Dr. Paul W. Bennett is director of Schoolhouse Consulting and author of Vanishing Schools, Threatened Communities: The Contested Schoolhouse in Maritime Canada 1850-2010 (2011). This is his first opinion column for Halifax's OpenFile.ca

Public school systems can, and should, be judged by how well they serve students in the greatest need of an education. Treating the Halifax Regional School Board's YPT as a strictly “temporary transitional program” and housing it in a dilapidated old Halifax high school is bad enough. Supposedly "saving" the program is small comfort when it’s been thoroughly gutted and left without the resources to rescue the region’s most ‘at-risk’ students.

YTP, if you're not familiar, is the Halifax Regional School Board's Youth Pathways and Transitions Program. Opened in 2004, it's been treated as a kind of drop-in program and way station rather than a life-raft for troubled or left-behind students. Even though YPT has provided a safe haven and “saved” hundreds of students from the educational scrap heap, it is viewed by Board officials as strictly a school of last resort.

But across North America, alternative schools and programs are growing by leaps and bounds. One 2003 Education Evolving study called programs like the YPT the “quiet giant” in the public sector. Since September 2009, the Toronto Board of Education has opened more alternative schools, bringing its total to over 40 specialized elementary and secondary schools, serving 3,583 students.)

At the end of the last school year, HRSB put the YPT program on notice. Alternative-education programs in the P-12 public system here are few and far between, and yet HRSB senior staff recommended cutting YPT, the only Board-wide program serving harder-to-reach secondary school students---
kids most vulnerable to being left behind. Their simple cost-cutting plan to save $654,000 further emphasized how ‘out-of-sync’ HRSB has become under the current administration.

The short-sighted decision to cancel the YTP program outraged its students and their parents. Denise Martell, the mother of a Grade 9 YPT student, took up the fight, while simultaneously battling cancer, rallying the students and setting up a Facebook protest page, while dragging public delegations to school board meetings.

For three months, the Board administration remained resolute. Similarly, until they were threatened by province-wide job cuts, Nova Scotia Teachers Union remained similarly silent as well.

But Martell, and her wingman, Grade 11 YPT student Shannon Simpson, won a hollow victory June 9th. HRSB finally relented, granting the YPT program a grudging reprieve, limiting the program high schoolers and cutting its staffing to the bone. “YPT is saved!” appeared on the group’s Facebook site, but it turned out to be a mighty small victory.

In September, YPT re-emerged in its run-down, half-empty Quinpool Education Centre. Only 15 students remained in the program, down from 27 in 2010-11, and two critical support staff, a social worker and psychologist, were out on the street.

Cutting alternative programs may save dollars in the short-term, but leaves “at risk” students with longer-term social costs, reflected in crime rates, health care costs, and welfare rolls. Most educational research also suggests these programs are highly successful in serving hard-to-reach students.

The Halifax public school system has some catching-up to do when it comes to offering programs “fitting the student” rather than the other way around. Although there is no appetite in the Burnside bunker for creating schools that are new and uniquely different, the YPT protest may yet teach a powerful lesson. Dead-ending Halifax high school students is no longer an acceptable educational practice.