A Request for Help

I need some help in locating online resources that prove that

1. small schools produce better students than big schools
2. smaller schools are, in the end, more economical than big schools
3. there are fewer social problems in smaller schools

. I have some research already and I am continuing my search, but if any of you know of any dynamite studies please send me a link. If you want to know why continue reading.

Recently the Fraser Institute, a right wing Canadian think tank, issued a report on high schools in BC. For more information on WHY the Fraser Institute produced this plan see this article in TheTyee (an online BC Newspaper - also Tyee is a west coast name for Spring Salmon)

The Report Card on British Columbia's Secondary Schools: 2004 Edition collects a variety of relevant, objective indicators of school performance into one easily accessible, public document so that all interested parties - parents, school administrators, teachers, students, and taxpayers - can analyze and compare the performance of individual schools. Parents can use the Report Card's indicator values, ratings, and rankings to compare schools when they choose an education provider for their children. Parents and school administrators can use the results to identify areas of academic performance in which improvement can be made.

This annual Report Card uses relevant, publicly-available data to rate and rank 279 of British Columbia's public and independent secondary schools. This is the only comprehensive and widely-distributed Report Card on secondary schools available in British Columbia.

In this report they state that Rossland Senior Secondary (RSS) is the highest ranking school outside of metropolitan Vancouver and Victoria. It ranked 34^th out of 279 schools in the province. RSS is what you could call a liberal school. It integrates a lot of arts and sports into the student's everyday curriculum (as should be expected). It also has a small student population of approximately 400 students. RSS students regularly win provincial school championships in alpine skiing and snowboarding, and the RSS jazz band has won the Lionel Hampton school jazz band contest held yearly in Idaho, 10 out of the last 12 years. In other words the students are getting a great well rounded education. So, what's the problem?

Rossland">Rossland is part of School District 20 which encompasses a lot of other communities including Trail. Trail, because it has the Teck-Cominco smelter there, thinks of itself as the most important community in the regional district and as such tries to dominate the politics of the region. However Trail is really a dying community. Cominco used to have 5,000 employees but automation has reduced that to 1,500 and further reductions in the workforce wuill continue. Most of Trail's residents are Cominco retirees. The only thing Trail has going for it today is that it is the site of the regional hospital. Rossland was the reason for Trail coming into existence in the first place (Cominco built their smelter there, on the Columbia River, at the turn of the century in order to process the ore coming out of the Rossland gold mines), and it is Rossland that holds the only hope for economic development in the immediate area through the Red Mountain ski development.

SD20 has their offices in Trail and the school board is dominated by Trail and surrounding community representatives. SD20 has, because of government cutbacks, been closing schools. They have also been wasting taxpayer money by listening to Trail city council.

Several years ago Trail council encouraged SD20 to close a number of primary schools and create a middle school in Trauil with kids being bussed in from neighbouring communities. SD20 wasted $4,000,000 oftaxpayer money doing this and the result was predictable (as many pointed out at the time), the middle school did not work and after only a couple of years of operation it now sits empty.

Now we get to the heart of the problem. Trail has a High School, J.L.Crowe that is in need of being replaced. In the Fraser Institute report JL Crowe placed 109^th out of the 279 schools tested. Now instead of SD20 doing the intelligent thing and just replacing Crowe with a similar size school, they have once again listened to the self-serving politicos on Trail council and are planning on building an 1,100 student school in Trail (they only need an 850 student school to meet their current needs), closing RSS and bussing RSS students down the hill to Crowe (when I say down the hill - note that hill is 6KM long with a 2,000 ft drop in altitude - dangerous in the winter with lots of semi-trailers jacknifed on it and some hairpin corners at the bottom of steep declines).

So let me recap this - close the highest ranked school in ruural BC and ship the students from there over a dangerous road to a school with a tough kid reputation and one that is not even in the same ball park academically as the one they propose to close. Got it? They say they will save money by doing this but their accounting is very bad - they have neglected to account for a lot of things, including the real bussing costs, the sum total of which wipes out the vast majority of their proposed savings. The vast majority of SD20 school board representatives are politically conservative, surprise surprise, which probably explains why they can't think straight.

Needless to say Rosslanders are up in arms about this and are looking for ways to block this stupidity. We are considering a number of possibilities:

• Breaking away and forming our own School District (my favourite)
• Turning RSS into an International School and featuring a sports curriculum that emphasizes alpine skiing (one of North America's best alpine ski hills is only 3KMs away) in the winter and mountain biking in the summer (BC Mountain Bike championships are held on that same ski hill every summer) along with a well rounded arts program. Students would compete in national and international events and would do a lot of their learning through distant education technologies. This scenario would see RSS stay open as a publicly funded high school that earned its way through foreign student fees
• Forming a Charter School or a completely Independent (private) school.

Either of the last two strategies would draw a lot of the Rossland students away from JL Crowe and thereby reduce the amount of money the provincial Department of Education gives to Crowe (schools get funded $6,500 per student). As you can see it would only take the retaining of 1/3 (115) of the current RSS population to totally wipe out the supposed $700K saving (already based on faulty accounting as mentioned earlier) that closing RSS is supposed to save. Yet the school district continues with its plans to do so.

There is no logic in their plan whatsoever. It is politically motivated and, well quite frankly, stupid. Closing RSS will result in a lot of bad things happening:

1. People will be reluctant to move to Rossland due to the lack of a high school for their kids
2. The investment group that is buying the ski hill this summer may very well opt out of doing so. They have until June to go forward with the deal and have stated publicly that a high school in Rossland is very important to their plans. Without that purchase, the ski hill will not get the upgrading it badly needs and the development in town and at the base of the mountain that we need for economic growth (the only industries of note here are Cominco, tourism and logging) will not take place.
3. many families with children in school now will seriously consider moving away, further reducing the tax base

. Rossland is a much wealthier community than Trail in the overall average income of its residents. If Rossland fails Trail will suffer even more than it already does because of the loss of business from Rosslanders (the only mall in the area is on the other side of Trail from us). Trail is cutting its own throat by trying to close RSS but council there doesn't care. They see only the immediate political advantage of being able to crow (excuse the pun) to their electorate - see we got a bigger high school built here and we are obviously more important as they (SD20) closed RSS in favour of our school. Typical conservatives - screw the future, screw what's right - lets just get re-elected.

What RSS and Rossland have going in their favour is that the local MLA (equivalent to state legislature representative in the US) is totally behind saving RSS. He is the Minister for Resort Development and he sees the need for development of the Red Mountain ski resort and the disastrous consequences for the entire region if that development does not go ahead. (Included in that development is another project I have been working on which is the development of an alpine training facility for the 2010 Winter Olympics. ). That he is also the former mayor of Trail shows that regional politics can be put aside.

What this situation illustrates well is the dangers in regional, as opposed to municipal, controls over valuable resources. It also illustrates the difference between conservatives and liberals. Conservatives start from the belief that building power and wealth in those individuals that can grab it benefits the entire community, whereas liberals believe that taking care of the whole community empowers individuals and contributes to the wealth of the community as a whole is the right way to go. Count me a liberal and proud of it.

So if you have suggestions or have some research that can help us make the point that it is better to have two smaller schools, one in Trail and one in Rossland I'd appreciate it if you could send it along :-)

Posted by The Dynamic Driveler at March 13, 2004 06:20 PM