By Joel Ceausu
www.thesuburban.com
If you’re puzzled by Education Minister Yves Bolduc’s volley taking a virtual cleaver to the province’s largest school board, you’re not alone. Marie-José Mastromonaco is as flummoxed as you are, and she’s the board vice-chair.
“I honestly don’t know, we haven’t got the reasons why. It’s pretty severe. We haven’t been told anything,” she told The Suburban. “It all seems poorly orchestrated.”
The massive transfer of territory from the Commission scolaire de Montréal (CSDM) to its neighbouring Commission scolaire Marguerite-Bourgeoys (CSMB) means losing more than a third of its 112,000 students and 66 of its 190 schools, making the recipient the province’s largest board and relegating the CSDM to a smaller, hobbled urban board, starved of its western territory and struggling with success rates and a plethora of challenges in the rest of the city.
Eyed for transfer are schools in Côte des Neiges–Notre Dame de Grâce, Sud-Ouest, Ahuntsic-Cartierville and Westmount, and the board has launched an online petition against the move.
Ward 11 commissioner for NDG and Westmount, Mastromonaco says the move shocked everyone at the board, and nixes suggestions that the move is payback for the board’s refusing Quebec City’s diktat for major budget cuts this year.
The CSDM only reduced its nearly billion-dollar budget by $5.4 million, not the $9 million requested. “Then most boards would face this,” she says, as several refused—including the English Montreal School Board, loudly—to toe the budget line.
She says the move may not seem like much to kids who walk to neighborhood schools each day, but for others in her ward’s, nine elementary and two high schools, it means major upheaval.
“The child attending FACE downtown and lives in NDG? Well they can’t go there anymore because all of a sudden they live in a different territory.”
It’s the same with Westmount she said, as families lured downtown by new development will find themselves short on local public school options.
While Marguerite-Bourgeoys boasts superior success rates to the beleaguered CSDM, she says “there are statistics and there are statistics; read them any way you want but behind them are children. We are just moving them from one board to another. Are we going to make the schools more efficient that way?”
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