National Post: 2008 April 25
By Natalie Alcoba
The forecast at the Toronto District School Board is one of decline. It has lost about 30,000 students over the past eight years, and will lose another 30,000 by 2016. Forty schools sit half-empty, dozens more are barely at 60% capacity.
Meanwhile, the cost of repairing and refurbishing ageing facilities is on the rise. The board says it will need $1.4-billion in maintenance work by the fall. “The TDSB is spending too many dollars on buildings instead of students,” trustees learned from staff in the facilities department last summer. “Change is inevitable.”
Now the TDSB is looking at the very properties that are draining its resources as a possible solution.
Staff estimate that as much as $3-billion in excess real estate could be sold off — some of it tied up in 83 buildings that sit empty or leased.
Last year, the board convened a group of well-respected urban development giants to review those properties; this month, it approved a blueprint for future school closures, which pushes a bigger school model that maximizes space, and suggests middle schools might be phased out.
But as this month’s debate over closing 39 school pools illustrated, any changes will likely be met with fierce resistance. Even on the board there are divisions on what kinds of schools Toronto children need.
Trustee Bruce Davis offers a passionate defence of “village” schools. He counts a number of small schools in his ward of Etobicoke-Lakeshore, and said they are in the business of “incubating” student success. Virtually every staff member knows every student, and “that is a very powerful thing.”
“It’s just a different vision,” said Mr. Davis, who voted against the closures blueprint. ‘‘Maybe we can’t have everything, but I don’t think it’s a crisis, and I don’t think we should be going to a widget model of large schools.”
TDSB chairman John Campbell asked: “How low does enrolment have to go before we take action?”
Students across the system are being shortchanged, he argues, from those attending small inner-city schools that cannot offer an array of courses, to suburban children who have waited five years for a local school to be built.
“It’s about making better use of the school space that we have, and it’s also providing more enriching program opportunities for students.”
Adding to the TDSB’s quandary is the burgeoning enrolment in some inner suburbs.
The TDSB gets no money from the provincial government to build schools because of its surplus space, said Sheila Penny, in charge of the facilities department.
It has been able to pay for new schools in suburban areas that are growing by quietly selling off properties it no longer needs. That is how Thomas L. Wells elementary school in Scarborough-Rouge River was built three years ago. With 618 students, it is four children shy of capacity.
“In the northeast part of the city, our schools are literally bursting at the seams,” said trustee Shaun Chen.
Five hundred students living near Meadowvale Road and Sheppard Avenue have been taking a five-kilometre bus trip to a holding school for the past few years because the board has been unable to build a school sooner.
Scarborough-Rouge River and Don Valley West were the only two wards in the city facing space crunches last year. In contrast, the inner-city ward of Davenport is the most under-enrolled.
“To me, there are some areas where consolidation makes common sense,” Mr. Chen said.
Investing in new schools, or upgrading dilapidated older ones, also makes sense: Thomas L. Wells’ environmentally sensitive design shaves 40% off its energy bill.
But it is not easy to find money for new schools at the TDSB, Mr. Chen said.
That the province “sees us as a system and doesn’t see us as a collection of individual, very diverse neighbourhoods” sets the stage for trade-offs, he lamented.
Further, he said, the province now wants to expand to full-day kindergarten. ‘‘If we are going to have our kindergarten doubled, we’re going to need space across the city,” Mr. Chen said.
One thing that is clear: The board is gearing up for a major reorganization that will start small, in wards with trustees who are eager to tear down the old to make room for the new.
“Politically, there’s a stronger will and recognition on this elected board than there was in the last elected board on moving in that direction,” chairman John Campbell said.
“Yes, some schools will close that have students in them. Those students will hopefully be better off by going to a new school where there are more students, more programs. And with the selling off of some properties we will have raised money to make capital improvements in the remaining schools.”
The recently approved report from the General Asset and Program Planning (GAPP) committee sets parameters that will keep schools accessible to its students, either by foot for the younger students or by public transit for those in high schools.
And it pushes for innovation in education — secondary students may in the future, for example, attend “a network” of schools that offer a larger breadth of programming. It also pegs optimal school size at 450 for elementary schools, and 1,200 in high school, a point that drew Mr. Davis out of his chair in opposition at the last board meeting.
Mr. Davis was one of five trustees to vote against the report.
“I’m not sure there is an optimal size,” Mr. Davis said in an interview this week. “There may be a size below which a school is not viable... and I see some schools that are so small, that it’s hard to get the grade configuration.”
But he worries that the guidelines set out in the GAPP report were made with the provincial funding formula, not the interests of the child, in mind.
“The funding formula says you get a teacher-librarian if you have 450 kids, so where do you think the 450 came from?”
Meanwhile, he pointed out, the boards energy bill is $75-million a year.
“We don’t have one solar panel on one school, anywhere. There are [other] things we can do to help reduce the $40-milion shortfall.’’
