Street Level

Thirty Canadian geese swam up to the dock today.

A baby duck jumped onto Alan’s kayak.

And, when I went to buy newspapers — it’s an addiction, what can I say? — and bread, the lady behind the cash register remembered me.

This is rural B.C. It’s what we all brag about when we talk to our friends and relatives back East.

It’s what we talk about when we explain why this is God’s country.

More than Cambie Street or Robson Street or the proximity to Washington state, it is the grandeur outside the 604 exchange that truly describes what British Columbia is.

And it’s why talk of closing schools in rural areas of the Kamloops area is simply wrong.

Rural B.C. isn’t the same as Vancouver or Victoria. It’s not even the same as Kamloops. It’s those communities where everyone knows everyone else. Where they nod their heads as they drive past you. Where they tell you to have a great day and you get the feeling they really mean it.

It’s where their schools are more than just a collection of classrooms. They’re as much a part of the hub of the community as those halls and arenas that host the local artisans with their craft fairs and the tiny-tot hockey teams every winter.

Take away a rural community’s school and you’ve killed much of its heart.

You’ve taken away yet another reason why these pioneers — and that’s what they are, even today — choose to live the tough life that defines much of rural British Columbia. You might as well close their legion, shut down the mom-and-pop grocery store and roll up the streets.

Closing their schools is more than just a smack upside the face. It’s a death blow -- and these are people who do not deserve that kid of treatment.

Which is not to say School District 73 isn’t facing tough times and has some tough decisions to make. But let’s be honest. Close a neighbourhood school in Kamloops and all those affected families will simply have to learn to become part of some other school community.

We’ve done it with our children who, because we have chosen to send them not to our neighbourhood elementary, but to Beattie School of the Arts, have had to learn to become part of a community created from throughout Kamloops.

It’s hasn’t been that difficult. If the guys want to go visit with some school chums, they have to take a slightly longer bus ride. They don’t have to ask us to drive them to another city.

Close the school in Pinantan, Heffley, Westwold or Savona and you’re forcing the children to leave their home community and ride on a bus for a ridiculously long time to attend a school whose community can never really be their own.

What is most galling is that all it takes is a majority of the board to enact these cold, callous decisions. And that same majority doesn’t have to rely on the rural vote to be re-elected.

Can’t you picture it? It’s so simple.

The Kamloops trustees — a majority — shut down the rural schools. They don’t lose a lot of votes in the city because, heck, they didn’t do much in Kamloops. The few rural trustees rage and rail and condemn — a surefire way to guarantee re-election next time we go to the polls.

Nobody loses — except those who live in Pinantan, Westwold, Heffley, Savona and all those other communities that really define what British Columbia is.

dale@kamloopsthisweek.com

Posted by Dale at 4:59 p.m. Comments