TVDSB to Establish Rural Education Task Force

Wednesday, 26 June 2019 14:38

The Thames Valley District School Board passed a motion last night to establish a Rural Education Task Force that will focus on the needs of small rural schools.

The Thames Valley District School Board passed a motion last night to establish a Rural Education Task Force.

The task force will prepare a report that will look at the specific challenges facing rural schools. The final report will be presented to the board, no later than April 2020.

The task force recognizes that schools in rural areas face a variety of challenges, including student enrolment, school population, growth and decline and other factors. They will listen to the ideas and concerns of rural communities, generate fresh perspectives related to rural schools and communities and develop innovative solutions for consideration for a TVDSB Rural Education Strategy.

Zorra Township Mayor Marcus Ryan was thrilled to hear the news about the task force and says it feels like the new Board of Trustee's at TVDSB understands the plight of rural schools.

"The motion that they passed is really making it clear that they will look at the unique needs of rural schools are, why they have those unique needs, what the opportunities are. One of the things that gets thrown across the entire province about rural schools is declining enrolment. Frankly a lot of the time, that isn't actually the case and that was certainly true for AJ Baker school. In the urban areas there is so much growth, that's where the pressure is for school boards to fund and then relatively speaking the schools that don't see growth, drop down in the needs for funding."

Ryan says this started a few years ago when the community went to bat for the AJ Baker Public School in Zorra Township.

"Just over 6 years when our community was faced with the closure of our school, we started a big fight to try and keep it open, which was successful and part of that fight was with board policies and local trustee decisions and part of that was with the Ministry of Education and their policies around how school boards are funded and how they decide to open or close schools. Frankly with the previous board, until the last round of school board municipal elections, we had a hard time of getting rural voices heard and the differences between rural and urban schools were significant and need to be addressed and now this board, right now and I have to give a lot of credit to the current board chair Arlene Morell, have taken a real step forward and this report acknowledges that the needs of rural schools are different then rural and suburban schools."

Ryan says the trustees on the current board have been really courageous and really open minded.