Editor's note: The following letter was submitted to the Halton District School Board and a copy was filed with The Oakville Beaver for publication:
The community of Joshua Creek appreciated the opportunity that was provided to delegate the Trustees and the concerns expressed by Trustees for our community's needs.
However, in accepting your staff recommendation you have left the community completely dissatisfied. Ten of the eleven delegations from our community opposed your staff recommendation. A petition by over 500 residents opposed your staff recommendation. We reject your staff's contention that this "represents a compromise with the community". From our perspective, you have split our community and have condemned Joshua Creek School to permanent overcrowding. Our community believes it would be best served by a second school being built. Your plan reroutes about 140 of our students back to Falgarwood School and will have 11 new classrooms built onto Joshua Creek  while keeping five  portables, growing to nine portables by October 2011. Adding up these students being bussed away, the new classrooms and the portables is 600 students (140 plus 20 classes of 23 students). To our community, it is clear that these 600 students should form a new school and not be shipped and stacked.
We recognize that Joshua Creek PS was built to facilitate five additional classrooms and thus it is built to serve 601 students (current 486 capacity plus 115 from these five classes). Your plan is to put about 900 students into this school, 50 per cent more than its facilities are meant to serve. This clearly is permanent overcrowding and hence your plan cannot be viewed as a solution to overcrowding.
Even the "friendly" amendment to the staff plan to increase the built-on classrooms at Joshua Creek  from nine to 11 is not welcomed by the community. Going from four to six classrooms being built onto the side of the structure means more of the precious little existing black-top disappears. It also needs to be recognized that this amendment was a reaction by the Trustees to the community's concern that your staff is again underestimating student growth and that we'll be back in two years redrawing boundaries again. The "friendly" amendment to the staff plan means that we'll be a bit farther away from exceeding the 12 portable maximum for the site, meaning that you will allow the student population at Joshua Creek  to reach 1,000 before you'll have to face us again. Permitting even more severe overcrowding, is not "friendly" to our community. We were dismayed that you made this amendment to the staff plan without any study or questioning of the impact of adding even more classrooms to an already overcrowded school.
Your plan is also dependent on your staff getting its projections correct. While you may have confidence in your staff's planning ability, our community does not. For our community, in your 2007 plan, your staff estimated 623 students for October 2007, whereas the actual was 708 (underestimated by 85). In this 2007 plan, your staff estimated 683 students for October 2008 but now your staff estimates 916, a 233 student adjustment! We think this 916 estimate for October 2008 remains low, that it might be closer to 1,000. Further, your staff projects the student population to reach 1,017 in October 2011, a growth of just 101 students after October 2008 even though there is scheduled to be 614 additional home closings in that period.
The other part of your staff's projections is that it counts on the Falgarwood  and Sheridan school populations undergoing significant retractions. Your plan relies on these populations declining from 605 in October 2007 to 478 by October 2011, a 21 per cent decline in enrolment in a matured area that is currently welcoming new families with young children. We can't reconcile with these staff projections. We believe that it is dangerous to base your plans on the realization of these projected declines.
Low-balling growth in our community while aggressively forecasting declines in the Falgarwood community is, in our minds, a recipe for failure. Time will tell, but it will be our communities that will suffer from more failed planning. It hardly seemed too much to ask that you would have respected our request not to rush forward with the construction of the built-on classrooms that will have permanent repercussions on our community. At least you could have waited to see this fall's enrolments.
Your staff communicated that a new school in our community is not feasible for two reasons: there isn't a second school site and there are not sufficient student numbers within the ward. Your staff claims insufficient students within the ward because of excess capacity in Falgarwood  and Sheridan. In October 2011 your staff projects 1,485 students in the ward, served by the existing capacity of 1,243: an excess student population of 242. As noted we think these projections underestimate the future student population and that the excess student population may well be 500 in October 2011 (1200 from our community and 540 from the Falgarwood community). There is clearly a north-south imbalance between students and school capacity that apparently is a burden which has been consigned to our community to bear (north/south capacity is 486/757 and north/south student population projected by staff is 1017/478).
If this legacy capacity must be used within the ward and if you continue to have confidence in your staff's projecting abilities, that's okay, there are easy solutions to deal with both. You have not made French immersion available within our ward, instead you bus French immersion students from our community and the Falgarwood community to Ward 5. June 2007 PARC 16B information indicates that nearly 300 students were being bussed out of our ward. This number will undoubtedly have grown and continue to grow as our community has grown and continues to grow. If you brought those students back into our ward and made Falgarwood  and Sheridan  dual-track schools, you solve multiple problems. This would draw students south to these schools, filling them to capacity, rather than forcing students into these schools. It would give you the student count that you need to justify a new school, about 550 using your staff's projections. It would be a whole community solution and reduce bussing. It is likely that it would also allow you to redraw boundaries so that you could keep English-track students north of Upper Middle in schools north of Upper Middle and thus alleviate the "barrier" problem that you are currently facing with Upper Middle for Falgarwood  and Sheridan  students. It would also provide needed relief to the enrolment pressures that the French immersion program is currently suffering under. The students exist, there are solutions, please consider them instead of hurrying to get it wrong.
The lack of a readily available second school site within our community must not be a reason to reject building a new school. We are pleased that Education Director Wayne Joudrie has indicated that he will see into an independent investigation of the release of the school site at North Ridge Trail and Postridge Drive. The Board must take responsibility for the release of the North Ridge Drive school site.
There are two suitable school sites available within our community that we have detailed to you. The Town of Oakville land on Kestell Boulevard would be suitable and we believe that you will find the Town sympathetic to our needs, as this may well serve the Town as the Board has school sites that it is vacating in southeast Oakville that the Town may want to acquire. The community will support and influence acquisition of this site.
Again, we urge the Board to take responsibility for releasing the second school site in our community. Taking responsibility does not include compromising the quality of public education in our community by permanently overcrowding Joshua Creek or bussing our children about. Compromising the quality of public education in our community because a school site was inappropriately released would be abrogating responsibility.
We hope that you, as trustees of public education, will take a sober second thought on your plans and the needs of our community. We recognize and respect your right and responsibility to decide. If you keep your plan, we will live and suffer with it. However, we regret that this plan will disenfranchise our community with public education. We will be forced to embrace the separate school system and private schools to provide our children with the quality of education and learning environment that we want them to receive: this is already occurring in our community and will escalate. Your staff's projections may well turn out to be accurate, but we expect that it would be because we have left you because you have left us. We feel that by rationing public education, making it an unattractive and difficult option that you will have voted against public education.
Michael Hawkins on behalf of the Concerned Parents of Joshua Creek