Letter to the Barrie Examiner March 3 2011

I have attended all of the accommodation review committee (ARC) public meetings. Every delegation and every comment that was made and every written submission to the ARC was in support of Barrie Central Collegiate and keeping a school in the downtown core of Barrie.

The letters to the editor in your newspaper have overwhelmingly supported keeping Barrie Central open.

Despite this, at the ARC meetings school board administrative staff continue to 'spin' their proposed option of closing the school and seeking funding for a south-end school.

The staff option is supposedly based on the Ministry of Education's reaction to the board's 2008 request for funds to rebuild Central.

Supposedly, the ministry told staff to consider potential growth in the south-end and supposedly this is what set the whole ARC process in motion.

At the last public meeting, the school board staff indicated that there are experts at the ministry who look at these matters.

However, no documentation regarding the ministry's perspective has been provided to the ARC. We have not heard anything from the ministry.

In fact, Leona Dombrowsky, the minister of education, has publicly stated that these are local decisions.

It is appropriate to be concerned that board staff may have put their own spin on the ministry's response to the 2008 capital funding request, as they have done in other ways during the ARC process.

To cite one example of an inappropriate spin, board staff suggested that they were pursuing potential partners for rebuilding Barrie Central but they pursued virtually nothing until after Barrie Mayor Jeff Lehman identified a number of opportunities.

To cite another example, board staff have suggested that the cost to repair Central is $19 million when no appropriate estimate has been obtained.

Let's hope that the trustees will listen to the overwhelming community consensus on Barrie Central.

Let's hope that Central is kept open so that our other secondary schools are not overcrowded while we wait for a new south end school, which will not receive a site, or site approval, for years, and which may never be funded.

Lesley Porter Barrie