Christina Blizzard wrong about Eden High School
Posted by Sandy on 20th April 2008
(See update below.) I rarely disagree with the Toronto Sun’s Christina Blizzard but she has blinders on when it comes to Eden High School in St. Catharines, Ontario. While I would like to criticize the McGuinty Liberal government for hypocrisy, I won’t. Because Eden High School is NOT, I repeat, is NOT a faith based publicly funded high school — although to be completely up front, I did make those claims during the heat of the 2007 Ontario election campaign. Rather, it is an alternative public high school, like every other publicly funded alternative high school.
If it was a true FB school, the students at Eden would be able to do spiritual activities during school hours like all Catholic schools do now.
And, spare me the cry that Eden is at fault for other public high schools closing. It has nothing whatsoever to do with any of those schools. Eden could cease to exist and those schools would still have to close. Few, if any students, were taken from other existing neighbourhood high schools. They come from all over the county, either in buses that would otherwise be nearly empty, by parent funded buses or by parent car pool.
Parents and journalists need to get over the fact that Eden is a success story. It is true that it is an alternative school, but a very different type of alternative school. A contract was made over twenty years ago with the local Mennonite Brethren community. As Education Minister Kathleen Wynn says, Eden has been grandfathered. If Eden closed, the parents would either fund their own private school, send their youth to existing private Christian schools or to local Catholic high schools.
Posted in Alternative Schools, School Boards | 10 Comments »