SCHOOLS – Why Stuart Wood was included in Fraser Institute’s report card

Several people asked why Stuart Wood was included in the new Fraser Institute report card on elementary schools even though it closed in 2016, so I asked the Fraser Institute about it. In the reply below, the reference to Stuart Wood moving “to a new location” means that when Stuart Wood closed, students moved to the new Beattie elementary, and the Ministry of Education continued to use the same identification code. — Mel Rothenburger.

Dear Mr. Rothenburger,

I work with Peter Cowley on the school rankings, and he has asked me to respond to your email.  Since the publication of the BC elementary school rankings, we have been alerted to a need to update our files and our website with respect to several Kamloops schools.

Each of the schools in our databases have a unique school code established by the ministry of education. The relevant ministry school codes in this instance are 07324002 for Stuart Wood and Beattie Elementary and 07324014 for Beattie School of the Arts and Kamloops School of the Arts. These ministry school codes are essential to the management of the great quantities of historical data that are used to build our report cards on schools.

Often times, when a school is closed or is moved to a new location, the ministry will assign a new school code to the school. In this case, however, Stuart Wood was moved to a new location and the school was renamed and yet the school code was not changed. Likewise, while Beattie School of the Arts was moved to a new location, its name was changed, and it was merged to establish a K-12 program, its ministry code remained the same.  Because the codes remained the same, the changes were not detected.

Our review of the circumstances of the changes suggest to us that it is reasonable to maintain the data sets as they now exist on http://www.compareschoolrankings, changing only the names and administrative details.  Thus, the school with ministry code 07324002 will be identified as “Beattie Elementary School” and the school with ministry code 07324014 will be identified as “Kamloops School of the Arts”. This course of action is consistent with that adopted in the ministry of education databases. Of course, all of the relevant data such as addresses, telephone numbers, website URLs and geo co-ordinates for mapping will be updated as required.

I hope this answers your question.  If I can be of any further assistance, please let me know.

ANGELA MacLEOD  |  Senior Policy Analyst
The Fraser Institute