North Okanagan-Shuswap School District trustee Chris Coers states that discussing school closure is “always frustrating” but easier in Armstrong where schools are a “stone’s throw” of each other.
The missing element in that statement is the notion of community.
The brick school is an embodiment of the Armstrong-Spallumcheen community because generations attended it. Children attending school for their first three years carried in their book bags, the stories of siblings and parents and grandparents along with their own new scribblers and pencil cases.
They knew the building. They knew the adventure playground, as my own children called it, the magical space with its hill for sliding in winter, its trees for hide and seek, its seeming limitlessness.
The brick school was the perfect ship for six-year-olds undertaking this strange new voyage called school.
How does one put a price on that? One can’t, of course – just as one can’t put a price on clean air and clean drinking water.
Ten years before it became incorporated in 1913, Armstrong’s residents enthusiastically attended a large public meeting to discuss separation from Spallumcheen, the parent municipality. Within two weeks, the idea had lost its appeal. Why? Armstrong School could not survive on a reduced tax base, and the community’s priority was the children’s education.
What is our priority? What is our government’s priority? What is the objective behind a sustained policy of cutting funding to public education, closing schools, and destroying community?
Are community and public education worth saving? Do they have a role in preserving our democracy?
Shirley Campbell, 13-year high school teacher in Armstrong
