Good Afternoon Everyone, 

We had a great turn out for our Community Town Hall meeting to discuss the proposed budget cuts to Education, the implications that could cause, as well as discussed the formal process that Policy 409 outlines. 

We had our DEC chair member Alex Morton, as well as Anglophone East School District  Superintendent Randy MacLean there for our question period. We were able to have our concerns heard, questions answered, and worked towards possible solutions should we find ourselves further down this path to "possible closures". 

School closure decisions are not automatic, and they are not ordered by the government. The decision to review a school rest with the District Education Council. These reviews are lengthy, and have a total of 8 factors to be considered before closures are even an option. There are rules, timelines and safeguards built into this process. 

As Randy MacLean mentioned at our meeting on Thursday "Education is an investment, either you pay now, or you pay later. Children have a right to free education. Once children start slipping through the cracks and losing interest in school, they will find themselves down a darker path, and we cant have that. Rural schools are the fabric of their community, and we are not in the business of closing schools, we're in the business of opening them."

Our voices matters, whether they are written or spoken. The more we noise we make, the more our concerns are being heard, and that will spread to other communities making the wave hard to ignore. We can conquer this together.

Please continue to email our government cabinet members, we need to let them know that cuts to an already thin education budget doesn't solve the problem, its shifts it to our children. Consolidation isnt a solution - it's a setback.

Please feel free to email your concerns to the emails below, as this government made campaign commitments to put investments BACK into Education and Healthcare, not pit them against each other.

Susan.Holt@gnb.ca
Rene.Legacy@gnb.ca
Claire.Johnson@gnb.ca
wwwfin@gnb.ca

This is just the beginning, and I can't thank everyone enough for their constant support.

Thank you,
Holly Sleeper