Verona is being betrayed, once again

Jeff Green | Jul 06, 2016

The recent Long Term Sustainability Plan (LTAP) presented to the board of directors of the Limestone District School Board in late May, recommended that Prince Charles Public School in Verona be closed and the students be sent to Loughborough Public School in Sydenham.

What a difference a decade makes.

Nine years ago, Glen Carson, who was at that time the manager of the Limestone Board's Facility Department, came to a meeting of the Prince Charles' Parent Council and said, as reported in the Frontenac News in April of 2007 by the late Inie Platenius, “I’m pleased to come here tonight. This is a good news item, and too often I go to these meetings with bad news.”

The good news he delivered was that because the Ministry of Education had determined that Prince Charles was old and needed extensive repairs to reach an acceptable standard, the ministry was going to fund the building of a new school in Verona.

Among schools in the Limestone Board, Prince Charles was at the top of the list of “schools that will be replaced.”

Carson pointed at the end of the meeting that “the process is just beginning, though, so don’t look for a new building for at least three years.”

Three years passed, and another three, and another three, and the school is still old, but the talk is now only about shutting it down.

One of the odd things about the recommendation in the recent LTAP report is that it proposed to merge two non-neighboring schools. Were the consultants who wrote the report unaware that in order to bus students from Verona to Sydenham, they have to pass through Harrowsmith, which has a school?

Program Accommodation Reviews (PARs) are the processes that the Limestone Board uses to close, rebuild, and consolidate schools. If one comes about in South Frontenac as the result of the LTAP report, it will have to look at all three of the schools and come up with a reasonable plan. Harrowsmith Public School is an old school, as is Prince Charles, so eventually at least one one of them will need to be replaced and upgraded. An argument can be made, based on geography, that a new school in Verona makes the most sense.

It also makes the most sense from a community and economic development point of view because Verona is the strongest retail hub in the township, and losing a school would damage that.

The problem with any kind of talk about closing schools is that it divides communities, and I am sure families whose children attend that school will not be happy to see any talk of its closing, even in a speculative column such as this one.

However, the LTAP to the Limestone Board, even if it has only been accepted for information, is a policy document that will form the basis of decision-making within the next few months, and while the demographic projections and the global costings in the report may be accurate, the recommendations are based on speculation.

A glaring example of this can be found in an un-related section of the report, the section about North Addington Education Centre in Cloyne. In order to deal with projected enrollment decreases at NAEC, the report urges the school board approach the Ministry of Health and Long Term Care about turning part of NAEC into a long-term care facility.

First off, there would be no way to accurately budget for the cost of renovating a 45-year-old school to turn it into a long-term care facility that complies with modern rules and requirements. Second, there is already a long-term care facility, Pine Meadow Nursing Home, in nearby Northbrook. The recommendation about NAEC has no basis in fact; it is mere words on a page.

The same can be said of the recommendation to pull the school from Verona. It reveals not only that the consultants did not visit the area to see what it really is like; they may not even have looked too closely at a map.