Data Source: B.C. government (PDF)

The B.C. government has released the 2010-11 enrolment statistics for kindergarten to Grade 12, and the numbers have never been so low.

Kindergarten class sizes in B.C. average 18.3 children, a 27 per cent decrease from the sizes of Grade 8 to 12. The above map shows the class sizes for kindergarten students throughout the school districts in the province, but even the fullest classes average out to students at most.

In districts like Nisga’a and Stikine, enrolment in kindergarten averages between 10 and 11 children, though this is not a wide variance from Grades 8 to 12 because the communities are heavily populated by First Nations students.

Classroom sizes are largest between Grades 4 to 7 in B.C., while declining in the lower grades. Even in the heavily populated areas of the Lower Mainland, enrolment is smaller than previous years.

Vancouver and Langley school districts represent the largest class sizes in the Lower Mainland, though even these average below 20 students. The Sea to Sky Corridor, meanwhile, goes as low as 16.

Calculating the difference between Kindergarten enrolment and Grades 8 to 12 gives demographers the ability to estimate the future needs of school children over the next decade of urban planning.

Data Source: B.C. government (PDF)

The largest decline from Grades 8 to 12 and Kindergarten was a 36.3 per cent drop in Peace River South, a 34.8 per cent drop in Delta and a 33.5 per cent drop in the Sea to Sky Corridor. It should be noted, however, that enrolment increases 11.6 per cent in the Grades 1 to 3 demographic.

Enrolment isn’t down everywhere. Central Coast district, which covers the remote areas of coastal British Columbia, is actually up 17.2 per cent. Gold Trail district is also up 10.6 per cent. This district covers the area of the northern Fraser Canyon along Highway 1, notable for having the highest percentage of First Nations students in the B.C. school system.

The largest single increase is enrolment in French Immersion schools, which is up 21.7 per cent in Kindergarten, and at 18.4 students it actually eclipses the average provincial size.

Between the 2001–02 and 2008–09 school years, 176 public schools in B.C. have been closed. The provincial government cites declining enrolment as a reason, but the BC Teachers’ Federation claims it was to cut spending.

View BC public school closures in a larger map

This is the fourth and final installment of blog entries focusing on parenting and parent issues. You can see the previous ones by clicking on the “kidblog” tag.

All images in this post are used under the Wikimedia Commons licence.

My family recently had head lice brought home from school, courtesy of our nine-year-old son. Once in our home, the lice quickly spread to my wife and my daughter. They most likely would have spread to me as well, if I had any hair for them to hide in.

We had to buy Nix Head Lice Treatment Solution and have everybody’s hair cleaned out. All the fabrics in the house had to be washed and sheets cleaned to ensure there was no lingering colony of eggs somewhere.

Lice is the big topic in schools right now, but nobody really wants to admit it happens to them or their children. Why? Does getting insects in your hair illicit personal embarrassment or invite scorn? It’s doubtful, considering any parent with children would soon find themselves hurling stones from their glass house.

One of the problems is that many schools don’t regularly screen for lice, or even require children who admit they have them to quarantine themselves at home.

This seasonal problem has led to an industry first in Canada, with four head lice removal clinics opening in Ontario in March. The clinics will offer professional delousing and screening services with the same kind of medical promise of confidentiality.

Lice, from the depths of fire and brimstone

Christine Tyson, a mother of two in Toronto, describes the problem as “hell.” She says the lice can blend with the colour of your hair and cling to the follicle. Her children are now 13 and 11, but got lice when they were just four and two. She tried everything to get rid of them before stumbling upon a strange solution.

“Olive Oil and lots of it,” she says. “Drench everyone’s head every other day for two weeks. Yes, including the parents, because we hug/cuddle our kids and we are the first to get it and the last to notice on ourselves. This includes the ladies who think because they colour treat, blow dry and flat iron their hair that they can’t contract lice. They certainly can and do.”

Ottawa mother of three, Elaine Morgan, says her kids got it twice a year and it was always a recurring problem. She didn’t try any natural remedies, going right for the chemical warfare, followed by hours of combing and nit removal. This led to a few embarrassing moments.

“I took my kids to McDonald’s after a brutal five hours of shampooing and combing. I knew my kids’ hair was cleaner than most others and would be going back to school the next day. A lady asked them why they weren’t in school and my five-year-old piped up, ‘Because we have lice!’”

Lice can be very picky about socioeconomics

“Where we live, in Ontario yes there is a stigma,” says Phillip Blancher of Morrisburg, Ontario, a tiny community near Ottawa.

“Typically in our schools the ones who get it are in lower-income brackets or thought to be low-income. Schools nowadays are so protective here about assigning blame that they wont even tell you what class has the outbreak, just that there was one in school.
Also the schools wont do anything about children who clearly have outbreaks and whose parents are unwilling or unable to treat them.”

Morgan has gone through the same problem. The checks used to be done by the school nurses, but that stopped when it became a parent volunteer job. She said some schools heard parental complaints that it violated their children’s privacy, which means that when there’s a real epidemic schools do nothing to stop it from happening.

Loretta Westin, who now lives in Prince Edward Island, says that in Nova Scotia the head lice regularly showed up in the public schools. Sometimes the school would do head checks, class by class, and send home only the kids with the lice.

“Lice jumps from head to head, so if the school isn’t on top of it, it can get around to everyone,” she said. “Kids who wash their hair more regularly are less likely to get nits. Avoiding borrowing hats and combs helps, and lockers also help to keep clothing separate. Reminding parents and kids of these things before the winter hats come out is probably a good idea.”

Persistent parasites of the Pediculosis capitis

One B.C. mother who wished to remain anonymous told a story about little Gracie, who was sent home from school every Tuesday from Kindergarten until she was 10. That’s because Tuesday was the school’s head lice checking day. Every week her mother used the lice shampoo, and every week she’d come home with lice again.

“Poor little Gracie couldn’t even attend her cousin’s sleepovers because she carried the lice everywhere… The back of her head is scarred due to years of scratching.”

Tyson says the schools aren’t doing enough and they should have public health professionals doing routine checks every couple of weeks. Blancher agrees.

“The schools should be able to require parents to keep their children home until treated and provide proof of treatment. Treatments are expensive and should be provided at a low cost as well so that there is one less excuse by lazy parents.”

This is the third of four blog entries that will focus on parenting and parent issues

Prior to the implementation of the carbon tax, the provincial government passed the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Targets Act in 2007, which legally requires all public-sector organizations, including school districts, to be carbon neutral by 2010.

This restriction put a dent in the budgetary decision-making of school boards throughout the province, who not only had to account for how many carbon emissions they were responsible for, but in the event they could not upgrade their energy efficiency, it required them to purchase carbon offset credits.

This was doubly difficult for school boards, since unlike the province legislating them, they are not legally allowed to run a fiscal deficit in order to make adjustments for this new carbon neutral designation. Which is a little strange, since B.C.’s own Climate Action Plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 33 per cent by 2020 was designated with a 12 year lead time.

Do carbon credits really work?

Cartoon by Gary Varvel

The concept of carbon offset credits is relatively controversial, even among proponents of a carbon neutral government. Some people have compared the principle of carbon offsets to absolution for guilty indulgences.

The level of carbon emissions produced by a school district, then, would not be affected, but the “neutral” designation would have to be achieved by using the existing budget to divert funds into purchasing credits, estimated to cost school boards in B.C. between $200,000 and $300,000 a year.

There’s also a question of how effective these offsets are. For example, purchasing tree-planting offsets isn’t a timely mitigation of cumulative carbon in the atmosphere, since it takes years for a new forest to function as the carbon-capturing component it’s supposed to be.

Nor can any person guarantee the permanence of forestry, particularly as global warming has been cited as being responsible for devastating forest fires that would erase any offsets from the purchase.

Trying to balance the budget and emissions

Photograph by: Peter Battistoni, Vancouver Sun

The Vancouver School Board budget crisis last year showed an $18 million shortfall that chairwoman Patti Bacchus blamed on the provincial government for not increasing funding enough to keep up with rising costs. At least two of those rising costs are outside of the control of the VSB. The negotiation of collective bargaining agreements with teachers’ unions, and the rising costs of energy and their impact on the status of the board’s carbon neutrality.

This means that if the consumption of natural gas goes up on the basis of energy needs and prices, the school boards have to ensure that money is reserved for the balancing of the increased usage in offsets.

That can lead to increased capital expenditure costs (one-time investments in an item that will return long-term benefits) in more energy-efficient heating systems, windows, and vehicles. These increased costs have to come out of somewhere, and since it isn’t coming from teacher salaries that are negotiated with the province, they have to come from the budget spent on actual education.

Some of these environmental retrofits do save money over the long-term, however, so the initial investment creates an pinch in the budget, but can result in increased savings in the millions of dollars down the road.

One of the concerns about carbon neutral schools is the urban and rural divide. Although it might be easier to transport students to schools in the cities, some school boards have no choice but to bus students in from the countryside.

Is the cost of being “carbon neutral” shared equally?

All provincial ministries reported their baseline carbon emissions in 2010, but school districts were given until June of 2011. They were provided with a provincially-created carbon measurement tool, called SmartTOOL, that will allow boards to enter in the figures of their energy expenditures in order to find their “carbon footprint.”

Up to 177 schools were closed in B.C. between 2002 and 2009 due to declining enrollment numbers, requiring schools to drive farther to pick up children. The savings from closing schools doesn’t take into account the increased carbon emissions in these rural communities. The carbon offset bill for School District 57 in Northern BC works out to roughly $17 per student compared to just $9 per student in the Langley school district.

Some critics feel that the money spent by school boards disappear into carbon offset programs that benefit private companies, and don’t return back into the school system to help kids. Cariboo North independent MLA Bob Simpson said tax dollars “which have been allocated to school districts to educate our children, are being re-directed, by government legislation, to assist resorts and greenhouses to become more energy efficient.”

The carbon credits currently being purchased through the Pacific Carbon Trust at a cost of $25 per tonne of CO2 emissions are going into the retrofitting of other organizations and private companies, rather than being used to upgrade public schools.

The complaints seem to have gotten the attention of the Liberal government, with Prince George-Valemount MLA Shirley Bond saying on Saturday that she will take northern school board trustees concerns about the carbon offset policy to Victoria.

Although carbon policies have been on the books since 2008, BC Liberal leadership hopeful George Abbott said on Jan. 4 that he wants a referendum to abolish the carbon tax. Although Abbott isn’t the front-runner, if his opinion is picked up by the eventual leader and brought to a vote, the costs could significantly reduce the current expenses in school boards across B.C.

This is the second of four blog entries that will focus on parenting and parent issues

The provincial government has been advocating for the ongoing need of the decade-old annual province-wide testing of B.C. students’ academic skills, but parents aren’t happy about the political fallout.

The Foundation Skills Assessment (FSA) is administered to Grade 4 and 7 students each year to gauge how well students are learning fundamental skills in the so-called three Rs: reading, writing and numeracy (‘rithmetic).

In a Jan. 16 open letter to parents, Education Minister Margaret MacDiarmid said, “without strong foundation skills, students entering their high-school years can become disengaged from their education.” She added, “contrary to misinformation, the FSA is not optional.”

That latter point has been a main source of contention as the tests are being conducted throughout B.C. from Jan. 17 to Feb. 25. The province argues that the main purpose is to help school districts, schools and planning councils to evaluate how well students are achieving and make improvements where necessary.

A polygamous school at the top of the education system?

Shelly Wutke

But some people aren’t so sure that ranking schools has been a helpful way to accomplish that goal. A school in the interior community of Bountiful recently made headlines in the media for achieving a perfect rank in a report published by the rightwing think tank, the Fraser Institute. Bountiful is an ironic additional to the list, since they are currently embroiled in a legal battle in the Supreme Court of Canada for the right to perpetuate polygamous marriages partially based on the societal perception it harms children.

It might not be as surprising as it seems, however, if you consider that private schools tend to fare better than public schools. As an example, although the private elementary-secondary school scored at the top, Bountiful’s heavily publicly subsidized other school Mormon Hills — it receives an annual provincial grant of $755,000 for its 163 students — has failed since 2007 to meet provincial curriculum requirements for high school graduation.

Shelly Wutke, a mother of four who lives in Aldergrove, said she went to a separate (Catholic) school growing up in Saskatchewan. Although publicly funded, the school did well as a semi-private institution, and Wutke said she had a “really positive experience.” It was when she entered public secondary school, however, that she began having trouble.

A politicized debate

The B.C. Principals’ and Vice-Principals’ Association, along with the B.C. Teachers’ Federation, have stepped forward to say that the tests are a waste of time and money. Jameel Aziz, the president of the BCPVPA, said in January that the test is just a political football, rejecting MacDiarmid’s argument that they are necessary.

Mike Klassen

“We believe the assessment is important,” MacDiarmid said at the time, while conceding she wouldn’t challenge the wishes of parents. “I’m not interested in a battle, political warfare, because students get chopped up by that.”

The unions and some school districts have sent pamphlets home with students that tell parents they have the right to withdraw their children from the tests. The battle between the unions and the government has spilled over into the public domain, and led to parents arguing with teachers. This led to the province backing down on the mandatory aspect in late January.

Mike Klassen, author of the popular Vancouver blog City Caucus, has a daughter in Grade 4 who just took the FSA. He said the politics is a distraction from the core issues.

“First of all I’ve always found the rancor caused by this discussion to be really unproductive. It really puts parents, educators, administrators and other members of the community in a very awkward situation when you’ve got that kind of adversarial approach to essentially what everybody is looking for, which is more excellence in our education system.”

A conflict of interest?

Nevertheless, Klassen said that he’s not sure it’s proper for the teachers’ union and other organizations representing educators to be advocating one way or another.

“I confess that where I get really concerned is that of the pervasive strength of the teachers’ union in so many different aspects of our eduction system, right from being part of the teachers’ college to education policy development. There’s very little they don’t have a direct hand in now. Maybe I’m not seeing the full picture here but it seems a group negotiating the salary and work conditions for their union membership are not necessarily the best to work for the interests of education.”

Coquitlam resident Heidi Hass Gable has three children in school, two that are eligible to take the FSA test now. Gable, an IT consultant who used to work for the ministry of the attorney general, said she exempted her Grade 4 son, Adam, from the test because he has a learning disability.

“This was one of those places where we didn’t want to challenge his confidence,” she explained.

Heidi Hass Gable

Gable, who is PAC president for school district 43, finds the tests are missing the purpose. She says she can see both sides of the argument and doesn’t think people will ever completely agree. But if the tests are used for what they were originally meant for, a snapshot of how the education system is performing in the province, then she can see an ongoing need.

“If you’re seeing there are consistent issues in a school, then why are we not putting more money into that school?”

“Lets not try to use this test for something it wasn’t meant to be used for,” she added.

Gable said a lot of politics and emotions come from the debates in the United States over things like No Child Left Behind, and we’re inevitably influenced by it.

“Year after year there’s a fresh group of parents and a fresh debate in the media about this. The media tends to look for the controversy but that’s not good for relationships in the schools.

“When I can talk to my teacher and trust she knows my child, we can have a conversation and she can hear me and react and adjust. But when we have this continual debate it doesn’t support that.”

Much ado about nothing?

Klassen says that he remembers annual testing in the 1970s and it never had a harmful effect. When he asked his daughter about it her biggest complaint was that she couldn’t go to P.E. that day. She also said she wished she had more time to finish some of her responses, but beyond that she just found it “boring.”

“Kids are going to have a much tougher time dealing with their peers on a day-to-day business than they will in the half morning time it will take them to conduct that test,” Klassen said.

But Wutke says her 9-year-old daughter at Coghlan Fundamental Elementary in Aldergrove was really stressed out about the test. She also said that though the main results are in the newspapers she hasn’t received the scores for her daughter. Nevertheless, Wutke doesn’t think they will be a good indicator of her daughter’s progress, since tests never show the whole picture.

What’s best for the kids?

All three parents said it’s more important to use the FSAs as a guide, rather than a number sheet and ranking system.

“I still think if I was to give any advice to the minister of education it would be that we just need to really help parents understand that the importance of local schools and devote some energy into how to counterbalance some of the marketing and persuasion tactics in the independent school system,” Klassen said. “Then parents would understand how beneficial remaining in your neighbourhood and going to your local school would be.”

Gable was more direct.

“This should be about my kid and my kid’s learning. Period.”

This is the first of four blog entries that will focus on parenting and parent issues