Protest at TDSB meeting for John Fisher Public School
Posted March 23, 2017 6:15 am.
Last Updated March 23, 2017 6:19 am.
This article is more than 5 years old.
A Toronto District School Board (TDSB) meeting was packed on Wednesday night, as trustees passed a motion that would allow staff to potentially decide which school students at John Fisher Public School could be transferred to due to a development project next door.
The developer, KG Group, told CityNews the project isn’t a condominium as CityNews first announced. Instead, it’s a rental apartment building that will provide 315 rental units next to the French school near Yonge Street and Eglinton Avenue. Construction is set to get underway this summer and is expected to take just over two years. A two-day demolition will also take place.
During this process, it is possible that the 500 students will be relocated elsewhere, but parents say no details have been communicated to them on the future of their children’s education.
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“This is a process that has not been transparent starting from 2013. It has involved the OMB [Ontario Municipal Board] and the TDSB,” said Taylor Roberts, a parent who has kids attending John Fisher. “They have not answered to anybody and that’s why all these people are here, and we’re not standing down.”
Roberts was just one of dozens who took part in the rally at the school board ahead of the meeting. During the meeting, the TDSB voted in favour of a motion that would implement a process that governed which schools the students would be transferred to if parents pulled them out of John Fisher.
School board trustee member Shelley Laskin, who drafted the motion along with John Fisher trustee Gerri Gershon, tells CityNews the motion is key to the TDSB being more transparent in this process.
“This motion was meant to bring transparency to how staff were going to handle it operationally, and in actual fact, without the motion, parents still won’t get into Eglinton Public School, staff would have to redirect them,” Laskin said.
Weeks ago, Laskin says, some parents tried to pull their kids out of John Fisher to transfer them over to Eglinton, which is already overcrowded. The trustee says the school is over-capacity with 590 students, well above the 507 cap it’s required to have by the Ministry of Education, so principals have been told to halt all registration until a central process was developed.
“This is a circumstance that we would never have thought of, that’s why it’s called an exceptional circumstance,” she explained. “We have never considered an entire French immersion school vacating, but we have to plan for that.”
Under Motion 18.2, if parents opt to pull their kids out of John Fisher’s French program, TDSB staff would decide which schools they would be transferred to, based on information including available space, grade, siblings, distance, child care and ‘necessary staffing adjustments.’
“This motion is asking staff to develop a process so that we will have visible regulations that parents can see and understand,” said Gershon. “The problem is that parents want to return to their home school and in some areas in the board, we’re unable to accommodate them in their home schools.”
While some students may find themselves lucky to get enrolled into a school of their choice, Gershon confirms that others may be required to commute on a yellow bus that the TDSB says it will support. Some parents say they worry the motion gives trustees too much power.
“That is not fair and this is through their lack of planning,” Roberts countered. “They call it an exceptional circumstance but they’ve been bombarded with emails with people who are making the point that this is poor planning on the part of the TDSB.”
The development has been met with opposition from the city. Councillors along with Mayor John Tory have said that the project was forced onto the city by the Ontario Municipal Board.
The TDSB is carrying out a risk assessment to determine if the construction of the tower would have any impacts on the health and safety of the students, and it’s expected to be completed next month. Depending on that outcome, the board will then decide what to do. Moving students to their home English school is just one of the options, along with keeping students at John Fisher and mitigating the risks during construction, and moving all five hundred students and the French program to Vaughn Road Academy, six kilometres away.
The developer says it will not use the school property at any point during construction, and at no time did it consider it to be necessary for students to relocate from the school during the process.
“At no time has KG Group considered it necessary for there to be any student relocation during the construction process. Alongside our construction manager, we have long track records of safely constructing large developments in high traffic areas, including near schools, with no relocations ever being needed. In addition, we have conducted extensive safety planning for this project to ensure no reason for any form of relocation,” Nathan Katz, senior vice-president of planning and development at KG Group, said in an email.
According to Katz, there will be approximately 18 metres (60 feet) between the development site and a fence that the TDSB will build between the properties.
“We are fully confident that parent concerns about safety, noise, vibration, dust and traffic will be resolved in the site-specific safety plan that we are currently developing. We will be sharing the plan with parents, the city and the TDSB in the next couple of weeks,” Katz said.
Parents are still hoping to fight the decision to have the development be built next to their school, and they are expected to have a closed door meeting with Premier Kathleen Wynne sometime Thursday.
The TDSB has also been criticized for not attending the OMB hearings. The TDSB argued that the province’s ruling wouldn’t change and the tower would still be constructed.
“We have no control over the building, we cannot stop the building, we have to be honest,” TDSB chair Robin Pilkey told reporters just moments after Wednesday’s vote. “We can’t stop the building, that is not how planning works in our city, we have to deal with the situation that we’re given.”
The board also said there are 11 other TDSB schools throughout the city that will see tall towers constructed next door. As such, the board is considering putting a plan in place to see how it can deal with situations like these in the future.
