RSS's Future is Wide-Open, For a While Longer

“Thank you for the tone of this evening,” Rossland parent Keith Robine said at one point Thursday evening, addressing superintendent Jean Borsa and the assembled school board members and district staff in the RSS gym. “We don’t feel threatened.” Robine’s statement was greeted with smiles and strong applause from the two hundred or so Rosslanders who turned out to hear district staff and SD 20 board members explain the background rationale behind the new five year plan the district is currently developing. And indeed, it was a remarkably civilized and intelligent discussion, given the occasionally rocky history of Rossland’s efforts to preserve its schools. The theme of the evening was change--inevitable change. The demographics of School District 20 are clear: the school age population is shrinking, district-wide, province-wide, nation-wide. Here in Rossland that decrease is reflected in projections that show RSS’s population shrinking from 379 students this year to 337 next year. How does one explain such a sharp, even shocking decline? According to Borsa’s extensive and detailed slide show charts, it’s actually simple: 69 grade twelves will graduate this year, but only 27 grade sixes will take their place. 69-27=a net loss of 42 students in one year. A fluke? No. Next year the numbers will be 67 graduates versus 29 new students. “It’s a huge drop, and we have to plan for that,” Borsa said. “When we get our funding, we get it on a per student basis, not based on space.” According to Borsa, under-utilization of school space is the biggest issue facing our schools. Even the new J.L. Crowe secondary, significantly smaller than the old Crowe, will, with in a few years of opening, drop well below capacity. What does this mean for RSS? With a maximum capacity of 525 students, the school’s population is projected to level out at around 285 students by the 2012-13 school year. That’s a usage rate of about 57% of capacity--an unsustainable number, according to the standards of the provincial government. This sounds grim, but Borsa was adamant that Rossland and other Kootenay communities need to view the current situation as an opportunity, not a threat. Throughout the evening, she stressed again and again the need to be proactive, not reactive: “We have an opportunity to do things differently. We need to attract new families and make our communities attractive to them. We need to put our thinking caps on and say, ‘what can we do?’.” According to the superintendent, the provincial government’s new Neighbourhoods of Learning initiative might offer a glimmer of hope. This initiative purports to look at ways of more fully integrating schools with the communities they serve. At one point, Borsa got a good laugh out of the audience by explaining this life-long, community-wide philosophy as encompassing people ‘from the cradle to the crypt’ or from ‘sperm to worm’. On a more serious note, Borsa indicated that there was provincial money available for pilot projects like a new K-12 school/community centre in a place like Rossland, observing that “The Ministry [of Education] holds this district up as a shining light.” The idea behind Neighbourhoods of Learning is that schools become more general community resources by housing (and obtaining revenue/funding streams from) other compatible community organizations like libraries, theatre groups, soup kitchens, health centres, and so forth. Synergy, in other words, might be the key to keeping K-12 in Rossland. Outgoing Rossland trustee Kelvin Saldern noted the availability of the mid-town lands (old Emcon lands) across from the current RSS as a potential site for just such a new school. Over the next couple of months, the District will be gathering proposals and input as the future of all threatened schools in SD 20. After receiving this input they will decide upon a course of action, which in Rossland’s case could range all the way from closing RSS and sending all our high school students to Crowe, to ordering a feasibility study on a new K-12 school. Other options along the spectrum include renovating the current RSS into a K-12 school and shutting down MacLean, sending grades 10-12 down to Trail, and so on. The future, at least for the next couple of months or so, is wide open. Consider making your voice heard in the forums, at: How should we go about keeping K-12 in Rossland?