Morinville parents had some strong words for Alberta's education minister last week when they learned that they might have to give up one of their schools to accommodate a new public school district in town.
Roughly 800 people crowded into the gym at Morinville Community High School on March 15 for a three-hour town hall with Alberta Education Minister Thomas Lukaszuk. Lukaszuk had called the meeting to consult with residents on how to find a permanent school for the town's secular school students.
But when evidence presented at the meeting suggested that G.P. Vanier Elementary could become that new secular school, parents gave Lukaszuk an earful.
That move would mean kicking out about 339 Catholic students to make way for about 100 non-Catholics, argued Kimberley Ettel, who has two students at Vanier.
"There are 339 students that attend G.P. Vanier," she said, shouting to be heard over the moderator. "What about their voices?"
Done deal?
Morinville falls under the jurisdiction of the St. Albert Catholic board which, until recently, ran all the schools in town. The board's curriculum is permeated with religious education.
In 2010, a group of parents asked the board to allow their children to be excluded from religious education under the Alberta Human Rights Act. When the board refused, that led to public protests and official complaints under that act, one of which is now before the Alberta Human Rights Commission.
The province has tabled Bill 4 to try and solve this issue. If passed, the bill would make the Sturgeon School Division the public board in Morinville and Legal and switch St. Albert Catholic from public to separate. That would give parents the option to send their kids to a secular school without having to give up their right to vote for a trustee on that school's board, as they have to do now.
That bill is likely to pass before the end of this session, Lukaszuk told the crowd, which means he has to figure out where to put Sturgeon's new secular students. (The board has no permanent school in Morinville, but does run the portable-based Morinville Public Elementary.)
"I want to be perfectly clear with you: that is not a decision I have made yet … I want to hear from you," Lukaszuk said.
But information presented at the meeting suggested that the best place for those secular students would be G.P. Vanier — a Catholic school and the current home of Morinville Public.
The province had three sites under consideration, said deputy education minister Keray Henke — Vanier, Notre Dame Elementary, and the Sturgeon School Division administration building. The Sturgeon building isn't big enough and wouldn't be ready for students by September, Henke said. The two schools have room and would be ready, but using them would cause a lot of disruption.
As about 500 of Morinville's 700 elementary students are in Notre Dame's catchment area, it would be less disruptive to use Vanier, said St. Albert Catholic superintendant David Keohane. The division would have to shuffle some grades between schools and use portables, he said, but they could find the space in Morinville for the displaced students.
"It is a working theory right now that it can be done," he said.
Several parents at the meeting accused Lukaszuk of having already made his decision. The audience applauded loudly when the moderator asked them if they thought this was the case.
Lukaszuk repeatedly said that this was not the case.
"In all likelihood, yes, it means transferring a school [to Sturgeon]," he said late in the meeting, but it could also mean sharing one between two districts.
Whose rights?
Town resident Michael Cust argued that Morinville's public board should remain Catholic. This is not a situation of minority rights being trampled on, he said, but of atheist values and religious intolerance. Catholics are the minority in secular Alberta, he said, and this is a small group trying to bring secular values into Morinville.
"It would be like English people moving into Quebec and complaining that everything is French," he quipped, to loud applause.
Alberta used that same logic to argue against creating francophone schools for its French-speaking minority (i.e. you're French and we speak English here), Lukaszuk countered. The Supreme Court forced the province to provide francophone schools, he said.
"It's not a question of who moved into whose community, or who's in the majority or the minority. The fact is that, in law, that minority has the right to attend schools that are not religious," Lukaszuk said.
This was not an easy choice to make, Lukaszuk said, but if he did not make it, the courts would.
"If I choose not to make that decision … that decision will be made for us."
A passionate Alanna Dalton accused Lukaszuk of trampling on her right to vote for a Catholic board trustee. As a non-Catholic parent, she would lose the right to vote or run for the St. Albert Catholic school board if it became a separate school district.
"You are taking away my voice to vote for my trustee solely because I am no longer Catholic," she said. "You're taking away our voice, and you're claiming you're doing it for human rights, but really all you're doing is changing who you're discriminating against."
Sturgeon solution?
Town resident Cindy Daoust was one of several people to suggest an alternative: bus Morinville's secular students to schools in Sturgeon County until a permanent one could be built in town.
"Why can't we bus the 100 kids to Sturgeon Heights?" she asked, referring to a Sturgeon division school in St. Albert.
When resident Albert Lutz also raised that idea, Lukaszuk said it was a very interesting one that he would definitely consider.
Sturgeon School Division superintendent MichÈle Dick said in an interview that she was not sure if there was any room at her division's schools for these students.
"We have very little capacity, if any, at Sturgeon Heights," she said, and a tiny bit at Namao and Camilla. Busing students would mean shipping them to many different schools, possibly even to Redwater, and would probably mean splitting up families with kids in different grade levels, she said.
St. Albert Catholic made this same proposal last year, said Thomas Kirsop, a vocal advocate for secular education in Morinville, and he rejected it then, too.
"No child should have to ride out of a town of 8,000 to find education that's publicly funded," he said in an interview. "No parent should be told to remove [his or her] children from town."
Busing out of Morinville would mean 10-hour days for many students due to the travel involved, Kirsop said.
"If you have a four-year-old in kindergarten, [he or she is] getting on the bus at six in the morning," he said.
Answer soon
Lukaszuk said he now has all the information he needed to make his decision, and would make it "as soon as humanly possible," which he suggested meant within a few days.
Kirsop said he sympathized with parents who didn't want their kids moved to a different school (his have moved three times in the last year as students at Morinville Public), and hoped Lukaszuk could find a solution that didn't displace anyone. If that isn't possible, he added: "I'd say what's left is the courts, and we know where that goes."
