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Outraged Etobicoke parents are vowing to take action to try to prevent the Toronto District School Board from selling a local school they depend on for daycare, which the board says must be sold to pay for much-needed repairs elsewhere in the city.
Vincent Massey Public School, which was closed in 1983, is home to a licensed child-care centre which the parents say is essential to the community.
"When I was looking for daycare, it was extremely difficult," said Natalia Berdnikova, 30, who spoke at a packed public meeting Monday night, her son Rayan on her lap.
"I couldn't get daycare. It wasn't only a question of getting on the waiting list, it was getting on the subsidy waiting list," Berdnikova said.
Rayan, 3, and Berdnikova's daughter Maya, 7, are two of the more than 170 children who attend Vincent Massey Child Care.
"If we lose that, where are our kids going to go?" said Anne Chaplinsky, who has two kids at the daycare.
At the meeting at Lakeshore Collegiate Institute, which drew well over 100 people, parents expressed frustration and anger over the decision to sell the property, which they say was made without public consultation.
"It was with resignation and reluctance that we started selling off our properties," said Andrew Gowdy, planning manager with TDSB.
In the past five years, the board has sold 58 properties across the city, raising $338 million to go toward repairs and renovations of existing schools.
Gowdy cited a number of reasons why Vincent Massey is on the chopping block: the small school is not a good candidate for reopening; two other elementary schools are nearby; and the building, which opened in 1929, needs an estimated $2.1 million in repairs over the next five years.
The child-care centre is one of two tenants in the building, which together generate $40,000 in net income for the school board annually. But that is not enough to pay off the board's backlog of repair bills.
School board trustee Pamela Gough said the provincial Ministry of Education needs to give the board access to development fees to make up the budget shortfall.
"They've been pushing the TDSB to sell off these really valuable lands, against our better wishes," Gough said.
When the property is sold, public sector organizations will get the first opportunity to bid on it, explained Shirley Hoy, the chief executive officer of the Toronto Lands Corporation, the school board's real estate subsidiary.
Other board properties sold in Etobicoke, including Franklin Horner Community Centre and Thomas Berry daycare, have been purchased by the city, but that is not an option for Vincent Massey.
"The city cannot keep picking up these sites," said Etobicoke-Lakeshore Councillor Mark Grimes. "We just don't have the funds to do it."
If a public sector organization does not purchase the site, it will be sold on the open market, and possibly developed into residences.
"The last thing I want to see in my community is more townhouses, more condos going up - more kids, where are they going to go?" Chaplinsky said.
-reprinted from the Toronto Star