As a parent here in Oceanside, I can feel my head almost exploding. I’ve had enough. We’ve taken enough, and someone needs to start listening, but it feels as though nobody is.
We’ve dealt with the school closures. We’re worried, we’re ill at ease and now we are dealing with rotating strike action. This is really piling it on, right?
Lots of us wrote letters, thousands, to Premier Christy Clark, Education Minister Peter Fassbender, MLA Michelle Stilwell, anyone who might listen. But wait, there’s so much more.
The latest genius plan for Oceanside Middle School, soon to become an elementary school, is to make many, if not all, the classes split classes. Someone in our new administration thinks this is a great idea.
You know, I made a joke the other day about simply cramming all students, regardless of age, into a Little House on the Prairie-like Frankenschool. Who cares about grade? Skill level? Age? Who cares, cram them in.
Apparently, even a Grade 2/3/4 split class is proposed. What is that? Is there seriously any parent that will swallow that with a side of school closure, appetizer of strike action and entrée of re-zoning? Anyone who longs for the days of the single-room prairie schoolroom, show your support now.
I haven’t even mentioned the repeated promises to set aside space at the new schools for pre-schools and before/after school care. That was swept aside, and now there is nothing.
These schools will have literally no pre-schools, and no facilities whatsoever for before and after-school care. So, your children can now go straight into full-day Kindergarten, without ever hitting pre-school and you can’t work because there’s nowhere for them to go after school. There’s your dessert, folks.
We are just hitting it out of the park in this area for education. If anyone with school-age children bothers staying here, which at this point I am quite seriously reconsidering, I just can’t wait to see how all our kids turn out with this utterly stellar quality of education we are offering.
Sharon Todd
Parksville