The Lioness of Pleasantville, Patti Bacchus

Written by Grant G


Lemaire to Cournoyer back to Lapointe, he shoots, he scores and the crowd goes wild.......

Krinkling maple leaves glimmering in gold while other leaves penetrate our vision with a brilliant sockeye red, hockey season starts, schools are in session and the season of change, of renewal, Fall is upon us and nothing is more Canadian than that...

Streets full of boys stickhandling through life, eraser hockey dominating school hallways at recess, children at play, the child's dream, boys wanting to play for the Stanley Cup and girls being groomed for marriage and kids, life in Pleasantville was simple, Dads would go to work while Moms raised kids and tended house, hot tasty meals await the arrival of the breadwinner....no cellphones, no computers no airmiles only simplicity, families with one earner and almost always was the man, life at that time in Pleasantville could be maintained with one worker, mothers and fathers had for the most part,  separate but distinctive roles...

Ernst n Young, the cold cutting edge of calculator logic confronts Patti baccus, the lioness of Pleasantville....

One sees children as a cost, the other as a cause, one is prepared to shuffle, to bus to stack to place children in a shoe box to save money the other sees a mission, a goal to educate, to train and mold the child to fit into a modern changing society..

I love Patti Bacchus for what she is doing, and yes, I don't know her in real Life but I understand her, admire Patti Bacchus for waging war against the shortsighted, unfortunately, accountants and auditors don't see life that way, Ernst n Young see land assets, see quick cash available to balance today's annual budget, see nothing but the cold bottom line...  

Vancouver proper, for this article, ....Vancouver was once Pleasantville, a city where sounds of clashing hockey sticks reigned supreme on near every street, a city where kids attended schools and played in parks in droves, and as time went by Pleasantville turned into Realestatespeculationville....No longer do families have 8 children, or 5, or 3, couples now have a hardtime affording even 1 child...$million dollar hovels not fit to raise a family in...Visitor families coming to Pleasantville now spend $millions to buy an ancient teardown house..The children of these visitors, usually only 1, maybe 2 don't attend Pleasantville public schools, these newcomers to Pleasantville enroll their children in upscale, pricey private schools, a place where uniforms and scripture are required, a place where training for the Fraser Institute tests are more important than the child, rankings above all, a school that isn't saddled with having to teach the wounded, the developmentally challenged, the perceived incorrectly lessor among us...

Vancouver, the second most expensive city in the world, land ceded there can never be replaced, how much to reacquire land for more schools when the enrollment rises and where can you reacquire large parcels of land for a new school in Vancouver, at what cost...Ernst n Young doesn't care about that expensive possibility, they are bottom line accountants and that scenario doesn't fit in a financial audit and it doesn't fit with a real estate developer beholden BC Liberal Government....The children of Pleasantville can eat cake, and parents, they can pony up extra cash and enroll their kids in uniformed scripture academy....

Patti Baccus, a heart of gold, a woman who wants a return to a properly funded, fully attended school where children are brimming within...is Patti Baccus' pursuit inane, unattainable, will Pleasantville become the city of no public schools, of perpetual enrollment decline as stratospheric house prices displace the last middleclass family within....

The only people who have the BC Liberal Party's ears are party donating developers and LNG spindoctors, the poor children of Pleasantville have no government support or backing, they have one ally, the Lioness of Pleasantville Patti Baccus and a few members of the Vancouver School Board...

Demographics and city planning,  not my forte but you don't have to be a rocket scientist to figure out that if you start closing every under-used school, start busing Ernst n Young's "costs" to available capacity dwellings(That is how children are regarded in a Government friendly accounting world)... the problem will get worse, individual communities within Pleasantville will become child barren, become Ernst n Young's bottom line world, a land of balanced budgets regardless of the cost...a new community called, Speculatordeveloperville...

Maybe my ideology is misplaced, perhaps the Lioness of Pleasantville is off base, maybe there isn't a personal Christy Clark versus public education war..surely a city like Surrey that is bursting with kids and has almost no enrollment shortfalls, clearly the per-pupil funding model is working in Surrey....but it isn't, portables, cubicles and Atco trailers are the order of the day, Demographics from a decade ago told the BC Liberal Government that Surrey and surrounding areas desperately needed new schools...next to none were built, no planning at all, get by with more portables and cubicles and fail that school district too, a district bursting with kids..

I wrote this article on March 2nd/2011...

http://powellriverpersuader.blogspot.ca/2011/03/demographics-simple-demographics.html

In 2011 Surrey needed 5 new schools to pick up the overcrowding, none were even under construction when I wrote the article...Cubicles and Atco trailers were and still are the BC Liberal's answer...2016 and the overcrowding in Surrey has only worsened..Which tells me the problem isn't with the school districts with declining children population or school districts with growing populations...

The problem is with a BC Liberal government that is ideologically opposed to public education, unless there is an upcoming election and then the pretense of caring for children temporarily changes, promises of seismic upgrades and promises of building new schools blanket front pages of local papers and once the election is over seismic upgrades are delayed for decades or cancelled altogether and new school builds are pushed into the future and...on too many occasions to count, the same announcements and press releases are dusted off and represented to a gullible voting public in a future election....We notice, some caring people actually notice, the Vancouver School Board noticed and for the Lioness of Pleasantville, she roared her disapproval....

Then out comes the voices of bought, of corporate agenda, CKNW, the Vancouver Sun, the Vaughn Palmer's of the world write article after article devoid of thought but full of robotic ministerial quotes and the bash education beat goes on..

I love Patti Bacchus for what she represents...

I despise what the BC Liberals have systematically done to BC's public education...

Lastly...I admire school districts throughout this province for fighting to retain schools, however, the time has come to adopt the cold-calculated world of Ernst n Young..school boards need to slash budgets, close every school you can, recommend that teachers and students stop raising monies for school supplies, stop trying to perform miracles...

Give the BC Liberal Government what they want...Close the schools without hesitation..

Let the voters make the next move...

Some might call that stupidity, I call it "Tough Love".....



Patti Bacchus, .......Thank you very much for showing your heart and courage....

The Straight Goods

Cheers Eyes Wide Open