A new round of school closures is on the table

And the new Citizen turns one

Feb 19, 2025

Hi, howdy. So I got that stupid cold everyone has last week and while it is lingering a wee bit, I’m back. I’ll admit it’s a bit hard to stay focused what with ~everything~ but also we must not allow ourselves to fall into the pit. So hopefully I can get back to doing this regularly again.

Yes Yes No

There’s a popular subreddit called Yes Yes No where you see something that looks good until you get to the end and you realize it is bad. Such is my feeling at reading headlines about the Prince George school district posting a budget surplus (yes!) of $1.2 million (yes!) because they can’t hire enough staff (no!). There’s some positive news in there as well, like more funding than expected, but overall it’s money being saved by simply not having qualified teachers working in classrooms. We’re hardly alone in this, the Walrus magazine just published a piece on the number of places across the country and continent that have non-teachers teaching and the long-term implications of this which are, simply put, not good!

In Texas, where half of new hires do not have teaching degrees, a study by Jacob Kirksey showed students losing three to four months of learning a year when taught by uncertified teachers with no instructional background. These recruits are also unlikely to stick around, with statewide data revealing that 30 percent quit after the first year, leading to a constant churn of people with little experience.
Likewise troubling are the attitudes that hiring people without proper training encourages. If, in a pinch, anyone with patience and goodwill can teach, what kind of job is it, anyway? Isn’t it mostly a question of liking kids? The result of such thinking is not that it widens the pool of potential teachers but it poisons it. The name of that poison is deprofessionalization.

So yeah, a problem to solve.

Meanwhile, a new report is recommending the closure of six schools in the district by 2033: Van Bien Elementary in Prince George, plus Hixon, Morfee (in Mackenzie), McBride Centennial, and Valemount, with the latter three to be amalgamated with the local high schools. The district is officially exploring the process of closing Giscome and shutting down the Central Interior Distance Education program.

And in higher education, Students, supporters react as CNC considers ending English class and CNC looks at cancelling three programs.

The new Citizen turns one

Editor Kennedy Gordon reflects on the first year of new local ownership of the Citizen, writing:

A year ago, this paper was less than half the size it is now. We’ve done that not only by adding staff, but by taking on a commitment to bring you at least 48 pages of local content each week, and a promise to cover everything happening in our community and our region, from civic government to crime to human-interest stories and local sports.
We told you about our major 2024 changes in a year-end editorial in December. On the anniversary of our new ownership, we continue to be optimistic about how we see our future.

It’s nowhere near the boon days of the 70-90s when it was dozens of pages daily but we live in 2025 and the fact is having a newspaper at all is a feat in and of itself, so congratulations to them. The hiring of new staff has made a huge difference in terms of the depth and breadth of stories, too — glad to have it.

And in the comments, Liam Ryan writes: “Hey baby, are you the City of Prince George? Because you smell funny but I still love you.”

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Send feedback by emailing northerncapitalnews@gmail.com. Find me online at akurjata.ca.

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