By ROY WOOD
The woman at the eye of the Osoyoos school closure storm says the experience of the last month or so has been amoung the most wrenching she has faced in her life.
However, Okanagan-Similkameen school board chair Marieze Tarr said in a recent interview that despite the difficulty of the process and the negative comments in the press and elsewhere, “I have been amazed at the kindness, compassion and support that I have received. …
“I get lots of hugs and support. … For every negative comment, I can honestly say I get a positive one, too.”
The board is in the middle of a process that could lead to the closing of the only highschool in the town of Osoyoos.
She says the experience is as difficult as emigrating from South Africa 16 years ago and giving up her career as a health scientist.
But Tarr is comfortable with the way she and the board have handled the very difficult situation that has arisen from the combination of declining enrollments in the school district and shrinking provincial funding for schools.
“Honestly I can’t see how we could have done it differently,” she said.
Going back to 2011 when a threat to close Osoyoos Secondary School was averted, Tarr says the school board has been warning of the dangers of declining enrollment. “It hasn’t come up all of a sudden. We’ve been talking about it for five years.
“People kind of think, ‘As long as it’s not going to affect me, I’m fine,’ and they don’t want to hear about it.”
In January 2011, cheers of relief followed a decision by the board voted not to close Osoyoos Secondary School or Tuc-el-Nuit Elementary in Oliver. However, as the echoes of the cheering faded, so did the commitments to farsighted cooperation.
This is a passage from a story in the Feb. 2, 2011 Osoyoos Times:
Osoyoos Mayor Stu Wells, who was in attendance, told the board that their decision took a weight off the shoulders of the Osoyoos community.
He added that the Town will help take on the responsibility of finding solutions to keep OSS open and viable in the long run.
In an interview following the board’s meeting, Wells said Osoyoos council and the community at large has an obligation to work with the trustees and the school to make changes to get more use out of OSS and increase enrolment in the area.
He said he wants to take the issue to council and Town staff and bring teachers from OSS into the discussion through forums, committees or a possible task force.
In a recent interview, former mayor Wells was asked what became of the commitments. “My memory would be nothing,” he said.
An unheeded editorial in the same edition of the Osoyoos Times said in part:
It’s OK for us all to breathe a sigh of relief, but we should immediately begin to build on the momentum of community involvement generated by the threat of the school closing.
Mayor Stu Wells was right when he said this situation needs to be tackled now while the issues are fresh and the community is still fired up.
The board’s decision is not a victory, but a reprieve: the trustees have simply bought us some time to figure out ways to keep the school open well into the future.
Wells now calls references to the lack of action “finger pointing” and responds with a school yard rejoinder: “The trouble with finger pointing is you have one (finger) pointing at the opponent and three pointed at yourself.”
He continued, “I take great exception to finger pointing. … People shouldn’t point fingers. … that’s disgusting. Absolutely disgusting.”
Wells points at the board for the failure to take any action to address declining enrollments and defend Osoyoos schools against possible future closures.
“It seems to be very, very hard to partner with the school district. That’s my recollection. … I fault the school district for not bringing that forward.”
Asked to respond, Tarr said, “My reaction is that no we’re not (difficult to work with). We, as a board have always tried to be collaborative and inclusive. We manage to work with a lot of other organizations. …
“I really don’t want to comment on something like that. I know I’m not difficult to work with.”
As for keeping the town informed, Tarr points to an open board meeting in 2012 at Osoyoos Elementary attended by Wells and some other members of council at which declining enrollments were discussed. And there was a similar meeting at the high school a year or two later.
“Obviously, at these meetings we didn’t say, ‘we’re going to close schools.’ But we kept them in the loop at all times on declining enrollment,” she said.
More recently, “We invited all council members in the district to a meeting last April when we were going through our budget process. …
“We once again went through declining enrollment and what this was doing to our schools funding and the fact that we were staring these things in the face.
“Nothing came from that either. There were no resolutions, there were no discussions afterwards about what can we do about it or anything like that,” she said.
Wells’ successor, Mayor Sue McKortoff said that she attended that meeting along with Councillor Carol Youngberg.
McKortoff acknowledges that the board expressed concerns about declining enrollments. “Yes, this was a trend they were worried about,” she said in an interview.
“Obviously, maybe we should have paid more attention to it ourselves. … (But) it’s easy to say what we should have done in hindsight,” she said.
Meanwhile, Tarr will continue to struggle with two unpalatable choices: “If we are going to continually have to look for money, there’s two places we can cut. One is facilities and the other is services to children or education to our kids.
Tarr says the reason she continues with her role on the board is, “I’m passionate about education and about kids.” She backs that up by volunteering in the classroom three days a week.
“As I was driving home today, I thought to myself this is a no-win situation. The problem is we’re not getting funded appropriately to deliver the services that we need to deliver to our students. …
“When you have to decide which decision will least impact education, that’s not a good day for education.”