Quote:
Originally Posted by Akash Rastogi
As for politely asking the school board for access to buildings on off days, this is a city school board. A very large city. It doesn't work the same way at all as your local town's district. Personal contact is not very accessible and neither is working your way around the system.
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Let me preface this by stating that I have very little experience with the school system in the United States, beyond that it follows roughly the same age bracketing and grouping as Canada, and they call their high-school years freshman, sophomore, junior, and senior instead of grades 9-12.
In Ontario, the school boards are run as a district level (this is a similar concept to counties in the states, some of ours are even called counties.)
Toronto is a special case. A number of years ago the area known as the Metro Toronto Area, which encompassed the then separate cities of Scarborough, York, North York, East York, Etobicoke, etc was conglomerated into the "Mega City". It all became known simply as Toronto. Those former cities and towns that got swallowed up are all still referred to colloquially by their original names, and even shown that way on maps, but there is no such thing as the Town of North York anymore, for example. This area is all covered by the Toronto District School Board. TDSB actually SPONSORS a number of FRC teams, as there have been many teams (led by 188's original drive more than 10 years ago) that have pushed them to support this fantastic program. TDSB covers a populated area of approaching 3 million people.
The school board that 1075 belongs to is the Durham District School Board. DDSB covers all of Durham Region, which encompasses the cities Pickering, Ajax, Whitby, Oshawa, Courtice, Bowmanville, and Newcastle along Lake Ontario, and extends northward to Brock Township, which is near Lake Simcoe. This is a huge geographical area, and each of the constituent cities have populations ranging from 80,000-200,000.
Perhaps I'm not understanding something correctly, due to differences in the way things are done south of the 49th parallel, but I don't see size as a good reason that appeals can't be made, and pushed on the school board to make changes that are a good thing for the students. At the very least, you can hope to gain some insight as to why the rules are the way they are, rather than aimlessly complaining about them. Its much easier to work with a set of constraints when you understand why they exist.
Granted, 1075's success at dealing with our school board might also stem from the fact that the board offices, and our school are physically in the same building. Maybe my view is simply skewed.