Maritime Communities: School Closures &; Amalgamation

Many rural and coastal communities in the Maritime provinces are entering the new millennium with uncertainty. Some are in crisis. The collapse of fisheries, the centralization of administration and services, and the reduced labour requirements of industry are forcing the migration and urbanization of rural Maritime people. This erosion of rural communities is exacerbated by the reduction of public services that are dependent on tax base and population. Rural education is particularly vulnerable to declining populations as education funding is based not on the delivery of programs, but on enrolment. While some adjustments are made in the funding formulae for remote areas and small populations, by and large the current education funding in all three Maritime provinces determines the size of education communities. In effect, education funding is redefining communities as it forces the closure of community schools and the busing of students to amalgamated schools.

Despite the potential for enhanced education and lifelong learning within rural communities, current government policies disregard the benefits of community-based education and government actions often contradict the objectives of the government's own programs. The same governments that pour money into economic development programs, to help communities in crisis, close community schools because the funding formula cannot maintain them. Rural communities that have lost their schools have fallen into social and economic decline.³ Community schools, once closed, have never been reopened within the public education system.

School closures are defended as necessary to provide a sufficient range of education programs. However, it has been shown that amalgamation neither saves money nor results in program enrichment.⁴ According to the literature, the forced amalgamation of schools creates alienation and lower achievements among students, political conflicts between governments and rural citizens and the imposition of inappropriate education models on rural communities.⁵

Exploring Alternatives: Diversity and Opportunity

Governments as well as communities recognise the difficulties of education funding in remote, sparsely populated areas; and during periods of declining enrolment they seek remedies by exploring alternative structures and funding. In Nova Scotia, the government has signed agreements with private partners who will build and own schools and lease them to the province thereby allowing new schools to be built without adding to the provincial debt. According to the Nova Scotia Government, this will save the taxpayers money if the province walks away from the schools at the end of the twenty-year lease period. They will have the option to continue leasing, but if the province chooses to buy the schools, the cost will actually be more than if they had been built within the public system. Most importantly, these private-public-partnerships (P3) do not propose to protect community schools, but to replace them with larger amalgamated schools.⁶