on and they are public knowledge so what makes her the expert?