Save our schools?

It is not often I get to comment on issues to which I am so personally connected. My parents’ high schools, Brantford Collegiate Institute (Mom) and Moncton High School (Dad), my own elementary school, and finally my Godmother figure prominently in this post.

I don’t usually read the Moncton Times & Transcript, but it was lucky that I caught a glimpse of this item from last Saturday: ‘Community urged: keep up MHS fight’.

Moncton High School, which was built in 1936 and which my father attended during and just after the Second World War, is an imposing fortress of a building. Located at the base of Mountain Road, the thoroughfare that bisects Moncton, its sandstone walls and turrets can easily fool first time viewers into imagining it serves some function other than its educational role. While not quite Hogwarts, Moncton High’s architectural flourishes evoke a more innocent era when the education of North American youth maintained some grounding in the classics. Jarvis Collegiate in Toronto, Kitsilano High School in Vancouver, as well as (the original) Oakville Trafalgar High School in my hometown, though all distinctive, nevertheless evince a style that has long since yielded to the utilitarian hodge-podge of interchangeable boxes that characterize the late 20th century high school. Times have very much changed since these relic structures were built with separate boys and girls entrances. Time wears.

It turns out MHS requires $48 million in infrastructure improvements, which has prompted calls for the New Brunswick government to save money by closing the school. Now I confess to have not followed this specific issue closely, so my reading of the local situation is based largely on hearsay and perspectives derived from other places.

This is where my Godmother, my mom’s best friend Mary Welsh comes in. One of the busiest, yet most selfless people I know, she epitomizes the spirit of community service and has just recently been awarded the Order of Ontario. The most recent cause to consume Mary’s energies has been the fight to save Brantford Collegiate Institute (est. 1910), the place where she met my mom on the school’s badminton team in the mid-1950s.

In the last few years BCI has also faced the tradeoff between its expensive upkeep and closure. As the head of BCI’s alumni association, Mary worked tirelessly, between dog walks and a million other pursuits, to save the school. By arguing that the cost to bus the displaced students to a new school on the edge of town cancelled any cost savings derived from closing BCI, Mary was able to get the Ontario government to dig into an unused infrastructure fund for renovations that kept BCI in place. Given this success, proponents who hope Moncton High can be similarly saved have sought Mary’s advice on the matter – and this advice constituted the basis for the Times & Transcript piece.

So what meaning, one generation removed, do these buildings or even old schools in general, hold for me? Though my father, a child of the Great Depression, was only a Maritimer for the war years, he and his twin sister maintain fond memories of their time in Moncton, when they lived in a unit at the back of 182 Highfield Street. So they must have only been at MHS for only a few years before the family moved back to Oakville where there attended Oakville Trafalgar, the high school down the road from where I later grew up. OT was unfortunately closed and relocated in the early 1990s. The structure has since served as a film set, an outpatient clinic for the adjacent hospital (itself slated for closure), but mostly looks sadly boarded up to me these days. A block away, Brantwood Elementary where my brother and I went from K-5, and which also must be at least 75 years old, is also on the verge of discontinuation. No wonder every third house in the neighborhood has a ‘Save Our Schools’ banner on the lawn.

In my lifetime the overall growth of the GTA has consumed Oakville, more than doubling its population. Due to its location and charm this demographic change has enhanced the embourgeoisement of Oakville, particularly its older neighborhoods. So Oakville has gone latte and there are now Porsches on my parents’ street. With fewer young families able to afford these postal codes, the population of primary school aged kids apparently does not justify continual public investment in an aging institution like Brantwood, so the remaining kids will now have to bus halfway across town, although one suspects school buses will not be the primary mode of transit used. I used to remember running a block and a half home from Brantwood for lunch. (My commute in Sackville, by the way, is about twice that distance.)

As for BCI in Brantford, its location in the city centre bears similarity to the other cases discussed thus far. Mary is quoted as saying that a key constituency that would have been affected by a BCI closure would have been the “many affluent young professionals…buying homes in the older part of town and renovating them as a place to raise their children.” The heritage crowd was also enthused – BCI was designed by Alfred Chapman who also did the R.O.M.

Interestingly, the T&T article described Brantford as “a city of about 60,000 people just outside Toronto’. Maybe my perception of distance has changed, but Brantford is a good hour-and-a half outside Toronto. To me it was both literally and figuratively far removed from the metropolis. Yet like the nearby Kitchener-Waterloo area, 30 km upstream along the Grand River from Brantford, these places have been largely absorbed by the growth of the mega-city region that Richard Florida calls Tor-Buff-Chester. This integration is good and bad.

My four aunts and uncles on my mom’s side all went through BCI. It sure has meaning for them. (For a clue as to how my maternal line channeled through Brantford, read Robertson Davies’ Murther and Walking Spirits). My other Godmother, my mom’s and Mary’s badminton coach also taught there so the connection runs pretty deep. I remember playing BCI in rugby in Grade 11, but that is my only point of contact. I am glad that BCI has been saved, though I recognized the bitterness that Mary notes characterized the fight to save it.

As for Moncton High, I am not as sure. This morning one of my hockey team-mates put it to me this way. Do you think the government can justify spending $40-odd million to renovate Moncton High when there are schools in Sackville that are so strapped for cash that parents have to fund-raise for a new coat of paint? I think parents also supplied the labour to paint the school. So the MHS case could also be a bitter fight.

Are our older schools worth saving? Is their symbolic and heritage value still relevant? Do places large and small think schools in the centre of town should serve as the heart of their community? How do we decide? All I know is that without champions like my Godmother, Mary Welsh, these issues would all be lost causes. Good for her!