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Tuesday, May 01, 2007

More schools stuff

I'm putting the post with the links to all of my school posts back up at the top of the blog. I've been getting a lot of searches for keywords related to the current space shortage, so I figured I ought to put it back up to save people the work. If you are new to the blog, you can find all of the background there.

Last night, the Catholic school board held a meeting to talk to parents about the issue. I wanted to go, but realised that I probably would not be able to answer the skill-testing question at the door:

Burly Catholic monk with arms crossed: Name the books of the Apocrypha.
Me: Um, Enoch?
Burly Catholic monk with arms crossed: Please leave now.
Me: Can I show you my genuflection? No?

I do, however, have a few secret sources out there, so I know what happened. CBC's coverage is here. Among the more interesting reports from the meeting:

  • There is no school spirit at Michael's school, which has been sharing space with YCS students for the past year. (This was news to me.)
  • Catholic students are not allowed to use the gym or specialty rooms at Michael's school. (This was also news to me. You'll be looking for section 25 in that link.)
  • The YK #1 high school is the only school in the city that is not owned by one of the boards. It could be taken from YK #1 and given to YCS over the board's objections. (Until this year, I had no idea that the boards owned the schools. I don't know why the high school is different.)
This is not going to end well. I feel bad for YCS in some ways -- YK #1's reaction to the education minister's threat to cut their funding was basically "OK, so we'll dip into our savings. Nice talking to you." This has left YCS without many options. While everyone was arguing about whether they could take one of our schools, the deadline to renew the tenancy agreement at Michael's school passed.

The minister of education is holding another public meeting on Thursday. I think we need to figure out the following things as a community:
  • What does YK #1 mean by "share"?
  • Under what circumstances would YCS be willing to share space?
  • Do we really need two public school boards? When we say we want a choice about where our kids go to school, do we mean that we want to choose the school or choose the district office?

4 comments:

Torq said...

Maybe I have low standards, but it seems to me that if you know what the Apocrypha is then you are doing pretty good!

Anonymous said...

Um, Megan, a Catholic would never ask you the books of the Apocrypha. We don't beleive they ARE the apocrypha. They're just books in the original canon of the Bible.

After all, it was the Catholic bishops who assembled the Bible in the first place.

(you know I'm winking and chuckling, right?)

Rev. Holsapple, any thoughts? (and are Anglican priests called Father or Reverend, sir?)

Megan said...

As long as we're winking and chuckling, I will admit that the first draft of this post had the burly monk asking for a list of the "deuterocanonical books". It also contained this aside:

NOTE TO NEWCOMERS AND HUMOUR-IMPAIRED CATHOLICS: This is a joke.

You are right, of course. I figured that Apocrypha was a funnier-sounding word, so I sacrificed accuracy in the name of humour. I have been duly chastised. I'll tighten my cilice so it doesn't happen again.

Megan said...

Yes, I am a loser, and no, none of this was intended as any type of slam on Catholics. I need to be more careful: our town's collective emotions are a bit unruly this week.

And Anglican priests go by a number of titles, but Father and Reverend would be the most common ones.