Keep our school small - draft

If Stephen Harper told Pauline Marois, “listen, you've got lots of room and we’ve got a backlog of people who want to move to Canada, so Quebec's going to have to double over the next few years” people would take to the streets.

In a province where questions of sovereignty and the right to self-determination consume so much psychic energy, and cause so much strife, our little alternative school is being told “you know what? Actually you have zero control over your schools educational platform”

This is not a question of “enfants gate” (spoiled children) not wanting to share our big under utilized building while other schools are overcrowded. Arc en Ciel was PUT in this building, during a first FORCED doubling, with a promise that we'd never be forced to expand again, so either the building was always a honey trap - and the CSDM always intended for arc en Ciel to keep growing, or the CSDM had no clue what they were doing and only figured out later that the building could hold more kids.

We are not spoiled children because we do the work. The parental involvement at arc en Ciel could be looked at as a direct subsidy - with thousands of hours of volunteer labour subsidizing the public funding we receive, though I believe most parents wouldn't look at it so crassly.

Parents get involved because they believe participating in their children's education is good for everybody.

But if you screw with the conditions under which these parents get involved, if you completely overrule their democratically expressed desires as to how best to run the school, are they going to stay motivated? Not a chance. Many, myself included, will at first disengage and then start looking at alternatives. There are many reasons why public schools in Quebec have such terrible reputations, and railroading a school that is “getting it right” is surely one of them.

I perceive this situation as pure political and bureaucratic posturing. On the one hand you have to appear to be fiscally responsible, and leaving a school half occupied doesn't exactly scream competence, and secondly you have a lot of parents asking for spots in alternative schools.

So how convenient? Fill up the building and appease some parents with spots in a popular school.
Except what makes a small school popular might just, shockingly, be its size - with all the educational and social opportunities that permits.