10 ~ Sunday, September 12, 1999 — North Shore News

NV school chairman says he’s ‘handcuffed’ by Victoria

From page 1

“They better pony up
some more teachers,” said
Marshall. “i don’t think any-
body in Victoria knows what
kind of impact they’ve had on

They’ve admitted their
error, but they’re not doing
anything about it. Everybody
just sits on their hands.”

Said Lynn Valley parent
Shannyn Poster, “I think it's
ridiculous.”

Poster was told shortly
before the start of the school
year by school board officials
that chere was no room for
her eight-year-old son Javde
at their neighbourhood
school, Ross Road clemen-
tary.

Ross Road principal Bill
Reid said that parents had to
register their children in the
spring to ensure they had a
space for the upcoming
school year.

“We used to have what we
called the $50,000 student,”
he said, “where because we
had one extra student, we had
to hire another teacher. Now
if we can’t fit kids in at our
school, we try to find them a
space at the next nearest
school.”

Meanwhile Poster belicves
ca she now has two choices: find

way. to get. Jayde to
‘Westover elementary, two
«kilometres away, or teach him
‘” herself at home.

7 aT don’t have dny chaice
but to home-school him,”
ix She’ said, “I have no way of
getting “him ‘to’ and’ from

Westover.”

“<< Poster is.-worried about
hei: own. teaching “abilities

* being up to scratch.
‘As a. sing'e parent, her

ra

time: is also’ taken _up during

feat

the day with the
babysitting = work
she’s doing °o try to
get off welfare.

“I never graduat-
ed from high
school,” she said. “1
had my son at 16. 1
don’t have the edu-
cation to home-
school him.”

Until last’ year,
Poster scrimped and
saved and = volun-
teered to send Jayde
10.2 private Christian
school — something
that she says she can
no longer afford.

But she’s stunned
to find out just how
bad things are in the
public system.

“There’s more
money to pay for the
kids who came off the boats,”
she said.

“Diversity is wonderful
and beautiful and we need it,

EIGHT-year-old Jayde Poster with his
mother Shannyn and the school sup-
plies he'll now have to use at home.

who came in illegal-
ly when native-born
Canadians are being
booted out of
schools because
there’s no money.
What are their
futures going to be
like when they
don’t even have
education:”

Jayde has always
been a straight-A
student, Poster said
proudly. “Just
because you're on
assistance doesn’t
mean your kids bave
to be vegetables.
He takes piano
iessons too.”

Despite hez concern
about the quality of
her son's education,
she balked at the
school board’s suggestion
that she allow him to walk to
Westover and back by him-

NEWS photo Mike Wakefield

but our own children in
Canada are in seed, and thev
shouldn’t be spending all this
money to take care of kids

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“My son doesn’t even
walk across the street to the
gas station to get bubblegum
on his own,” she said.

Unless a space comes up at
Ross Road, she"ll be teaching
Jayde at home.

Said) North Vancouver
School District chairman
Doug Mackay-Dunn, “I get
very angry at what parents

and kids
through.

“I've been talking to peo-
ple who are just at their wit’s
end. [t tears your guts out
and you want to do some-
thing, but you can’t.

“It’s not the fault of the
school board. We're hand-
cuffed by those characters in
Victoria.”

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