So many passionate pleas to trustees not to chop programs and positions as recommended by the Vancouver School Board’s senior management team, so little space for them all in the pages of the Courier.
Here are a few standouts from public consultations on the 2014-2015 budget:
- “Recently there was an incident at school where my daughter believed that she was accused by wrongdoing and she felt so hurt that she told her mother that she’d rather be dead than hear [this] about herself. At the end of the school she was so upset and crying nonstop. My wife phoned the [multicultural] worker… Next day, we met the class teacher to clear the thing out. [It] would not have been possible without the help of the multicultural worker.”
— Amir Romala, on why he didn’t want the VSB to eliminate one of the three-and-a-half South Asian multicultural worker liaison positions to reflect a decline in the newcomer South Asian student population.
- “I know lots of kids that felt like giving up, got in trouble, skipped school, were doing drugs and didn’t care about anything. Many, like me, got involved in sports and it changed them. Now we have dreams of going to university and further to play sports. It’s funny to see tough guys jumping around like kids when they react to almost the whole school screaming their name and holding up signs in support of school spirit. They have pride in their school, rather than hate it.”
— Grade 9 student Colton Liu, whose mother helped him with sports to recover from a brain injury.
- “My children have been in classes in recent years with outdated or inadequate textbooks. They’ve spent a whole year in portables with fetid air… They’ve been in bathrooms that haven’t been repaired properly because the funding isn’t there. They’ve seen teachers demoralized and they’ve seen athletic programs let go by wayside. They’ve also seen parents plugging many of the gaps in the education system. In the school that my kids go to, which is a great school, L’Ecole Bilinque, parents do a huge amount of work around the edges and it’s because it’s a school which draws on a fairly affluent range of households. In schools where parents don’t have such a luxury, I just can imagine how the students suffer… It’s time for [the provincial government] to make public education a priority again.”
— Jim Boothroyd, of the new citizens’ group, Protect Public Education Now.
Music Monday
The VSB acknowledged the importance of music education April 30 when it saved the elementary band and strings program in its 2014-2015 budget. The importance of youth playing music will be celebrated to stratospheric proportions May 5 with the 10th anniversary of Music Monday. The Coalition for Music Education has organized a live webcast linking events across the country. The event culminates with a synchronized nationwide performances of I.S.S. (Is Somebody Singing) with former Canadian Space Agency astronaut Chris Hadfield, led by Maestro Bramwell Tovey of the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra at Science World. The webcast will air between 9 and 10 a.m. at musicmonday.ca.
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