New Brunswick: Local parents continue decades-old fight to save immersion program

[Harold Schiffman]

Local parents continue decades-old fight to save immersion program
Tea with Hatfield resulted in policy change for greater access to FI

KATIE TOWER
The Sackville Tribune Post


The fight to save early French immersion in New Brunswick is not new
for Sackville parents. Just ask Vanessa Bass, who's been through it
all before. Bass was among a group of two dozen parents in the
community who lobbied the various levels of government back in 1980 to
ensure their children were granted access to the French immersion
program. She knows what the battle is all about.
"If we are a bilingual province, we are doing our children no good
service by not allowing them to have good French," says Bass.
Early French immersion classes had been available in Sackville since
1973 with usually enough students each year to fill up one classroom.
But it was in the fall of 1980 when things started to change. "What
was going to be different for the fall of 1980 was that there were
twice as many students whose parents wanted to enroll them in the
program as there were spaces available," explains Matthew Hayday, a
professor of history at the University of Guelph.

Hayday, who conducted research on the Sackville parents' 1980 campaign
while  teaching history of language policy at Mount Allison from
2005-'07, says parents have defended the FI program since its
inception. "It's sort of been an ongoing battle over a period of
several decades," said Hayday, whose study of the Sackville immersion
battle has recently been published in a book on social movements in
Canada. The boost in popularity of the program in 1980 could be
attributed to a French immersion conference that was held at Mount
Allison University in the spring of that year, explains Hayday. "My
suspicion is that it had attracted a lot of parents. There was a lot
of information circulated about the conference that year which
probably drummed up more interest among the parents for the class; so
the result was twice as many students as spots available."

But with a local school board reluctant to create a second early
immersion class that September, the parents decided to take things
into their own hands to try and expand the program for the two dozen
children who were going to be denied entrance. "The school board did
not want to move on this issue at all," says Hayday. "There was a lot
of reluctance from members of the school board to add a new classroom;
there were concerns about what this would mean for teachers' jobs and
the potential costs associated with it.
When the school board indicated to the parents that the class would be
chosen by a "lottery" in which the names of the students would be
drawn out of a hat, they decided to take action. "What the parents
decided to do was lobby at basically every possible level of
government to try and get that decision overturned," says Hayday.

This started with a vigorous letter-writing campaign to the Sackville
Tribune-Post and parents attended school board meetings to voice their
concerns. "It was frustrating for them, especially since a lot of
those parents already had older children in the French immersion
stream and they wanted to be able to put the younger brothers and
sisters in it as well. They were quite happy with how it was going."
Bass was one of those parents. She says her two older children were
already in the FI program and were doing well. It was her youngest
child who she was worried wouldn't have the same opportunities as her
older siblings. As it turned out, her daughter's name was one of those
picked in the lottery draw. But that didn't stop her from fighting for
access for the other children.
The parents also decided to write to the federal government to see
what support they could get from the Commissioner of Official
Languages and to determine if this was a broader issue of language
rights or national unity.

Then they decided to take their lobbying efforts to Fredericton. "They
put together a whole bunch of protest signs, piled into station wagons
and drove down to Fredericton to protest in front of the Legislature
to try and get the Premier and the Minister of Education to intervene
directly," says Hayday. Bass remembers those days well. "We all met at
my house and we made posters and I remember we all got a little woozy
from the smell of the markers," she says. "We didn't have buses then
so we just all met in Fredericton and started walking around in a
circle in front of the Legislature." She says their protest 28 years
ago wasn't as big or as noisy as last month's rally in front of the
Legislature - where hundreds of protesters gathered to voice their
concern over the government's recent decision to eliminate early
French immersion - but it seemed to have as much, if not a greater,
impact.

"Sue Purdy and myself were invited in and we were very kindly offered
tea with Richard Hatfield and our then-MLA Mr. Folkins. We told him
what our concerns were and although nothing came of it at that time,
we did make headlines and it sparked more interest (for our cause)."
The parents were soon invited back to Fredericton to have lunch with
the Education Minister. Bass says although many of the parents
remained skeptical that any of those meetings would produce any real
results, the government was at least willing to listen to their
concerns. "Despite the tea and cookies and the lunches provided, we
certainly did get the impression that they weren't just dismissing us,
that they weren't just being pompous and arrogant," she says. The
Hatfield government, in fact, was listening. The Conservatives at that
time were putting their support behind the growth of bilingualism and
were striving to have New Brunswick's status as a bilingual province
recognized in the Constitution.

So the Sackville parents' fight was not in vain. Their campaign
resulted in a promise from the government to change the province's
policy on French immersion – so that, if sufficient demand existed,
immersion classes would be created to accommodate students.
"This is a campaign that completely changed New Brunswick's policy on
French immersion, to basically guarantee open access to it if a
significant number of students were interested in the program," says
Hayday. Bass, who recently reprised the journey she and the other
parents made 28 years ago when she hopped on the bus from Sackville to
Fredericton on March 27 to take part in the rally to support EFI, says
the fight is just as important now as it was then. "I have
grandchildren and I would hope that my grandchildren would remain as
strong linguistically educated members of the New Brunswick
community," she says.

Why all the fuss over learning French? Bass believes the answer to
that is pretty clear-cut. "I believe that maybe it comes down to
something as simple, yet as important, as jobs," she says.  "I think
Sackville parents are smart enough and wise enough to know that,
without a good knowledge of French in this environment of New
Brunswick - a bilingual province - the likelihood of their children
getting a good job and staying in this province is very small. The
likelihood is they'll go elsewhere if they don't have a very good
working knowledge of French"Amanda Cockshutt, a local parent and one
of the organizers of today's lobbying efforts, says she thinks it's
much more than that. Sackville, a university town that attracts a lot
of professional and creative people, usually sees about 50 per cent of
parents choosing to enrol their kids in the early French immersion
program. Cockshutt says many of the local parents who choose EFI do so
because they believe it will broaden their mind beyond simply learning
another language.
"The culture of education is strong in this town."

Cockshutt says rather than scrap a program that is working well for
some, the government should instead add more resources to French
immersion to make it more inclusive for all students. She says local
parents, who are continuing to meet and network through e-mail and
facebook groups, are still holding on to hope that Education Minister
Kelly Lamrock will reverse his decision to eliminate EFI and admits
she is astounded by the "unbelievable amount of action being taken" to
try and make that happen. In fact, Cockshutt says she believes the
campaign is just gaining momentum. Because just as it was 28 years
ago, parents don't take their children's future lightly. "Whenever
it's about kids and their education, people just don't drop it," says
Cockshutt.  Hayday's article, entitled Mad at Hatfield's Tea Party:
Federalism and the Fight for French Immersion in Sackville, New
Brunswick, 1973-1982, can be read in the book Mobilizations, Protests
and Engagements: Canadian Perspectives on Social Movements, available
from Fernwood Publishing.

http://sackvilletribunepost.com/index.cfm?sid=126636&sc=129


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