Piri de Vries is a parent who has experienced communication issues with the School District #27 (SD27) trustees and faced many battles in her pursuit of area education and improvements.
After hearing SD27 chair Tanya Guenther update the South Cariboo Joint Committee on options for changing trustee and zone reconfiguration recently, the Bridge Lake parent expresses her support for the school board’s current direction towardOption 4.
Despite her past issues, de Vries says retaining the three zone trustees in the South End of the school district is the right thing to do.
“That is really important, especially for rural communities, and that the people know who [their trustee] is.”
As the former Bridge Lake Elementary School (BLES) Parent Advisory Committee (PAC) chair, de Vries fought hard, if unsuccessfully, this spring to prevent the closure of the school her daughter attended.
de Vries says she has encountered problems with Zone trustees who represent specific communities, such as when she asked her area’s Trustee Linda Nielson to attend a private PAC meeting to talk about saving the school, and Nielsen refused.
The Bridge Lake PAC chair says she was involved in a discussion at a meeting with the board last February about the four options, and also submitted a letter from the PAC stating they didn’t want to see options 2 or 3.
She explains their point was that large, rural areas need more than one trustee to cover all the families living there.
“Anyway, we feel they didn’t listen to us much, all the money goes into big cities (like Williams Lake), and they have closed our school now. Whatever came afterward – they said they were minus [in the SD27 budget] and they were $1.3 million plus.
“That was the main reason they closed our school – they said they didn’t have money to have our school open. So we are more [ticked] off here.”
As new Canadians still struggling with reading and writing English, de Vries says she is worried about how their daughter’s education would be affected by the long bus ride to Horse Lake Elementary School and back home again.
She filed the Ombudsperson complaint even before BLES closed, and says she is still waiting for a decision.
Since then, de Vries says she and her husband resigned themselves to home school both their children, adding it takes her six hours, five days a week “and we don’t get paid [for teaching], and we still pay the taxes.”
de Vries says trustees have clearly indicated at a meeting that regardless of a zone position, all trustees represent the whole SD27 area, and so in that sense, they already have a combined representation.
These statements don’t hold credence with her when small schools in rural areas are shut down to reserve money for big schools, she explains.
“Who cares then, about it? They [seem to] care about the [SD27 North End] things … and they have a bit different problems that what we have.”
The Bridge Lake group was turned down for a provincial Rural Dividend grant it hoped to use for a “community hub and school” with hired teachers, she explains.
de Vries says the group, which has society status, was given another chance to reapply this fall, but since it was its lack of an audited financial statement that led to the grant refusal.
However, it is being disbanded as there aren’t enough volunteers left who are willing to fight this issue any longer.
Now, de Vries has appealed to Cariboo-Chilcotin MLA Donna Barnett in her new role as Minister of State for Rural Economic Development.
She adds residents throughout the community believe a “really important point” for reopening the school is to attract more families to live in Bridge Lake and its neighbouring areas.
