Editor:
A new mayor for the Town of Ladysmith is huge news but may actually pale in light of the drama of the election of school trustees for SD68.
Choices of the Trustees to close Cedar School, Ecole Davis Road, and the intelligent group at the South Wellington community school have left a lot of people in shock.
The one success this year was due to the school board’s capitulation to the need of bus service for the Ladysmith French Immersion students travelling to North Oyster. There is no bus that takes a great proportion of Cedar high school kids to Ladysmith Secondary School. Attempting to push the Cedar population into the megaschool project in Nanaimo, the only bus from Cedar runs to Barsby.
Meanwhile, the population of LSS has nearly doubled from last year, and the portables from École Davis Road are now being moved to our high school.
Though this taxing the less economically dense taxation network of Nanaimo South for the benefit of Nanaimo’s urbanites allows for NDSS to qualify for two million dollars in government funding for real estate that is worth more than twice that amount to VIU, no such capital can be expected in Ladysmith. Rather, our kids’ books are a year older, there is no projected new program for trades, there are no new science labs or tech programs. In fact, there is just a dizzying abundance of kids and same ol’ funding one might find in a one-room school house.
So the community gossip I have heard that does seem to have clarity is this: bring in a completely new board. There is some truth to the fact that the trustees are helpless to the demands of government cutbacks, but the other aspect of that is trustees behaving like bureaucrats and not like advocates.
I really miss June Harrison; we could use her creative grasp and huge intellect about now.
Jacqueline LeitchLadysmith