Shortly after a delightful chat with Justine Keirn on Monday morning I felt a strange and growing heaviness in my heart. Keirn is executive director of Valley Community Services, one of two large non-profit providers of a large variety of social services in the Creston area.
VCS provides services from pre-borns to senior citizens and our conversation was specifically directed toward the Creston Education Centre which, over the years, has evolved into a hub that provides programs and services that focus on families and helping to ensure their pre-schoolers get a strong and healthy start.
“I was just reviewing our stats—the numbers are through the roof,” she told me. Last year more than 500 families benefited from VCS services in this marvelous hub, which also includes HomeLinks and Wildflowers home school supports and offices for professionals like occupational and physical therapists, psychologists and speech-language pathologists, all of whom work for School District No. 8.
Last month I attended, along with VCS management and staff, school employees and parents, yet another meeting about “facilities”, which is a current obsession with the school district. The presentation was filled with charts and graphs and a lot of information that interested almost no one in the room. It was intended to justify the district’s decision last year to either divest itself of the former South Creston Elementary School or simply shut it down.
Since that decision was made, VCS has been part of a working group that includes regional directors. Its mission has been to find a way to keep the doors of CEC open, and to maintain all the current programs and services under one roof. To say there has been co-operation from the school district would be a lie. While SD8 did hold an information session (which Creston trustees chose not to attend) that included a tour of the facility, it has otherwise taken a hands-off approach to the situation. Rather than enter into discussions geared directly at keeping the building open and functioning as it is (including providing a home for the school district’s programs and services), the board of trustees approved a process that put out a request for proposals onto BC Bid, the province’s web site that lists publicly owned property and assets for sale. To be fair, that request does outline conditions that favour a community purchase.
The deadline for proposals ends this week, and VCS will not be submitting one. The reasons, Keirn said, are simple. Her organization does not have the $10,000 deposit required to submit a proposal and it does not have the resources to manage the 22,000 square foot facility and the grounds. It does, though, have a great interest in participating in a community effort to acquire the property.
“I explained to the school district that a non-profit has opportunities for funding that it doesn’t,” Keirn said. Many capital and operating grants that are available to non-profits are shut out to governments and the private sector. She also says that some other community organizations have come forward with interest in using parts of the CEC building and playing field, with the gymnasium being seen as a particularly valuable asset. One suspects that the Creston & District Community Complex would have an interest, because it has to rent out school gym space to offer some recreation programs.
It doesn’t take a brilliant mind to see that the CEC is a marvelous asset to our community and could become even more valuable if it ends up in the hands of people who don’t look at it as a sinkhole of “deferred maintenance costs”, as the school district does.
Coincidentally, the school district also finds itself in a bit of a bind these days, with the Supreme Court decision rolling back the Province’s move a decade ago to gut the teachers’ contract and increase class sizes. That decision means more teachers (and classrooms) must be added and, at the information meeting last month, SD8 Secretary-Treasurer Kim Morris admitted that the school district doesn’t know exactly what that will all look like in the end.
My guess is that the deadline on BC Bid will pass without expressions of interest, and that the school district will have an “opportunity” to enter into direct discussions with the working group. But if it has an ounce of interest in the Creston Valley, the board of trustees is going to have to extend its planned date to close CEC, which is January of 2018. That is simply too short a time period for a community to rally to save the facility. While they’re at it, trustees should also conclude that Plan A should be to keep Home Links and Wildflower, along with the ancillary services in place. And the discussions should be about how to transfer ownership of the property to our community, and not to try to milk us for a half million bucks. As Keirn said, we have already paid for it once.