Legal's former mayor laid into Alberta's education minister last week, saying that his proposed fix for secular schools in Morinville could threaten the future of his town.
About 800 people gathered at Morinville Community High School last week for a forum on secular schooling hosted by Education Minister Thomas Lukaszuk. One of those people was Albert St. Jean, former mayor and current councillor for Legal. He was concerned that Bill 4, the bill recently tabled by Lukaszuk to address the lack of secular schooling in Morinville, might suck students and people out of his community.
"Our town's not big enough to sustain three [school systems]," St. Jean said to Lukaszuk. "I don't think you've considered our community of Legal whatsoever."
Three-way split
Morinville parents cannot currently send their children to a publicly funded non-religious school without giving up their right to vote for a school trustee. While Sturgeon School Division runs a secular school in the town, Morinville parents cannot vote for the Sturgeon school board because they are not in the board's jurisdiction. Some parents have said this violates their rights under Alberta's human rights laws.
Bill 4 is meant to address this problem by making the Sturgeon School Division the public board in Morinville and changing St. Albert Catholic into a separate board.
This change would also affect Legal, as it is under St. Albert Catholic's jurisdiction. If the bill passes, Legal will have two schools (Legal School and école Citadelle) and three school boards (St. Albert Catholic, Sturgeon and Greater North Central Francophone).
When the francophone école Citadelle opened in Legal, it split the town's student population between two schools and made Legal School (Catholic) too small to support its French immersion and high school programs, St. Jean said in an interview. Legal School has about 190 students while école Citadelle has about 130.
St. Jean's concern is that Bill 4 would worsen the situation. Since Sturgeon does not have any schools in Legal, any students it picks up will have to be bused out of town. That's bad for Legal School as it could lead to the loss of its junior high program, he said, and bad for the town.
"Who wants to move to a community that doesn't have a junior and senior high?" St. Jean said.
Coun. Trina Jones, whose children attend Legal School, was concerned about how the board switch would affect her voting rights. She isn't Catholic and only Catholics will be able to take part in St. Albert Catholic school board elections if it becomes a separate board.
"I will essentially be losing my right to vote in trustee elections," she said.
While there are no official estimates as to the number of Legal residents that would lose their right to vote for St. Albert Catholic if Bill 4 passed, St. Jean said he knew of at least one class at Legal School where half the parents would be disenfranchised.
"You could be talking 30 to 40 per cent of parents in Legal," he said.
No clear solutions
It's very possible that Legal could lose students to the Sturgeon school board, Lukaszuk said in an interview.
"Parents will exercise their rights and they will vote with their feet," he said.
Still, he continued, the province needs to keep rural schools open if it wants places like Legal to thrive. The province is working on a rural sustainability plan that would place related services into under-populated schools and turn them into multi-use facilities.
St. Jean dismissed the idea as "smoke and mirrors," as it would not prevent the damage that Bill 4 could cause to Legal.
"[They] keep telling us small communities to be sustainable … but when they throw this at us, they're just working against us," he said.
Legal should not have been included in Bill 4, St. Jean said, and will end up as "collateral damage" from its implementation.
"We're just an oversight," he said.
