Never the twain shall meet on Stuart Wood closure

WEDNESDAY MORNING EDITORIAL — What should have been a 15-minute discussion in City council chambers on Tuesday turned into an hour and a half of confusion and indecision on the Stuart Wood school issue.

The Downtown and West End Residents Association went before council to ask its support in trying to save Stuart Wood as an elementary school. The Kamloops-Thompson school board will make a decision — likely to close it — very soon, probably next week.

Residents fear that loss of the school will damage the quality of life in the downtown area, and they make a good case. But council, though expressing sympathy for their position, couldn’t figure out what to do about it.

In the end, they did nothing except agree to write a letter to the school board asking that it listen to the concerns of the residents. Three councillors — Tina Lange, Donovan Cavers and Arjun Singh — wanted to do more but couldn’t prevail.

The main thread of council’s reluctance to act was that it is not expert in the field of education. Better to leave those decisions to the democratically elected school board, it reasoned.

But here’s the problem. The school board, as reflected in superintendent Terry Sullivan’s oft-stated reminder, is not expert in urban planning. All they want to do is put schools where they work best for the teaching of classes. The school board does not involve itself in urban planning stuff, such as the social and economic impacts of a school on a neighbourhood.

The point the residents associations — both the downtown-West End group and the Sagebrush Neighborhood Association that overs the area on the south side of Columbia Street — are trying to make is that the future of Stuart Wood is very much both an educational and an urban planning issue. But so dedicated are the two elected bodies responsible for those things to staying within their own turf that Stuart Wood seems certain to become the victim.

Never, it seems, the twain shall meet.

But, speaking of meetings, the downtown-West End association is holding a public meeting tonight, Wednesday, at Desert Gardens to talk more about Stuart Wood. Maybe that meeting can come up with some ideas on how to get the point across. It starts at 7 p.m. with a meeting on some association stuff, followed by the Stuart Wood discussion at 7:30.