$15M school for 41 students

[grammafreddy]

http://www.edmontonjournal.com/life/Cou ... story.html

Court orders Yukon to build $15M school for 41 francophone students

By Tamsin McMahon, Postmedia News July 30, 2011


WHITEHORSE — Citing the need to protect minority-language rights, a Yukon court has ordered the territorial government to give its lone French-language school $2 million and begin a multimillion-dollar school expansion to house an arts studio, separate classes for every grade and space for a student radio station.

In a French-only ruling released this week, Yukon Supreme Court Justice Vital Ouellette ordered the government to build a $15-million high school within two years to house the board's 41 French high school students.

Maxime Faille, the Ottawa-based lawyer who represented the Yukon government, warned Thursday the ruling would create a "huge inequality between francophone students and other students in the territory." At around one teacher for every 10 students, student-teacher ratios at the school are better than many others in the territory, Faille said.

"People in Toronto pay (up to) $50,000 a year to have their students in private schools with student-teacher ratios that are worse than what they have in this school," he said. Meanwhile, schools for aboriginal students, who make up 30 per cent of the territory's population, are so underfunded that students often have to move hundreds of kilometres away to Whitehorse to go to high school.

"If another high school has to be built in the Yukon Territory, I'm not sure it should be in the City of Whitehorse for the francophone population that already has a high school, a very good one," he said.

Whitehorse's Ecole Emilie-Tremblay was built in 1996 for $6.2 million, shortly after Yukon created its only school board, whose sole job is to run the territory's lone French school, serving 184 students among a 1,200-strong francophone community.

Since then, officials with the Commission scolaire francophone du Yukon have complained that the government hasn't handed over complete control of Emilie-Tremblay's nearly $5-million annual budget. The board argued that the government never consulted school board officials when it diverted $2 million in federal French-education funding to pay for French immersion programs in the territory's 27 other schools.

Ouellette found the government violated the Charter of Rights and Freedom's protection of minority language education, and ordered it to return the federal money to the school.

The government said it plans to appeal the new case to the Yukon Court of Appeal, arguing Ouellette, who was once president of a minority-language francophone school board in Alberta, was biased in favour of the school board, Faille said.

The territory appealed to the judge to recuse himself last year, saying he had laughed at some of the government's witnesses and joked around with the school board's lawyers.

The judge refused, saying that while he didn't deny he had joked around, judges couldn't be expected to maintain their composure the entire length of an extended trial. His association with French language education in Alberta was well-known before he was appointed to the bench in 2002, he added.

In previous court rulings, the judge ordered the territorial government to build new portable classrooms at the school and give the board money to hire three new teachers.

Roughly four per cent of Yukon's population is francophone, numbers school board officials said during the trial were underrepresented because, they argued, the Statistics Canada census was flawed. The judge agreed, saying there could possibly be as many as 400 students who could qualify for French-language education in the school. English students who want to learn French can also enroll in it.

Roger Lepage, the lawyer who represented the school board, called the ruling a "resounding victory" in a news release. "The positions of the judge are well supported and consistent with Canadian jurisprudence," he said.

National Post

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[coffeeFreak]

Freaking bogus!!! Why not cyber-school?

Here's just one of many links to this educational option: http://www.canadacyberschool.com/

[grammafreddy]

I think for many of these isolated areas, cyber school is definitely worth looking into.

This project seems to be a total waste of money that could be otherwise spent on improving other areas of life for the people in these communities. I'm not against teaching French to kids and believe knowing other languages is valuable knowledge, but when it is for so few students and when cyber stuff is so readily available, it makes more sense to do it over the Internet than to build whole new schools for just a few.

At no point in time in Canadian history has the government really made the wisest or the most responsible decision where native people and people in minority are concerned. They either decimate them to get rid of them or go overboard trying to prove they are not racially or culturally biased.

[wthwyt]

Freaking bogus!!! Why not cyber-school?

Here's just one of many links to this educational option: http://www.canadacyberschool.com/

Or look to Australia how schooling has been conducted for years to remote area's of outback. Now with new technology video conferencing etc etc. Spend a lot less and get the same results.