Last Updated:Friday - 09/24/2010

Save inner city schools

If the Catholic Church's commitment to social justice is real then closing inner city Catholic schools should never, except in the most unusual circumstances, be an option. Education is crucial for all children, even more so for those from low-income families.

Low-income children often need headstart programs, good libraries, school lunch programs and other "extras" to put them on a basis even remotely close to that of children from more well-to-do families. There is a growing division of opportunity in society between the educated and those excluded from the information society. The Church must help narrow that division, not increase it.

The Edmonton Catholic School district certainly recognizes all this and is not planning to abandon the inner city. But its proposal to close Sacred Heart School (on one side of the tracks) and build a new school on the St. Michael's site (on the other side) will almost certainly lead to many separate school students switching to the public system. Such an occurrence would have serious consequences. It would mean, first, that many students would lose their main ongoing tie with the Catholic faith.

U.S. studies have regularly found that inner city children who attend Catholic schools achieve more academically and in later life than do those who attend public schools. While those studies are not strictly applicable to the Alberta situation because Catholic schools here are tax-supported, it ought to be the case here too that faith-based education with a strong sense of moral standards is of particular benefit to those from economically-deprived backgrounds.

One recommendation of Project First, the recent major consultation process in the school district, is to study why separate schools in southeast Edmonton (north of Millwoods) attract a lower proportion of the overall student population than in other areas of Edmonton. One seemingly obvious answer to that question has to do with the large number of Catholic schools that have been closed in that part of the city over the years.

If Catholic education is not easily accessible, many families will not make the extra effort to send their children to a Catholic school. One might condemn these families for their negligence. However, the situation points out the importance of keeping Catholic schools open even in middle-class areas, let alone in low-income areas where fewer families have cars.

The question that remains is where does this leave parents in new neighbourhoods who desperately need new schools for their children? The provincial government has refused to fund new schools in districts where the total utilization rate is under 85 per cent. The relatively empty schools in older neighbourhoods are a barrier to building new schools in new neighbourhoods.

This is an obstacle, however, that is totally of the provincial government's making. Its 85 per cent quota is totally unreasonable given that inner city schools were built in an era long before portable classrooms and when it was automatically assumed that those schools would always have an ample supply of students. The parents and children of the 21st century are being punished for the false assumptions of governments and school boards in the 1920s.

More must be done to help the provincial government see that while its desire to make efficient use of existing school buildings is reasonable, its arbitrary 85 per cent quota is not. The government, as well as the school board, has a responsibility to children in both the inner city and outlying areas. Its utilization quota has the effect of pitting parents in older neighbourhoods against those in newer ones.

The situation is exacerbated by the current lack of an inner city trustee on the Edmonton Catholic school board. The inner city lacks a voice when it most needs one. Still, one must urge the remaining trustees to work to preserve inner city schools and to lobby vigorously for the desperately needed funding for new schools on the periphery.

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