Can’t We All Just Get Along?
One of the dominant school-related stories of late was the showdown between the school board and Cambridge city council over heritage designations of a handful of schools. I won’t recount the story here, but the series of stories in the Cambridge Times can bring you up to speed.
Whether or not these schools should or should not be designated as heritage buildings is not the issue that concerns me here. The really unfortunate thing about the situation is the behaviour of both the board and the city.
In my view, the board (the staff more than the trustees) precipitated the crisis with a surprise announcement of a new building for Grand View Public School in Preston. This announcement – which apparently caught even the trustees off guard when it was presented – came with no public consultation either with parents or with the city. Prior to the announcement, the board’s position had always been to renovate Grand View. The change came as a total shock to parents and to area residents.
I cannot believe that the board staff who made this recommendation did not expect that the City might have some reservations about tearing down an iconic Preston building. Generations of Cambridge residents have wandered its halls over the decades. It would be mere speculation, however, to suggest that the board acted in this way precisely to catch the city off-guard and prevent a preemptive heritage designation.
So the board acted, at worst, immaturely and, at best, irresponsibly by making such an important decision without any warning or consultation. The City, though, is not off the hook. Rather than trying to work with the Board to find a solution that addressed everyone’s concerns, they took a combative approach and threatened to designate every remaining eligible school to prevent the building of any other new schools. This was apparently not a hollow threat as Council did just that a few weeks later.
The moral here is that the Board – and especially the Cambridge trustees – and the City need to work as partners with the common goal of healthy, sustainable, and well-educated neighbourhoods. We cannot allow our Board and our Council to play political games with our children.
