The One-Room Schoolhouse
There are a couple of threads on Sooeys.com about the bus accident in Toronto (which has since had a tragic outcome) and the point was made about seatbelts not being on buses. It's something parents have questioned for years, but there were always reasons/excuses as to why this could not be done. It's hard to understand how a concern for the unlikely (kids trapped behind seatbelts in the case of an emergency) overtook something that seems like so reasonable a precaution, but there you go. It did. And seatbelts, or a lack thereof, may have done nothing to protect the kids on the bus, and I guess there's going to be an inquiry, but commonsense would tell us - they couldn't have hurt. I mean, isn't that why we have a mandatory seatbelt law for automobiles?
But speaking of commonsense, remember Mike Harris and his Commonsense Revolution? I do. That's because I knew Mike Harris to be a nothing more than a two bit thug from North Bay who'd never done much of anything that wasn't attached to the public teat. That he got elected calling himself "The Taxfighter" was pretty funny, too.
Gawd. Voters.
Anyway, if you're like everybody else in the province, you've probably noticed that there are a lot of school buses on the roads these days. I guess that's because they're cheaper than schools. Mike Harris closed a lot of schools when he was Premier. I was involved in one school closure battle here in Ottawa (we lost) and I've got to tell you - there's nothing dirtier'n school board politics.
Nothing. And maybe it's a coincidence and maybe it isn't, but just so you know - that's where Mike Harris got his start. After he was essentially fired (i.e. didn't pass his probation period at a time when you pretty much had to impregnate a student to not get hired on as a teacher - full-time) - he ran for the position of Trustee and won.
The rest, as they say, is history. Sort of like much of the Province of Ontario.
In any case, our school closure battle was so "hot" that the Trustee who won actually got more votes than the sitting Regional Councillor. Sadly, he turned out to be not the man we all wanted to think he was but knew he wasn't and when the time came to close our school so he could save his and see the fulfillment of his master plan - he did.
We (my ex and I) were mad because we'd bought our house so that our kids could walk to school, come home for lunch - the whole olden days shebang. Now the school was closed and we figured a toxic waste dump would be built in its place. (Real estate does crazy things to people. They say it's good for a community, homeownership, but I can't see how. People just get really NIMBY once they've shelled out for a house.)
Luckily, Ottawa, which pre-amalgamation had eight school boards: Ottawa Public, Catholic, French Public, French Catholic, Carleton Public, Catholic, French Public, French Catholic - still had four, post-amalgamation (there are cities for which amalgamation makes sense, cities for which is doesn't). The Ottawa boards combined with the Carleton boards and we had four boards. One of those boards, the French Public, bought the school and rebuilt it from the ground up into a much bigger school.
Some boards have money, some boards don't. Thank Gawd for the Huegenots, is all I can say.
We lived. The older two were in Middle School anyway (probably the most demented invention after that Mexican celebration where people fire their guns in the air, resulting in the accidental deaths of a few people every celebration) and the youngest took a bus for a year to a neighbouring open concept money pit that was located in an old (Conservative) money neighbourhood.
The Trustee who won lives across from his kid's school and, of course, it is still open. Sometimes $5,000/year is worth it, I guess.
But none of it really matters now. At the time it did - especially the part about having the grimy underbelly of municipal politics revealed to political neophytes - but kids grow up and once they're teenagers, a lot of life falls into perspective. Things that mattered SO MUCH when they were little, don't even register - and man, is it a relief.
So now, having perspective on the whole thing, I have to ask: Why are we pretending that life is like it was when kids could walk to school and come home for lunch except now they are all bused to school and aren't allowed off school property for lunch unless they have a note? I mean, sure, that's how I went to school. I walked and came home for lunch. But nobody came along and shut down my school, either. Even though it wasn't exactly packed to the rafters by the time I left.
Oh wait. They did close down my high school. After I left, closed it down and built a new one out in the middle of nowhere that has been slowly sinking into the mud ever since. EVERYBODY is bused to that school. Mine was in the middle of the city and no one took the bus, but it was old and it was Bill Davis' Ontario, and developers needed work then, too.
If I have any bitterness it's that we fell for the idea that you could live the way you were brought up - that it would just cost a bit more. But you can't live the way you were brought up. Times have changed. People live differently, large numbers of people live differently, and, while there's nothing wrong with that and maybe everything right, I'm not sure why we're pretending schools should be neighbourhood schools and not something more like government office buildings.
I mean, think about it. Would it not be easier on everybody to have children going to the same location, in as much as it's possible, in our cities in order to get an education? What difference does the actual building make? And since developers don't build schools along with all that tract housing that people, young families, buy - and taxpayers then have to - why not take a deep breath and admit that schools would be better located where parents go to work - downtown - instead of having all these little neighbourhood schools everywhere that school boards can just shut down on a whim anyway as the neighbourhood ages or the government decides it's not going to pay for building repairs and whatnot because its best buddy - Mr. Developer - needs work?
That's what I think we should do. Build one-stop drop-offs - just like Queen's Park or somesuch - and call them "schools" instead of "offices".
And then bite the bullet even harder and, no matter what comes out of this inquiry, put seatbelts on all the school buses driving the kids to the "School Depot".
Hey - there could even be a marketing campaign with a jingle: "Let's all go to the School Depot"...
