English public schools need access concessions

Commissioners of the English Montreal School Board are faced with an unenviable choice Wednesday night as they prepare to vote on which of the schools under their jurisdiction will have to be closed.
The hard reality is that some will have to be shut down despite passionate appeals for their preservation from parents of children currently attending schools identified for possible closure as a result of a consultation process that got underway last March.
Closings were inevitable from the outset, given that the board’s student population has shrunk by nearly a quarter over the past decade, from 27,000 to 20,000. It was hard to argue with chairperson Angela Mancini’s bottom-line take that the board is simply carrying too many schools for the number of pupils it has.
Even so, indications on the eve of the vote on closures are that the cuts will likely not be as painful as originally anticipated.
On Monday, the board’s long-range planning committee submitted recommendations calling for the closing of only three schools instead of the previously anticipated six. The committee also backed off proposals to relocate some schools and programs.
Nesbitt in Rosemont, Carlyle in Town of Mount Royal and James Lyng High School in St. Henri, which had appeared destined for the chop, now look as though they might be spared. Alas, the same can’t be said for St. Brendan in Rosemont, St. John Bosco in Ville Émard and Fraser Academy in St. Laurent, all of which had their ardent supporters at public hearings last month, but whose closings the committee has proposed.
There has been criticism of how the consultation process was conducted and the end result will leave many unhappy with the outcome. But on the whole, the recommendations put forward for the crucial vote are not unreasonable, painful as the inevitable closures will be for some.
What is unreasonable, in the broader context, is that Quebec’s English public school system isn’t being allowed any new demographic oxygen, in large part as a result of the province’s constrictive language law that limits access to English school to children with at least one parent educated in an English school in Canada.
This restriction of free choice in public schooling for francophones and immigrants has deprived the English system of much of its traditional replacement clientele and cut its number of students from 232,000 prior to the adoption of Bill 101 to 101,450 in 2010-11.
In addition to those shut out by law from English schools, 11.4 per cent of youngsters eligible for English public education by latest count attend French schools, a further deprivation for the English system.
According to education department estimates, the English public school population will dwindle even further in coming years, down to 95,600 by 2015.
A measure that could alleviate this slow strangulation of the English system, and restore some measure of vitality to it, would be to allow the children of immigrants from English-speaking countries whose mother tongue is English to attend English schools in the province. This was recommended two decades ago by former McGill University chancellor Gretta Chambers in a report on English schooling in Quebec, but has found no takers in a succession of governments.
Such a measure would boost the English school population by a healthy 10 per cent, while depriving the French system by a mere one per cent of its clientele. It would furthermore allow Quebec to attract skilled workers currently put off by the current schooling restrictions. Many skilled workers who come to Quebec with very young children like the idea of educating them in French; on the other hand, many of those with teenage children think twice before accepting a job offer in Quebec over one from outside of the province. That, at least, has been what McGill University’s recruiters have found out, principal Heather Munroe-Blum told The Gazette editorial board recently. It’s easy to imagine other major employers in Montreal have discovered the same thing. In the end, Montreal’s economy loses out.
Easing access somewhat to English schools would hardly constitute a threat to the survival of French in the province. And yet reasonable as it might be to provide such relief for the declining English school system, which is after all a valuable asset for Quebec, easing access is politically inconceivable in the present circumstances.
As long as any discussion of language is dominated by language hawks who see the slightest concession to English as a death knell for French in Quebec, no major political party is likely to have the courage of generosity.
Maybe someday the political context will change. If and when it does, the Chambers report should serve as a blueprint for reform.