The head of Manitoba's school boards is urging trustees to take their fight for the right to close schools to the provincial legislature.
"They should get ready now," Manitoba Association of School Trustees executive director Yolande Dupuis said Friday from Lorette.
Bob Steele signs a petition being circulated by Jennifer Carlson, 11, and her mother Leanne Carlson to keep Ness Middle School open.
Dupuis said school boards should be ready to speak before a legislative committee in hearings expected this spring after Education Minister Peter Bjornson's ban on school closings gets second reading.
"You usually have only a couple of days to get ready," Dupuis said.
Dupuis said that trustees still are getting most of their information about the moratorium on school closings from what they read in the newspaper.
"We're waiting for something in writing," she said.
MAST especially wants to know what it would take to get Bjornson to allow an exception to the moratorium. His initial announcement said that a consolidation of schools, with the consent of the community, might persuade him to grant an exception.
"We're still looking for definitions" of consolidation and consensus, Dupuis said.
Bjornson said in an interview Thursday that he will not allow any of the nine city schools to close, which have been under review for possible closure since last year.
Bjornson said consolidation is only a possibility in rural Manitoba, and would only apply to an elementary school being merged with a nearby high school into one kindergarten to Grade 12 school building. Even then, he'd allow consolidation only in extreme circumstances in which a school would not remain viable.
Confusion reigns as school boards try to sort out just what hit them out of nowhere.
Park West school board has called off Wednesday's public meeting in Birtle, which would have heard residents' comments on the proposed closing of Kenton School and a possible restructuring of declining-enrolment schools which could eventually have reduced seven high schools to two in Russell and Shoal Lake.
St. James-Assiniboia school board chair Bruce Alexander was uncertain Friday whether trustees will still want chief superintendent Ron Weston to present his recommendation Tuesday evening for the possible closings of Hedges and Ness middle schools.
A review committee of staff, parents and residents had earlier recommended that the division close Ness and move its staff, programs, and students to Hedges in September of 2009.
"The whole thing is really in question. We expect, at some point, the government will communicate in writing," Alexander said Friday.
Ness parent Leanne Carlson said she and other parents are not taking any chances.
They'll be going door-to-door this weekend with petitions opposing the closing of Ness, so they can show Bjornson that there is no consensus or acceptance in the community of for any possible closing.
Meanwhile, Pembina Trails superintendent Lawrence Lussier recommended Thursday night that the division close tiny Chapman School, but also recommended that Pembina Trails take no further action at this time.
"The board will have to continue to study what is the appropriate action now, if any," Lussier said Friday.
Elsewhere, The Brandon Sun reports that the Park West school board could reduce Kenton School from its current kindergarten to Grade 8, to a K-5 school, which this year would have chopped enrolment from 26 to 16. School board chair Joan Clement could not be reached Friday.
Bjornson said last week that he would not allow school boards to move grades and programs out of a school as an end run to his moratorium.
But, one senior administrator pointed out Friday, "There's nothing in the legislation about reconfiguring schools."
nick.martin@freepress.mb.ca
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