Winnipeg Free Press

We were walking around the University of Ottawa campus last week, and noticed that the campus was overrun with high school tours.

The question was raised, does any university invite high schoolers to tour in January, when it’s minus-35 and the wind is howling across all those open spaces that look so idyllic on a sunny day in May?

Has anyone ever seen a recruiting brochure that shows what it’s like for most of a September-to-April academic year?

A couple of things I  noticed about both Carleton and UOtt. They have a lot of residence rooms, even though UOtt is in a Wolseley-like area of student rental housing. UOtt had high-rise apartments sprinkled amid the academic buildings.

Both schools had a gym comparable to the Investors Group or Duckworth Centre. They both had a stadium for football and soccer, with permanent seating. Both also had two full-sized ice pads, each university having one rink with extensive spectator seating, and a second full-sized rink with little or no seating.

In fact, Ottawa has a fair number of large arenas, when you consider the NHL rink, the Major Junior rink for the 67s, and the rink across the river for Hull’s Major Junior team.

Does anyone else get the uncomfortable feeling that the Doer government is making up the rules for its school closing moratorium on the fly?

Like the recent tax incentive grant that seemed to have a new catch or condition or nuance every day leading up to the school board budget deadline, the Strengthening Local Schools Act did not come in a neat little package, bereft of loose ends.

Education Minister Peter Bjornson says that he could be persuaded — highly unlikely, only in extreme circumstances, but he ‘could’ be persuaded — to allow an exception to the moratorium if there is a consolidation of schools in a rural area.

He also says that there has to be consensus in the community for consolidation, and that it has to be clearly evident that a school could not be viable standing on its own.

I don’t recall the day all this broke, that there was any reference to rural being treated differently than urban, but that’s probably just my missing something crucial.

As the Manitoba Association of School Trustees has pointed out, and which I had also raised with the province, the legislation does not define ‘consolidation’ or ‘consensus’.

I hear that this legislation took a lot of people by surprise and came not only out of left field, but from somewhere far beyond the left field fence.

But things like defining key terms, don’t they have policy analysts and lawyers that are supposed to sign off on every syllable and semi-colon before the minister tables legislation?

The ubiquitous senior aide to the minister, and subsequently the minister himself, have told me that consolidation covers an elementary school in a rural community which could be joined with a nearby high school, to become a K-12 school in one building. No one has defined how physically close the two existing buildings have to be — in some rural communities they’re on the same property, in some communities they’re blocks apart.

St. James-Assiniboia School Division can try making a case that it wants to conolidate Ness and Hedges middle schools into one building at Hedges, and Pembina Trails could argue that it would consolidate Chapman and Royal schools in the Royal School building, each case being a matter of a few blocks, but Bjornson says that he won’t let such things happen.

Meanwhile, over near the Saskatchewan border, Park West School Division didn’t give up when Bjornson thwarted plans to close Kenton School. Trustees there are considering removing grades six through eight from the K-8 school, which this year would have amounted to reducing enrolment from 26 to 16.

Bjornson says he won’t allow school divisions to close schools through the back door by moving grades and programs out of a small school with declining enrolment. However, one superintendent pointed out, the legislation does not say anything about banning the restructuring of a school.

Who would have thought the revolution would start in St. James-Assiniboia?

I guess school board chair Bruce Alexander will be addressed in future as Che.

The division, which knows something about closing schools, having closed 15 in less than three decades, was this close — yes, this close — to voting on the possible closure of Ness and Hedges middle schools as of June 30, 2009.

The likely scenario was closing Ness and moving the staff and programs to Hedges, and hoping the kids would go there rather than to another school. Both schools are far below capacity, enrolment is dropping fast, and there’s no sign of many younger kids coming along or moving into the neighbourhood.

But that was before Education Minister Peter Bjornson came out of nowhere early last week and imposed a moratorium on closing schools.

Divisions elsewhere have grumbled and fumed, but have pretty much backed off taking their review processes any further, though Pembina Trails superintendent Lawrence Lussier will tell his trustees tonight what he would have recommended they do with tiny Chapman School.

Not so St. James-Assiniboia, which is going ahead with the superintendent’s recommendations next Tuesday, then a public forum May 26, and a board vote May 27.

The division says it knows only what it’s read in the paper — which, it goes without saying, would be accurate, true, and comprehensive — and while the minister has sent along a copy of his legislation, it has only been tabled for first reading, and was not accompanied by any document that St. James-Assiniboia considers to constitute written orders to cease and desist.

SJASD thinks it can make a case to convince Bjornson to grant an exception to the moratorium. It will argue that the closing of Ness is actually a consolidation of two schools into one building, that the community accepts the need, and that neither school is viable if both continue to operate, regardless what day cares and seniors’ centres and other community services use empty space in Ness and Hedges.

This isn’t about education, so if that’s why you’re here, move on, nothing to see here……..

We minor soccer refs got a directive this week about youth soccer, laying out quite clearly and succinctly and even eloquently (notice how well I suck up to management, even at a community volunteer level?) that there is no such creature in the soccer rules as a ‘handball’.

Yes, I know, every kid and parent in a park screams ‘Handball!!!!!’ as soon as ball and fingernail enter the same general quadrant of the space-time continuum, but we’ve been directed that there is no such thing.

A foul occurs when a player deliberately touches a ball with his or her hand. The key word is deliberately, and any other hand/ball contact, regardless where it occurs, or what advantage it brings, is not a foul.

I told the teams I reffed earlier this week that I define ‘deliberately’ to include having hands where it’s inappropriate to have them, such as over a player’s head, stuck out like you’re playing airplane, or palms out and arms extended to make yourself as big as possible in defending your goal area.

Not that I expect any of this to keep everyone from hollering every time my whistle remains unblown when hand and ball collide……..

I spent the weekend in Ottawa with about 2,000 of Canada’s finest young volleyball players, having a fabulous time.

If you’ve got a kid in tier 1 club volleyball, you know about the nationals in other age groups coming up the next couple of weekends. These in Ottawa were 17 and 18-year-old divisions, both men and women, close to 200 teams spread across umpteen divisions and tiers.

Our U-17 women’s team somehow played all its matches at Carleton University, but they could have played at the University of Ottawa, two community colleges in Ottawa and Hull, or a place on Bank Street that I think — can’t be sure — was a municipal facility.

Carleton had 16 courts, and luck was with us that the age group drew the late afternoon and evening, while U-18 got the 7:30 to 2 p.m. starts. Friday it was sweltering inside, on pads laid out on one of Carleton’s two indoor arenas, Saturday the same place, Sunday the other ice rink early match, and the finals in a monstrous fieldhouse. The U-18 men’s final was played in the main gym, more than 3,500 squeezed in and going nuts — or so I hear, being busy next door with a tad more seating available in our division’s and tier’s finals.

It was chaotic, it was pandemonium, it was bedlam, screaming and whistles and cheers for three days. Every court had kids in bright and sometimes garish uniforms, a few parents on folding chairs or occasionally sitting in a real spectator area with fixed seats, kids waiting for their match sitting and watching intently. Walk from venue to venue, it was packed with people standing in endless lines at the campus Tim Horton’s, fewer hitting the canteen with its healthy choices, zillions scanning a poster wall full of four-team pools and trying to decipher a colour-coded schedule to ferret out the implications of where and when they’d play the next day if they won or lost their next match.

We had a wonderful hour taking our cold pops down to the banks of the river within Carleton’s campus, sitting on a picnic table, and chatting with a friend from university 37 years ago. And having our son explain the rules and strategies to her, while six young women raced around their half of the court in the intricate madness that follows every serve through bump, set and hit.

We didn’t go to nationals when my son played U-18 in Abbotsford two years ago, or when my daughter played U-16 in Calgary last year, but all of us made the trip this time. The team was in a hotel, but we stayed just the other side of UOtt at one of the best bed and breakfasts I’ve ever experienced, a 1895 heritage house — you’ll find it at www.homesweetlandhome.ca.

But back to volleyball. Of the 60 teams in U-17 women, 10 were from Manitoba, not surprising proportionally if you’ve hung around volleyball for any time. The way the divisions and tiers broke down, by Sunday there were eight gold medals up for grabs just in U-17 women.

For our team’s young women who’ve been together since the December tryouts held right after high school varsity volleyball ended, they’ve made friends they’d likely never have met otherwise, the 10 players coming from seven or eight high schools. Yes, I will acknowledge that club volleyball at this level can be socioeconomically exclusionary, that it is for the children of the affluent or those willing to sacrifice — but it was worth every penny for both our kids, athletically and socially and yes, even educationally, and I’m open to anyone who wants to talk about how it can be opened up to help those who can’t afford upwards of $2,000 a season.

There were many neat little things, like walking around the National Gallery or Museum of Civilization, and seeing people you knew from Winnipeg. Or standing in the athletic complex in Carleton and chatting with a school administrator I’d met in another movie, our daughters playing on two teams within the same club. We won’t talk here about rolling our eyes as we watched the post-tournament celebration in the halls of a certain hotel in Nepean — that was probably all on Facebook by Sunday night.

I won’t bore you too much with what went on on the court, though anywhere you went at Carleton by Sunday afternoon, something special was happening, from Division 1, tier 1, U-18 men’s and women’s finals where some of the players will be in university ball next year, to those who’d been tiered lower after their own provincials and after Friday’s first three matches, but were playing against their peers with all the same heart and passion shown a few meters away by Canada’s very best young players.

There was one match late Sunday afternoon involving an Ontario team of amazons, all but the setter and libero six feet or taller, some of the young women looking to be about six-foot-three or maybe even an inch or two taller, who went up a set and were up 18-10 in the second. And a group of young women from Manitoba who were much shorter, and could have mailed in the last seven points, who gave every one of us lucky enough to be there one of those great memories — I remember the men’s division volleyball championship match at Kelvin in Grade 11, and an indoor soccer final at Skylight in 2006 that had the same emotion and will be in the same trove of memories — as they threw themselves headlong at every ball, dug out every hit, kept bumping and setting and challenging the massive blocks.

Even when one girl badly injured her arm diving to try to save a point when 10-18 had somehow become 22-19, the rest kept playing with a frenzy. And the neatest things? As they were jumping up and down after taking the third set, there was their teammate, a sling around her arm, ice packs taped to her knees, in considerable pain but insisting on returning to the gym, and they ran to her to engulf her in their celebration, and to engulf another teammate who’d been on crutches since Friday night after rolling her ankle. And the Ontario team that had just lost was so gracious, coming across to the injured girl to shake her left hand and see how she was doing.

It’s really neat that your kid can be part of it, and that she has made such good friends with such good young people.

I wanted to talk about….talk about….ummm…….

Sorry, I got a little distracted there, forgot what I was going to blog about before I heard that my Mighty Maples have fired coach Paul Maurice. Should I submit a resume, or do you think the one I submitted for the Leafs’ general manager’s job will suffice?

Oh, right, I was going to talk a little about national museums. I’m not going to get into the Canadian Museum for Human Rights, at least not directly. It will be in a class with two of our country’s greatest public institutions I visited this past weekend, the National Gallery and the Museum of Civilization.

These are magnificent buildings, and they’re our buildings — the Lawren Harris at which I look in awe every time I visit Ottawa, the Krieghoff I discovered for the first time, Colville’s hypnotic “To Prince Edward Island” that draws me back on every viewing to trips to my grandparents’, they belong to all of us.

They’re also enormous buildings and huge properties. Within each there are vast open spaces and natural light, lots of natural light.

We weren’t sure about taking in the post office museum within the Museum of Civilization, watching the clock for the start of volleyball games as we were, but it was really neat. It was a little freaky in the exhibit of every stamp Canada has ever produced and used, that I recognized and remembered every stamp from the 1950s, and yet the vast majority of stamps from the past 25 years, I don’t remember them at all.

You can get in as an adult for $10, and families of two adults and kids 15 and under can do each of these treasures for $25. We walked to the National Gallery, but circumstances dictated we drive to the museum, whose $10 parking tab seemed a tad excessive for a national public institution.

And something to think about when you’re hiring staff for the human rights museum: we walk up to the ticket booth at the Museum of Civilization, and before I can say anything, the young woman says, “One senior, one adult, one student.”

That really hurt.

Yes, I could have saved a couple of bucks, and you probably all won’t buy that I was just being honest, but I asked her what age seniors start. “65,” she answers, at which point I told her with all the nicety I could muster that I didn’t qualify.

Not yet.

Not quite.

Education Minister Peter Bjornson’s where-did-that-come-from springing of a ban on school closings puts a halt on yet another closing in St. James-Assiniboia School Division.

 SJASD has already closed 15 schools in the last two or three decades, the most recent the former Silver Heights Collegiate last June. That property will go on the market this summer, likely drawing interest for seniors’ housing.

The division had designated Ness Junior High and Hedges Middle School for review, the formal step necessary to close one or both because of steadily dwindling enrolment. The recommendation out of the review process and community consultation was that Ness would close and its programs shift to Hedges. Ness would have been easier to sell, said one source, because the site could be used for multi-story housing, possibly seniors’ housing.

Hedges also already houses special needs programming, it was pointed out.

But Bjornson put an end to all that, so both Hedges and Ness will move inexorably towards one-third of their capacity.

The division had already ruled out creating kindergarten to Grade 8 schools, so there was no possibility that both Hedges and Ness would stay open by absorbing low-enrolment elementary schools.

Sources say that St. James-Assiniboia planned next to look at closing at least one elementary school in the near future from among Lakewood, Buchanan, Heritage, and Crestview.

But that’s on hold too.

The province is vacating its department of education offices in the former Deer Lodge Junior High at the end of June, and has no interest in another lease or in buying the school. It will be put on the market.

In case the division ever needs to reopen schools because of young families moving into older homes, it is retaining ownership of Bedson School, leased to a Mennonite private school, and Allard School, which now houses the city’s police training academy.

I’ve been taking some grief over my alleged villainy in causing widespread consternation in Lakeshore School Division earlier this week.

A parent in Fisher Branch quoted a senior provincial bureaucrat who supposedly blamed me for leading people in Fisher Branch and Ashern to believe, if only for a few hours, that their early years schools would remain open. I got it all wrong, that was the gist of the message.

Education Minister Peter Bjornson came out of nowhere Monday afternoon to impose a moratorium on closing schools in Manitoba. There are 13 public schools under review, which is the formal process by which school trustees designate a school for possible closing. These schools would potentially close June 30, 2009, and four city divisions were poised in the next few weeks to vote on the fates of nine of those schools.

However, any school whose fate had been decided by Jan. 1, 2008, would not be covered by the moratorium.

 When I spoke to Bjornson late Monday afternoon, he told me that the only school that he would allow to close is the three-student Pine Dock School in Frontier School Division. Every other school would fall under the moratorium.

And that’s where it got muddled — though I suspect there’s more muddling to come. This one is starting to look like the tax incentive grant of two months ago, in which each day there seemed to be a new catch, or some contradiction or inconsistency to work out.

As it turned out by Tuesday, Lakeshore had beaten that Jan. 1 deadline by voting last June to close the early years schools in Ashern and Fisher Branch, and convert the local high schools to K-12. Fort La Bosse S.D. did the same in Reston.

But Bjornson was really specific, and I printed what he’d said….and I asked more than once.

Silly me.

When Bjornson said that every school currently operating in the province, with the exception of Pine Dock School, would remain open indefinitely, I thought that the minister meant that every school currently operating in the province, with the exception of Pine Dock School, would remain open indefinitely.

My bad.

I gasped when I saw the machine.

Earlier last weekend, we’d been at Elkhorn School, and when parents were dismayed to find that the vending machines contained naught but juice and water, I got on my high horse and arrogantly and condescendingly told them about the province-wide nutrition policy and the campaign against childhood obesity and lifestyle-related health problems.

So now here we were a few hours later at Virden Collegiate, and what was in the school vending machines? Coke, and root beer. Not even diet — real pop, with real sugar.

I talked to the woman who was running the canteen — yes, I know she was not speaking for Fort La Bosse School Division — and she said they need the revenue, kids should have the choice and learn to make sensible decisions, and that they had until January to comply. That would be complying with the province’s healthy choices nutrition policy banning pop, chocolate, chips and other junk food in cafeterias and vending machines.

I should point out that I was not sneaking into schools without the knowledge and consent of the superintendent, principals and school trustees — this was the weekend, and we were at provincial club volleyball.

But I made a call when I got back Monday, and sure enough, the nutrition policy much-touted  by Education Minister Peter Bjornson and Healthy Living Minister Kerri Irvin-Ross has not yet been passed into legislation, and has not been officially mandated.

Meanwhile, we were talking in a miffed manner about having nowhere decent to sit in Virden Junior High, the lighting was uneven, and it was kind of stuffy, even with the back door open. I had to keep reminding myself that gyms are designed for gym classes, and not for the comfort of parents sitting and watching.

I got a call this week asking me to help out Winnipeg School Division.

Gosh, when have I ever been anything but helpful to WSD?

OK, but apart from those 387 times…….

My source was concerned that WSD has a national recruiting campaign to hire a successor to retiring chief superintendent Jan Schubert, but is hearing reports that prospective candidates think it’s in the bag.

Seems that trustees met this week with their headhunter, says my source. “They called somebody they thought was capable and fine for the job. The person said, ‘I thought so-and-so was a shoo-in for the job and the school board already made its mind up.’ It chases away potential people. There’s rumours that there’s someone who’s already been picked and is coming in through the back door.”

This source wants me to spread the word that the job is wide open, and is well aware that every public educator in Canada reads my blog over her or his morning coffee.

So I called board chair Kristine Barr, who’s way beyond being surprised that secret meetings are public knowledge.

“I don’t know why a candidate would think that,” said Barr, who said the division is advertising nationally and has compiled a 10-page job description. “There is no predetermined outcome — if there was, we wouldn’t have hired a consultant.”

And then I talked to a second source, who said that the person rumoured to be frontrunner for the job is Pauline Clarke, WSD’s superintendent for inner city schools, and a person who has been doing amazing things for years. This second source said Clarke is the natural and best choice, but there’s a lot of backroom politics going on at WSD.

OK, I don’t know if Clarke actually wants the job, and I suppose that there’s a chance that if headhunters scour every possible candidate in Canada, they might possibly find someone as qualified and suited for the job as Clarke — anything is possible.