With F.H. Huffman School likely to close, in favour of consolidating its students in a new school at the Robert Moore site on Second Street East, the last of the public board’s small “neighbourhood” schools will be gone.
The slow process actually began in the early 1980s with the closure of the McIrvine School in the west end. But it definitely accelerated over the past few years, with Alberton, Alexander MacKenzie, and Sixth Street School all being mothballed in one fell swoop.
Now F.H. Huffman seems destined to meet that same fate, leaving the town with just four elementary schools—J.W. Walker and Robert Moore in the public board, and St. Francis and St. Michael’s for the Catholic board.
Declining enrolment certainly is a factor. Huffman has a capacity for 132 students, but only 88 currently are enrolled. And just 54 are projected to be there by the 2011-12 school year.
At the same time, however, these closures were all but inevitable when the board, facing budget constraints, basically allowed the schools to fall into disrepair—to the point where they were deemed “prohibitive to repair” by the province.
So in effect, the groundswell in favour of keeping Huffman open has come too late. It should have begun years ago when less and less money was going towards maintenance.
The writing was on the wall then; parents just didn’t see it.
The trade-off, of course, is the promise of a brand spanking new school to replace aging Huffman and Robert Moore, which does have its appeal, though some—looking at the new J.W. Walker School—fear smaller classrooms and a smaller gymnasium will be the end result.
The real irony, of course, is what happens if the population of Fort Frances rebounds again in the coming years, as our civic leaders are trying to do. Faced with the prospect of overcrowded classrooms and more portables, no doubt we’ll wish we had kept at least some of our small “neighbourhood” schools open.
