A radio report a couple weeks back caught my attention. CBC Radio aired an interview with Kootenay Lake school district Supt. Jeff Jones about the reported chaos being experienced at L.V. Rogers Secondary School in Nelson (Nelson Star story), where a parents meeting had been called to deal with the frustrations students were having with scheduling and getting the elective courses they wanted.
The story itself wasn’t particularly different from what we typically hear from high schools each September. It’s always a mad scramble, especially when it comes to enrolment numbers. It’s all good when projections made by principals earlier in the year turn out to be accurate, because that’s what the Sept. 1 staffing level is based on. If the number of students is higher than anticipated, they get crammed into classrooms until staff can be added. Projections that turn out to be low mean that newly hired teachers live for a month or more holding their breath — layoffs are coming.
This year, though, high schools across the province were also using a new, provincially mandated scheduling system and Jones expressed frustration that glitches were causing headaches for staff, students and parents.
What really caught my attention was Jones’ suggestion to address the problems in Nelson and Creston (he brought Prince Charles Secondary School into the conversation himself — no big uprising was occurring here). The principals will have to spend their way out of the problem, he said, by hiring more staff and exceeding their budgets. Really? Budgets that are really the ultimate responsibility of administrative staff and the school board are now to be ignored by the very people who aren’t supposed to ignore them? This sounded more like Jones was throwing his principals under a bus than a helpful suggestion or solution.
The next week, back from several days in Calgary, I thought I would check on the Creston situation.
It took a few hours, but Jones gave PCSS principal Scott Cobbe the OK to talk to me and off I went to the high school. By that time I knew that the school board had averted a possible problem for Jones and the principals by approving the addition of teaching positions in both L.V. Rogers (Nelson Star story) and PCSS.
I met with Cobbe and assistant principal Mike Nelson in an office whose walls are covered with masses of sticky notes. Much of the scheduling for classes falls to Nelson and it’s something he’s probably very good at, with calculus being one of his specialties. Undoubtedly it’s a challenge in a smallish school to satisfy the wants and needs of students when it comes to electives, trying to balance demand with the need, Jones’ comments aside, to work within a budget.
I was pleased to learn than neither Cobbe or Nelson thought that this September was all that more challenging than previous years. The problems with the scheduling system were minor, they said. And Cobbe took full responsibility for his projected enrolment, which looks like it will fall short by about 20 students. In other words, PCSS has about 20 more students than it was ready to accommodate. To his credit, Cobbe said that he works hard to make his projections as accurate as possible and refuses to be overly optimistic. An optimistic projection can lead to the need to lay off teachers in October, after the final enrolment numbers are set, and that’s not something he wants to build into his planning model, Cobbe said.
As we talked, it occurred to me that the difference between Nelson and Creston school challenges this fall might be more cultural than anything. Is it possible, I wondered, that Creston residents are simply less demanding than our Nelson counterparts? Cobbe didn’t deny that possibility, but added fuel to my theory by saying that he had only had to deal with one upset parent in September, nothing like the outcry that had come out of Nelson and put the story out across the province.
The theory isn’t intended to be judgmental. Nelson is known for its activism and probably has a larger base of parents who are also professionals who have high expectations for their kids. In Creston, we have one of the lowest family income levels in the province and we tend to make do in every aspect of our lives. Perhaps we are more understanding when we see others, Cobbe and Nelson and the PCSS staff in this instance, doing their utmost to provide students with what they need. We live our lives doing the best we can with what we have, so why would we blame others when things don’t go exactly the way we would like? We ask others to do their best with what they have to work with, just as so many of us have done to adapt to life in this wonderful Creston Valley.
Lorne Eckersley is the publisher of the Creston Valley Advance.