More transparency and community-involved discussion are needed in new school projects, says a Moncton parent — a sentiment shared by the New Brunswick education minister.
Jeremy Nelson has a daughter who attends Bessborough School in the city, one of two schools that will close and merge into a new K-8 school in the next few years.
He eagerly watched a virtual Anglophone East District Education Council meeting Tuesday evening, when Education Minister Dominic Cardy and a department staffer presented the criteria for choosing the site, which will be on the same property as Bernice MacNaughton High School.
Cardy signed off on the location, which was recommended by staff from the Department of Transportation and Infrastructure (DTI) and the Department of Education and Early Childhood Development (EECD). He says he has “full confidence” in the decision.
However, Cardy does say the school project selection process needs an overhaul, despite touting the fact that criteria and infrastructure lists for school projects have been made public.
“It’s such a morass of competing different departmental jurisdictions, you’ve got DTI who actually does the work, you’ve got district education councils who all present a list that they believe is prioritized, you know, 1-10 or whatever, you’ve got seven districts,” Cardy tells Global News. “They all have different lists… So the competing jurisdictions and decision-making processes are a mess.”
Cardy says schools need to be considered capital assets with a long-term plan that can adapt to short-term population, need changes.
Nelson says the dialogue and transparency were great, but came too late.
“I think the forum that we had on Tuesday was healthy, but, again, it came six months too late,” he says. “We should’ve been having these discussions, been openly analyzing the various sites, and making a decision as a community… I think everyone would be a lot less frustrated by the way this has played out.”
To that end, Cardy agrees that a public forum would be good to have earlier in the decision-making process.
“There’s no reason we shouldn’t be able to do that from now on going forward,” the minister says.
New Brunswick’s auditor general released a report on Tuesday identifying several critical areas for improvement in school infrastructure planning in the province.
“There are several instances where the department did not follow their own project assessment tool and process, and others where cabinet approved projects different than those put forward by the department for funding,” Adair-MacPherson said in a statement.
She cited the situation for l’École de Moncton and the Hanwell School projects as examples in the report.
–With files from Global News’ Aya Al-Hakin
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