"Eleven empty Portables" to move to your school.
Rocky View Schools (RVS) is reporting that it has a portable shortage and the provincial government has not stepped up to solve the problem. Perhaps RVS needs to find a solution right here in Cochrane.
Here are a few things parents in Cochrane should know. Over here in the West Valley, at Mitford School, for the past five years we have been looking over our fence at a group of school portables in a school play field that once contained a very well used baseball diamond.
After 18 portables arrived at Mitford School over a period of a few months without any apparent planning or community consultation, our five-year misadventure with RVS began.
Eleven school portables remain that have been blocked up and sitting empty since Fireside students moved into their new school 17 months ago. In a letter in 2014 to concerned West Valley residents, our RVS Trustee Fiona Gilbert assured us and thanked us for our patience. She also added "the opening of Sunset School 2016 and Fireside School 2017 would allow RVS to decant students from the overcrowded Mitford School ... and thus remove the majority of if not all of, the modular classrooms at Mitford.”
Yes, she kept her word on “decanting” or moving the students from the overcrowded Mitford School, and now, guess what? Our community still has not resolved this issue with RVS. For the last year and half, the school field has been a parking lot for 11 empty classrooms, tittering on wooden blocks and unprotected (at times) as students play ball on the infield diamond, just outside the falling down fence.
If I were a parent that read the article last week of 'RVS’s shortage of portables' to move to your school, I would pickup the phone or email the powers that be and call their bluff.
Please don’t fall for this RVS Board rhetoric "for the medium term, the solution may lie in redrawing the school attendance boundaries,’ Which, in simple terms, may very well mean just busing or driving your child to a very overcrowded Mitford School again. The last time this happened, Mitford area School attendance jumped from 300 to 500 to around 1,000 with substantial impact on our quiet residential community.
Bill Skene
