Marianne Meed Ward
Have your say on the six options for potential closure of one or more Burlington high schools, or none, by filling out the online survey here: School Closure Survey
Survey on potential Burlington school closures now active
Public meetings Feb. 28 & March 7
The six options have emerged for public input from the Program and Accommodation Review Committee of 14 parents, two from each of Burlington’s seven high schools. I am one of two parent representatives on the PARC representing Burlington Central High School.
The options include closing Central & Pearson; Bateman & Pearson; Bateman; Nelson; or no school closures. You can also have your say at two public meetings Feb. 28 and March 7.
For more information on the options, including links to Halton District School Board reports, visit my earlier article here: Four schools named in potential closure options
I don’t understand how the board repeatedly considers it productive to suck so much time and effort from thousands of people when many of these options would not even be on the table, and a qualified team would make decisions in a reasonable world. Thinking of what else we could have accomplished as a community with all these meetings.
I just completed the survey and found it a frustrating experience and unlikely to produce useful data. Many answers for me demanded qualifications which the format does not really allow for, though there is a general comment section for each option. Committe members with months of experience assessing and evaluating the implications of the proposed changes might be able to answer the questions without gross errors or self-contradiction, but any stakeholder member of the community who is not equally informed would need to spend days examining each option before committing to responses in order to avoid a set of head-scratching results (which I can’t imagine would occur anyway, with computer assembly of the responses). Add to that the questions raised by the community about the source data and I am extremely doubtful about the efficacy of the whole exercise and frankly suspicious of how it would be interpreted and used. I urge the board to take extensive public delegations and hold only public meetings with open, fulsome discussion and debate of the proposals, so that all points of view and the nuances of each choice are clear before a decision is made.