School Purple – A corrupted fanticy.

How about a bit of creative (?) fiction. (Or is it.) It ends in some people, including a few trustees, going to jail so it might be worth the long read.

This is the story of School Purple built by the North York School Board in the 1960s at a time when the Board  opened seven or ten schools a year. This was the baby boom that produced new residential communities and kids by the bucketful all who needed to be educated in yet to be built schools paid for by taxpayers.

School Purple was built for 425 students, around the concept of a central library, gym and a six-acre lot as a playground.

Over 650 kids enroll in the school in the first year so many that up to six portables had to be put on the site.

Twenty years later the population slowed the production of children locally and the school’s numbers dropped below 170 but the North York Board of Education, which closed over 30 schools in this period, (true) only threatened schools with closing when their student number approached 120. (also true) That was the case for the nearby School Yellow, which closed with only 115 students to the consternation of those parents who fought to keep it open.

Fifty per cent of Yellow’s kids were assigned to Purple boosting its numbers. Twenty-five percent of the students went into the local St. Yellow Catholic school that set up in the School Yellow building making a shorter walk for them and the rest scattered throughout the system.

In the ara reorganization, School Purple lost its grade six students to the local jr. high which became a middle school. You see, that bolstered the numbers in the local high school which took the jr. high’s grade 9s to its list and made that expensive secondary building less vulnerable to being taken over by the catholic Board.

We were told that this grade organization (K-5, 6-8 and 9-13) would help the elementary schools concentrate on the special needs of the younger students while it was better for the 12 year-olds to be in an adolescent environment of the middle school. Of course it put the pubescent14 year olds into the factory like high schools, with 19 year olds, a year earlier than under the old system but something had to give.

The School Purple land is one of the largest open spaces in the community. Ten years earlier the Board dug it up and replaced the gravel surface with a more natural garden-like environment and a safer play-scape. The community used to watch from their front windows as children played on grassy fields all summer and in winter tots used sleds to slide down the slight hill of snow that appeared just after New Years. Ah, suburbia.

By 2009, School Purple was operating with just over 200 students all of who walked to school, except for some of those in the special education class. With an active parent organization and after school activities, the building was well used.

But the Board had this 2009 report (not fiction) that says that a good school must have 450 kids and serve from kindergarten to grade 8 in order to be effective. This spelt the doom of School Purple and may schools like it.

That  report also says that the Board wanted to close and sell ‘small schools’ like Purple and build ‘better’ and bigger K-8 schools in the local middle school building: fewer ‘transitions’ for students. What actually happened was the Board was responding to a Provincial funding formula that funded school facilities based on a so much area per student formula.  200 kids in a building that the Ministry says should hold over 400 makes School Purple only 50% full, an economic burden to the Board.

The Board then (into the future now) sold School Purple’s six acres to a developer  (similarly withe 200 other school sites) and used some of the money earned to renovate these new super elementary schools.

You see, the Board needed the money for renovations. In 2009, it was one billion dollars behind in its school renewal program thanks to chronic underfunding by the Harris Conservatives and then the McGinty Liberals. The Board cut $40,000,000 out of its capital budget each year in order to finance other programs like teachers, heating fuel, etc.

After the closing, 20 percent of the kids in Purple’s area need to be bussed to the former jr. high.

After the sale of the school site for five million dollars by the Board’s Toronto Lands Corporation (TLC), the developer left the land vacant for five years only cutting the field twice a year and causing locals to complain about unsavory characters hanging around the nooks and crannies of the boarded up building.

Then the developer took a plan to the local city Councillor. Proposed was a modern development of 552 stacked townhouse units that would fill the lot. Locals complained that that was too dense for the area but were told that the developer would win at the Ontario Municipal Board so the fight was useless. The developer, hearing the anguish of the community reduced the proposal to 495 units and gets approval.

Those units sold for an average of $420,000 per unit. Wow, that was over two hundred million dollars passing hands from the sale of one modest elementary school property.

That was so much money that a major scandal erupted involving the developer, the staff of the TLC and a few of the Board trustees. Allegations of fancy dinners, expensive conferences, personal loans, free home improvements and the odd winter vacation paid for, slowly make their way to the courts and some TLC executives and a few trustees end up in jail for a few years for this white collar crime.  This much created money corrupted all but the purist.

And now the community can walk by the block of new buildings, smelling the off gassing of the new paint and the partical board under the quaint brick siding on their way to the small local park.

Ten years down the road, the result of developers’ infill housing and a younger residential profile made the large K-8 building bulge with students crowding a dozen portables on the lot. New facilities were needed for the all those children and there will be no resources and certainly no land on which to build them. This was a problem all over the city because the Board sold almost 200 of its properties in this period.

Remember that developer who was recently released from jail and who kindly corrupted  and testified against those TLC executives and trustees a few years ago? Well the same guy is offering to build a school on an industrial lot two kilometres away from the School Purple land and rent it to the Board as part of an expensive and inefficient Public Private Partnership that the province loves to promote.

How nice.