Letters sent to The Premier, Minister of Education, MLA's and Quesnel School District Trustees...
August 9, 2002
Dear Members of the Board of Trustees, School District #28
We have been following the plight of your Wells residents with great sadness.
In March of this year we formed a group in Vancouver called Save Our Schools to express parents’ grave concerns about the under funding that the provincial government created in education. Although we came together as a small group of PAC chairs and PAC executive, within two weeks we had support from every school in the city, and the signatures of fourteen thousand residents. Our message was a simple one: we held the provincial government responsible for education funding. We asked the province to fund the legislated teachers’ salary increases and to give sufficient funds so that all of our children could receive the first class education that the government promised them.
Save Our Schools Vancouver is a local initiatve, but we realized from the beginning that our message had provincial implications. One of the first things that we spoke about was that local school boards were going to feel pressured to make choices that would hurt certain kids as they scrambled to balance their budgets. We did not want this to happen in Vancouver and worked with local schools and with the trustees to represent us. We did not want our trustees to have to make choices that would pit kids with one set of needs against kids with another set of needs. We wanted them to know that we were concerned with all of the kids and that they were all at risk if the government’s actions were not challenged.
To date our trustees have had to make some very difficult choices, but Vancouver children have been “lucky”. The trustees have not cut any one program in its entirety. They are working with us to send a message to the province that they need more money to provide a good education and keep services for all our children.
The reason we are saddened by the situation in Wells is that as co-founders of Vancouver SOS we see the school closing as an almost inevitable fallout of increased pressures and inadequate funding. It is not our place to delve into the local nuances of the situation in Wells and in Quesnel. In fact our strength is that we have stayed away from looking at education funding as a local matter.
If your decision to close the Wells school is motivated by a need to economize we urge you to bring the school and the citizens of Wells back into your larger community and to work together to keep the school. If we stand together as people who care about the education of our children, ultimately we can do a better job than if we let schools and programs be chipped away at, or closed.
Sincerely,
Judy Thau & Maureen Bayless
Co-chairs, Save Our Schools (Vancouver)
Vancouver, B.C.
Copy: Premier Gordon Campbell
Education Minister Clark
BCCPAC
Save Our Schools (Wells-Barkerville)
Dr. John Wilson, MLA Cariboo North