By Tina Comeau
THE VANGUARD
NovaNewsNow.com
Students at Maple Grove Education Centre put down their textbooks and picked up protest signs as they walked out of class for a while on Thursday afternoon to protest the school board’s handling of the grade reconfiguration of their school and Yarmouth Junior High.
A large percentage of the school population walked out of class shortly after 1 p.m. Judging by the chatter on the front lawn of the school, some students just wanted to be out of class and didn’t really seem concerned by the issue.
For others, though, they feel strongly about the fact that they want their voices to be heard by the school board. Some even called the school board office and board members while they were out of class in an attempt to get their message across.
Another protest rally was also planned for 6:30 p.m. outside the Yarmouth Consolidated Memorial High School where a public meeting was being held Thursday evening, May 27, to unveil the plans for the new Yarmouth high school. Many of the students who walked out of class at Maple Grove earlier in the afternoon made signs for that rally. Their signs were printed on pink Bristol board – pink being the colour to symbolize taking a stand against bullying.
There had been talk about students walking out of class at Yarmouth Junior High too, but given the location of the school and its proximity to the street it was decided it might be a challenge to control the situation.
The student walkout at Maple Grove was organized by Grade 8 students Brooke Hamilton and Braeden Robichaud.
“We hope that the school board will understand what we’re all going through and that they will fix what they’ve made a mess of. They’re breaking their own policies and they’re not putting students first,” said Brooke. “They think that they can just take us away from our building but it’s our peers and our guidance counselor and our principal and our friends, it’s not just a building they’re taking us away from, it’s a lot more than that.”
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Braeden said the board should have asked students for their input before making the decision they made in April.
“And at the last meeting the board had, they sat under a banner that said students first, well I’m questioning that right now with this decision,” he said. “They didn’t even let student council president Trent Thibodeau speak at the meeting, even though he had spent a lot of time on his speech.”
The student council president does intend to make a presentation at the board’s June 1 meeting.
“I’m just bothered that they didn’t consider what was going to happen, they didn’t talk to anybody about it, they just went ahead and did it,” said Trent, who said some students are really concerned by the board’s actions, while others don’t talk about it. “The Grade 9s, they’ve not involved like the Grade 8s.”
The student walkout was not condoned by the school, but school administration didn’t stop it from happening either. Principal Svein Ravlo said some parents have come to him saying their children have asked what they can do to be heard on this issue.
“The students decided to interrupt their school day,” he said, adding he doesn’t hear a lot of discussion about the issue taking place during the school day, nor has he had teachers telling him it’s all students are asking about. Of the three grade levels at the school, he said the 125 Grade 8 students are the ones most directly affected by this as they are the ones who will have to move to Yarmouth Junior High in September.
As far as ordering the students back to class, Ravlo said they would let the students do their thing for a while, under the watch of school staff, before telling them it was time to come back to class. During the walkout any student who came into the school looking for friends were stopped at the door and told if they came back into the building they had to go straight to class. Many, not surprisingly, opted to stay outdoors.
Asked about the student walkout, Tri-County Regional School Board superintendent Phil Landry said, “They have the right to do what they’ve done. I don’t have a problem with that.”
At the school board’s June 1 meeting, board member Winnie Surette will introduce a motion asking the board to rescind its motion to go ahead with the reconfiguration of the two schools in September. Before the motion comes up on the school board agenda, the board will hear from several presenters on the issue. As of Thursday afternoon, Landry said they had a list of 10 presentations.
Meanwhile, Landry maintains that while many in the public have been vocal about their dissatisfaction about the board’s decisions, the board is also hearing from a lot of people who support the decision.
“There’s a number of people who have contacted us to stay the course,” he said.
Landry also warns that with continued declining enrollment and the impact of that on school populations, staffing and programming, there are going to be more difficult decisions in the years ahead that the school board will have to make.
