Post CSDM.
They shot down our attempts at avoiding getting bigger.
They gave some bullshit about come back in two years...start two volets...
It was practically scripted - the commissaire to the right of Louise Mainville launched into something whose details escape me but essentially boiled down to “we have to think of the whole community not just your school...” and he clearly is always her point person in these situations, then, and it took a slight prompt from Mainville “Ben?” and Ben Valkenburg took up the same theme. I was disappointed that he had been co-opted into this, he'd seemed sympathetic to our cause in the past and had lived through the forced expansion of ÉLAN. He'd told me “my advice to you would be to do everything to maintain cohesion within your school. When élan was expanded we ended up with four factions - members of the staff for and against, and parents for and against”...what was a little rich was that he went on how “as elected officials we have to represent...” well, you were appointed to replace somebody by your own party, and MEMO, the so called movement pour des Ecoles modernes et ouvert, holds ALL the commissaires spots...so not exactly a model of representative democracy.
Finally the new president, in an attempt to be vaguely conciliatory said we could develop “deux volets” essentially “you can concoct some kind of parallel educational streams within your one school and come back and tell us how french sealing painful that is to manage in two years...”
After the meeting, again following the exact same script as a year ago Louise Mainville seeks out our president and says something to the effect of “ha ha, suck it, and whatever you heard in here about deux volets well we expect you to assimilate those extra kids into your current structure pure and simple”
So, once again, though it took another year and countless hours of parents trying to find some leverage to move the CSDM, our educational project is thrown up into the air and we are left with having to find new ways to function as our school heads from 150 kids towards potentially 300...unless of course there's no demand and we find ourselves unable to fill these new spots we’re being forced to offer.
I believe that Louise Mainville either always intended to keep growing Arc en Ciel or decided to as soon as it became politically expedient. When she “promised” six years ago that we'd never be forced to double again either she knew it was a promise she could break while throwing up her hands and saying “oh it's the demand of parents for spaces there's nothing I can do” or if she did “promise” in good faith to protect our school, it was only because Arc en Ciel were the parents that needed appeasing five years ago and when new parents started asking for spots that became the politically more advantageous thing to do.
As far as Claude Daviau goes, he's probably just trying to justify the salary that allows him to drive a Volvo while teachers take the bus or ride their bikes. Given that the CSDM is in chronic deficit, the appearance of a half empty school looks bad so going through the motions of appearing to fill it up has all the elements of seeming to do your job except for the niggling little detail of “is this actually what's best for that school and the children in it?” and even worse “does doubling a small school actually respond to the demand for access to that school, which might just be because it's a small school...”
And for the CSDM what's at stake is their very relevance. If they gave in to our demands, if they let the precedent be set that maybe parents know better than they do how their resources should be organized, well then, maybe you don’t need a bloated school board with a ratio of something like one CSDM staff to every six students...and given that the class ratio is 1 to 24 or more, that's a lot of overhead...and how many of them drive volvos?
I think our next step is to ask our directrice to support her parents. To actually stand with the current parents of students in her school and say “if these parents really are this concerned, maybe we should consider their proposal of opening a second distinct school in the same building”. Apparently there was far from unanimity as to how our case should be treated so if we had the support of our directrice it might give us one last kick at the can before the phone calls start going out inviting new kids into the new maternelle.
I think we should also draft some proposals as to how these types of decisions are taken. If parents are to feel implicated in the educational programmes of their schools then they need some decisional power - over staffing choices, number of students, etc. These are issues of interest to all schools in the CSDM and across the province - what functional democratic units and stakeholders should be involved in these decisions?
Are school boards necessary and relevant? And are they landlords and resource allocators, or should they be determining how schools are actually run and constituted?
At the end of the day I suspect our little school in a big building was always a honey trap. That now parents will be expected to do tonnes of work to make the new structure work - and that we’ve been terribly served by our “elected” representatives and the bureaucrats that are supposed to work for us.
And who even knows the real horse trading that is behind all this? Who really benefits at the end of the day? Is it just so Mainville and Daviau can appear to be doing their bit to “eponge” the deficit? I don't know - but I do know it's discouraging. For the structure to be such that parents, staff and students can pour their hearts into trying to build a better school, only to have it all swept away by administrative fiat, when it becomes useful for some unaccountable individual or individuals to do so?
Well that's not the kind of model that's going to encourage them to do so. So more motivated and involved parents start looking for alternatives to their now less “alternative” school - and the public system loses out, and with it, to my mind, all Quebeckers.
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