Do you have a story about the ARC process and what it is doing to your community? If so, write it up and I will publish it. Send it to erroly@sympatico.ca.
Your story
The URI to TrackBack this entry is: http://saveschools.wordpress.com/your-story/trackback/
The best way to save Toronto’s schools is for Ontario to merge the Catholic and public boards into one school system. http://www.onessn.org
Doing so will:
- reduce travel times to schools for everyone,
- reduce catchment areas by half for each school,
- reduce the high costs of bureaucratic redundancy,
- allow optimal use of school buildings,
- stop dividing kids according to religion,
- give all kids access to all schools,
- give teachers opportunities at all schools,
- save the Ontario government about $500 million.
Funding education for only one religion is unfair to other religions. The UN has sanctioned Ontario twice for this discriminatory practice.
I agree with this. The Supreme Court stated that the Catholic system is no more bigoted than Canada was in 1867 and therefore was constitutional. What a standard!
1867! That’s half a century before women were recognized as persons and given the vote. Quite a moral standard.
There was an unfortunate use of the word “merge”. NEVER use the word or even the idea of “merge”!! By “merging” both school systems the discriminatory provisions of the present funding of two systems would remain. Remember that if the chickens devise a plan to stop the loss of their eggs and the skunk agrees with it, you know something is basically wrong !!
Good point
Time to see a political figure tackles this problem
It is unfortunate that the conservative party is “SCARED” too
To bad, think more of appeasing pressure groups.
One can understand why we, as taxpayers get fed up.
Guess it boils down to, no guts, even though they agree with the suggestion
Ontarians should quit complaining about being taxed to death, when there is a partial solution.
I was a parent member of the ARC for our board, the Upper Canada DSB. I was very impressed with the process our board went through, the amount of time and effort that was put into going from community to community in our huge board (geographically, the largest in the province). An enormous amount of time, effort and money was spent listening to and collecting community input. What made me really sad was that our board was doing all of this because of declining enrollment, and one of the big answers is staring us right in the face – the elephant in the room, that NO one dares mention: provincial funding of TWO separate school systems in addition to TWO public school systems. We have French, English, French Catholic and English Catholic school systems in this province! This is a HUGE waste of resources – but of course, people have jobs to protect! This has NOTHING to do with delivering world class schooling to our kids, and everything to do with turf. We simply CANNOT continue to do this! Imagine having a special health care system for one religious group – the very idea is ludicrous!