School Closures

I have been following the school closure issue with some interest, albeit not nearly as much as I should. The latest article in the Edmonton Journal dated April 12th has some very interesting reading, including the comments posted from people.  From the 'twitter' side of things, I have been quite fond of the job that Sue Huff has been doing (you can read her blog and follow her on twitter) and her ability to think out-of-the-box has been most impressive.  With all due respect to her fellow trustees, many of them should be looking to Sue to learn some insight and lessons.

With that said, the politics of the school system really needs to be fixed.  It has been said that the formulas used are out of date, but what really kills me is the (paraphrased) "oh we can't do anything until the system changes so we are bound by law to do it this way" crap.  You, the trustees, are supposed to be there to think, and not to just rubber stamp things. One of the comments posted within the Journal at 3:25 pm on April 10th says

Seems to me that seven rubber stamps costs less than 140 bucks, so why are we paying in excess of 300 grand?

and I have to agree with that, to a point.  Now, I am certainly no expert, but one would tend to think that a fair amount of the "wasted" school spaces can be leased out to all sorts of worthwhile entities, such as day care, community services, etc.  Just because the current rules say "this" should not be an indication of what you should be doing, especially when it's obvious the rules are flawed.  Take a stance, say to the public and to the Government "these rules ARE flawed, and we refuse to make decisions based on errors".

From what I can see, there are only 2 trustees that are interested in really doing the job, the rest seem to be just along for the ride.  Which is really very sad for the children.