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Eilish Murphy
What do feuding cats and dogs, deteriorating school buildings, school closures and a 25-foot Burmese python have in common?
They are a few of the many things one may encounter during rural media visits with ATA president Larry Booi. Sound farfetched? Believe it or not, they are all part of the daily flow when you spend several two-day stretches visiting editors, reporters and local presidents in various communities across Alberta.
Media tours are designed to give media outside Edmonton an opportunity to meet the ATA's new president, learn about the Association and give the president a chance to raise important education issues facing Albertans. Well, that's how it started out. Now it has become an excellent opportunity for the tireless president to learn about individual concerns facing communities. And who better to inform him of those issues than those who cover the stories on a weekly basis?
My job is to coordinate the tours and to accompany Larry for two days at a time in a designated region of Alberta. Thus far, we have met with almost three dozen newspaper editors and reporters in southeast, central and east central Alberta. We have also met with most of the local presidents and district representatives of the areas in which we are traveling. Sometimes the local president joined us in the media interview and added a local perspective to what was happening in schools. These meetings have ranged from informal chats to formal interviews with a strict Q & A format. Either way, it's always a learning experience. It seems that, no matter where we go, each community has had to deal, at one time or another, with a local education issue.
Issues vary from community to community. One community may be fighting to keep its local school from closing while, only 45 minutes down the highway, another community, faced with severe overcrowding, cannot get a new school built.
One town we visited is having difficulty offering specific programs to its students: offering Physics 30 to seven students when funding is set for an expected class of 25. The school must decide a course of action—take funding from other areas or cancel the course. Still other issues include fundraising, school fees or a school building deteriorating so badly that the ventilation system is starting to adversely affect the health of students and staff.
One thing is clear after visiting these communities; while the specific symptom may differ from one place to another, all problems have a common cause—severe and chronic underfunding in education. As Larry pointed out many times during the tours, the government's own education facilities task force concluded that Alberta schools would need an immediate injection of $770 million just to bring schools up to standard and then $140 million each year for maintenance after that. Keep in mind, these dollar estimates come from the government.
As important as these tours are, there are light moments during our travels. One time we met with the editor of a local newspaper in a Second World War era Quonset where we were entertained and upstaged by an old cat who kept tormenting her new housemate, a young German shepherd. Most recently, a local editor and I conspired to have Larry pose for a picture with a 25-foot Burmese python named Kaa. I viewed it as a great photo opportunity; Larry saw otherwise—he is still calling me "Judas." If ever there was a time when I was worried about holding on to my job, that was it! How was I to know that the only phobia Larry has is about snakes?
Media tours are one of the most exciting aspects of my job. Tours take planning and can be draining, but what we've learned is invaluable. It's a great combination of new learning experiences, meeting interesting people and touring beautiful countryside.
Keep a lookout for upcoming tours.
An apprehensive looking Larry Booi poses with Kaa, a 25-foot Burmese python, while zookeeper and science teacher Alfred von Hollen reassures the ATA president that Kaa has been fed. The school zoo, located at Pioneer School in Rocky Mountain House, is celebrating its 20th anniversary of operation.
Photo by Brian Mazza, Rocky Mountain House Mountaineer
