Pools, Computers and City Kids, Where is the Shame?

I guess the one thought that keeps coming to mind is shame. Specifically, where is the shame that I believe our trustees, our MPPs and in some instances our city councillors because they can’t or more accurately won’t provide for the school kids who need them. I was a school trustee in the early mid 80s and took it upon myself to organize to have one of these joint city/Board of Education pools and gymnasium overhauls done at Swansea Public School. Lucky for me, past trustees had already done this with two well situated schools so this was like a completion task. It took four years from the time we pulled the first meeting together until completion. The community was middle class for the most part but had a big public housing project two blocks from the school. The board and the city were great. The school board agreed to build a brand new seriously ungraded gym and donate enough land to the city to build an adjacent pool. The double facility, pool and gym were for the exclusive use of the school 9-4 and for the community through Parks and Rec. the rest of the day. Beautiful, everybody in Swansea was excited and justifiably proud of their achievement. Due to the early 80s recession, admittedly serious but not this serious, the project was even moved up to create jobs for recession battered construction workers. This stimulus plan was the icing on the cake.

Everybody worked together community, board and city. This is why it tears my heart out to see the sad spectacle of our present day politician’s finger pointing and playing political football with these pools today. I am well aware that across the rest of Ontario, I don’t know about Canada, people do not have pools with their schools. In the ward I represented only half the schools had pools, the citizens of Toronto agreed to tax themselves, nobody else, to pay for these pools so that inner city kids had access to this kind of recreation and swimming instruction so that they didn’t drown on their first trip to Wasaga Beach. Has anybody even associated these pools with the fight against childhood obesity? Where is our shame?

To compound the problem, we have the sad spectacle of the TDSB Chair supplicant before a computer retailer, agreeing to locate a couple of donated labs close to the stores and repaint the classrooms in the company colours. This last part makes the whole episode just so cheesy. Where is the idea that these kids have an absolute right to this equipment, in all likelihood purchased from the same companies at wholesale prices? Computers today are the paper and pencils of thirty years ago. There is already a digital divide between rich and poor kids in school. Is begging our new strategy for our poor kids? More computers! You want MORE! (The new Oliver Twist). Shame on us all.