Category: Community Voices

Dear Honorable Stephen McNeiI, 

I write to you today as another concerned parent with a child enrolled in the Petite Rivière Elementary School. I wish to add my voice to the chorus of distressed families and community members concerned with the impending loss of their school.

We are new to this area, having moved here from New Brunswick in 2014, looking for a new life in a rural community, close to Halifax and the beaches of the south shore. I left a career as an academic physician in the teaching hospital in Saint John, and chose a slower, perhaps less prestigious life raising a family and starting a small farm close to Petite Rivière. 

One important factor in choosing this area were the educational opportunities in the area. We started with our first child at an independent school in Blockhouse.  The school seemed to fit most closely with the ideals we wished to see imparted to our son. Although a wonderful school, sadly our son did not thrive there and after two years we decided to move him to the Petite Rivière Elementary school. It was not without some trepidation that we did this, for we had no experience with the public school system and stories are not always positive.

We are now eight months into Oliver’s first year at PRES and have seen the most wonderful thing happen. We now have a boy who wants to go to school! This may seem like a small thing, but to engage and enthuse a boy like Oliver is no small feat. We know this because we’ve been trying for years. I am so shocked and happy to see my son engaged on so many levels at PRES that I can not fathom how on earth anyone could bring themselves to destroy that type of environment. 

This school is a product of its community and a service to the community. This is a community that is young and growing. This is a community that cares about its members, both young and old. This is a community that has increasingly chosen to eschew the fast pace and opportunities of city life. They have chosen to live a life perhaps a little closer to that of a different time, when humans lived in small communities and really knew their neighbours. To support themselves we see interest in farming, the arts and traditional trades, alongside more modern careers supported by high-speed telecommunications.  This is a young and growing rural community, a rare and precious gift in a world being increasingly urbanized. 

This school serves as a recruiting tool, bringing young families into the area. This school is recruiting young families that are so smart, caring, wise and brave that they are willing to move to rural Nova Scotia to start new lives. These are people who have so much to offer, so many ways to benefit their community and the surrounding area. These are the people you want in this province, if the province wants to improve its future. Take away the school, and you lose some of your ability to recruit into this vibrant community, and you risk this being the first cut that eventually leads to an unravelling of the fabric of the area in ways that been repeated in so many rural communities in rural North America. Indeed, since I started his letter we have had to warn a young professional family of five, moving from New Brunswick to not look at a farming property in the PRES catchment area.

Finally, I should like to put on my public health hat for a minute.  As an internal medicine and intensive care specialist, I have devoted over 90% of my career treating diseases that are entirely preventable. That may seem like an extreme statement on the surface, but ask any physician out there and they’ll tell you the same. Yes, the vast majority of all the big killers, heart disease, lung disease, strokes, type 2 diabetes, cancer are all preventable. They do not need to happen, all that suffering and loss is truly preventable, and yet we do almost nothing. It seems evident but the path to avoid these killers is the simplest one we can know. Eat right, exercise, play and raise a family.  

Sadly too many of us now do not know how to cook, meaning our children can not learn from us. Not knowing how to cook also implicitly means that one knows little of how truly important food is on so many different levels, how it can impact health, and bring a family together all at the same time.  Now we can’t even learn how to cook in school. Why? Ironically because we’re spending our tax dollars treating the very illnesses we could have prevented. 

How many of us, in our busy lives, take the time to exercise on a daily basis? Not enough I’ll warrant. How often do we get out and get our kids heart rates up? Not enough I’ll warrant. Like food, not exercising is often associated with a poor understanding of the benefits of exercise. Who knew being fit can impart a 75% reduction in the chance of dying? And now we can’t really teach our kids how to exercise in school. Why not? Oh yeah, we’re still treating all those illness we could have prevented!

Whilst on the subject of exercise (and mental health) let’s think about those kids from the farthest reaches of the proposed school bus catchment, sitting on their enlarging posteriors for a couple of hours a day. How are we encouraging these kids to live healthy, active and community-based lives when we waste so much of their time enforcing upon them an activity known to be bad for your health? We are stealing these children’s childhoods and transforming them into an unhealthy and uninspiring shadow of what they could be living.

Sadly my point about spending all of our money to treat preventable illnesses is all too true. We (yes us, the voting and entitled public) have chosen as a society to focus the lion’s share of our tax revenues on the treatment of preventable illnesses in our latter years. This is sadly short-sighted and selfish. We appear to have forgotten that the generation that comes next is inherently the one where most resources should be put. All of the issues we wish we could see solved in the Canadian educational system could be solved if we to a fraction of a percentage point away from that gorilla we call health care. 

Our children should be given a head start, not hindered. With a properly funded educational system, they’d be fit, active and would largely stay that way through their lives.  They’d know the value of food, and they’d know how to prepare it, freeing them from the grips of fast or pre-prepared foods. They’d have learned all this in the communities they lived in and would not have to waste hours of their lives in meaningless commutes.

We know today that with the childhood obesity epidemic that the next generation will likely be the first to live shorter and unhealthier lives than their parents. This is the end result of our selfish choices, favouring the previous generation over the next. We should be ashamed of ourselves.  We should do all in our power to advocate for our children, for they are us, and in their turn, they will advocate for and nurture our grandchildren. Closing Petite Rivière Elementary school will be another strike against a healthy future for those children and that community. 

Peter West

For years, very committed citizens have been fighting to save the Petite Rivière Elementary School. The value of this school to a growing population of young children and the value of this school to the community at large have been discussed openly in great detail.

Nevertheless, officials who would rather see young children bused out of their community to an already overcrowded school continue to ignore the educational and social importance of the Petite School.

The officials who vote to close Petite Riviere Elementary School and those who, by their silence, support closure are supposed to represent the interests of the people in their constituency.

My question to those officials: exactly whose interests do you reflect when you vote to close this school? How, in good conscience, can you oppose the position that is universally held by the people in the area you represent and who look to you to lead with thoughtful and insightful decisions?

Peter Barss

To the Honourable Minister Karen Casey, Minister of Education;

Minister Casey, I am writing to request that you look again into the intended closure of Petite Riviere Elementary School in Lunenburg County, and that you provide the guidance, leadership and authority of your office to reverse the decision.

I have lived in rural Lunenburg County since 2001 and am originally from the Kingston Peninsula, New Brunswick, a region not dissimilar to Petite Riviere. I did a Master of Environmental Design in planning and policy specifically because I wanted to work to protect the beauty, nature and way of life that is unique to the rural maritime provinces.

We are so lucky for what we have in rural Nova Scotia; for what has been built over time; for the incredible beauty and plentiful resources we share; for the structures and community hubs across the province that enable and sustain rural livelihoods and are the envy of tourists (some of whom come back to stay). But the exodus of young people from rural Nova Scotia, our declining population, and a lack of investment in or accurate assessment of necessary services for rural Nova Scotia make the future look a bit grim.

It certainly looks grim for Petite Riviere if the school, which is a focal point of the community and literal creator of community, is deemed unnecessary and allowed to close.

Churches were once the unifying structures and connectors essential for giving rural Nova Scotia communities a center and a heart. As church attendance has declined over the years, country churches have closed and will continue to close across the province – and church halls and the social coalescing that churches provided go with them. In 2017, closing a rural school that is a focal point of a community (as this one in Petite Riviere is) isn’t just closing a ‘school’. It isn’t just closing a building and (maybe) reducing County and Provincial education spending. In 2017, closing a school at the heart of a community is a lot more than that: it’s taking away the common thread and communal bond for being there.

Petite Riviere is a living and even exemplar rural community. I live across the river from Petite, I don’t have children and I am not personally invested in whether or not the school stays or goes, but I am writing this letter because I am tired of seeing decisions that diminish instead of encourage and support what people are trying hard to build. The community of Petite Riviere is like no community I have never seen. They welcome newcomers as if they have been there the whole time. When couples break up (as happens), they all seem to rally support for the family and help them get through it. They take care of each other’s kids after school. They organize and attend their own festivals, create their own entertainment opportunities, find grant money to build a community park where an old business had burned down, they support businesses that open up.

It honestly is like nothing I have ever witnessed or known of. They are in it together.

And the school. Because people live nearby and are invested in the school and community and their kids, the school garden gets taken care of, people are able to pick their kids up after school or they can get to someone else’s house until their parents get home from work. Many of the teachers live in the community and are directly invested in helping to sustain it. When a child is struggling or having behavioral problems, it is a community issue they take on. Again, it is honestly like nothing I have ever witnessed. It sounds like I am laying it on heavy here, but it’s honestly true. Petite Riviere is a community that keeps people from leaving, that people are drawn to and come back to and that people are working hard to build, and the school is one of the only public facilities the community has. They have a firehall, and a school.

I know that some rural schools must close. The diminishing population demands it. There just aren’t enough kids to keep them all open. When the Riverport School closed it was a loss, but the numbers were dwindling to none. It was unavoidable. But in this case, the assessment of necessity is off: demographics for Petite Riviere school are increasing and are projected to continue.

Why did the Board make the decision it made? It is hard to know, but I wonder if we are putting too much responsibility on School Boards? Having to decide school closures demands a wide range of skills and analysis and rural development expertise. I am not sure that decisions that are this far-reaching should be left on the shoulders of School Boards. I am not sure this one should have, which is the reason I am writing to you.

Closing this school will diminish and perhaps even destroy this growing community of young families, and that will be a loss for all of us. If you watched a movie of this story, you would be broken hearted at what this school means to people, and at the powers that be who have failed to weigh the importance of this small school to this particular rural community and the growth of the region.

Minister Casey, please require a review of the Board’s decision, or request directly that they reconsider. If not, the loss and the story will permeate this region and beyond. We need a hopeful story like what happened in PEI recently, instead.

Respectfully,

Wanda Baxter