CPE is part of a community based, parent-driven advocacy movement that is focused on keeping Ontario’s schools publicly funded. By advocating for the importance of publicly funded education in communities across Ontario, and lobbying the government to ensure that schools remain publicly owned and neighbourhood based we can best meet the needs of both school-age and adult students.
We are opposed to sale of school properties, and believe that properties owned in the public sphere must be used as educational and community hubs even in areas with declining enrolment where it is anticipated an area will not incur population growth. Such examples of alternate usage of space would be day care, afterschool programs, community housing, housing for the elderly, parks and recreation, can be effectively combined with smaller more effective schools.
The Ontario Alliance Against School Closures is a closed group of organizations across Ontario who are against the closure of schools that are currently underway and closures that have already occurred in Ontario. “We discuss ideas and strategies to assist each other to put an end to the closure of schools going on in the Province of Ontario. We are organizing groups who have taken up the fight against their local school boards with the common goal of supporting a call to the Provincial Ministry of Education to withdraw the revised PARG (Pupil Accommodation Review Guidelines) which has eliminated “Value to the Community” as part of the the decision making process of school closures.”
