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08 December 2005

Lowest common denominator school politics

God invented schools.

Then God invented school administration.

Then God took the brains to manage school administration away from anyone connected with the eastern school authorities in Newfoundland.

This report is the umpteenth kick at the cat for local school bureaucrats. Many of the ideas are old ones that reflect the sort of idiocy that only can come from academic bureaucrats who define a neighbourhood school as one in which their computer program drops your kid across town, even if the actual neighbourhood school is about a couple of hundred feet away from your back door.

Like the one to keep two schools across the street from each other and have one a K-3 school and the other a 4-6 school.

School board planners and the consultant hired to produce this report obviously never did a course in traffic management.

Tough decisions - but necessary ones - are not going to get made. Yet again.

Meanwhile the Minister of Education has been well-briefed. She is following the same pattern as her predecessors. She wants to scrap the plan and, likely, keep everything much as it is.