Former prime ministers Pauline Marois and Philippe Couillard sign, together with more than 30 public figures, an open letter in which they urge François Legault to act to avoid the closure of a specialized school in the municipality of Saint-Tite- des-Caps, in the MRC of La Côte-de-Beaupré.
The Collège des Hauts Sommets welcomes around a hundred students with special needs, from secondary 1 to 5. Entangled in procedures at the Ministry of Education, without the special status it has been demanding for years, this private boarding school currently has the necessary funds to operate until the end of March, after which it will have to close its doors. .
And that, “it can’t happen,” says the school’s general director, Marc Charbonneau, in an interview with The duty. Although he was careful not to alarm parents, Mr. Charbonneau agreed to make the situation at his school public in the hope of getting things moving in government.
In a rare joint initiative, former prime ministers Marois and Couillard called on the current head of government, François Legault, to ensure that the College’s mission is supported by sustainable funding. “There are causes like that which are above party lines. I find that education is very much the case,” said M.me Marois at Duty. “The mission must continue. and it is very difficult when there is no predictability of funding,” Mr. Couillard also affirmed.
The letter they sent to Prime Minister Legault is dated January 19. It is co-signed by Senator Michèle Audette, former Liberal and PQ ministers Lise Thériault, François Gendron, Marie Malavoy, Agnès Maltais, Pierre Duchesne and François Blais. Among the 37 signatories are also the former CAQ MP Émilie Foster, the prefect of the MRC of La Côte-de-Beaupré, Pierre Lefrançois, the former mayor of Quebec City Régis Labeaume, the former Olympic athlete Pierre Harvey and the sociologist Guy Rocher, among others.
Complete the process
The communication demands that the steps taken by the Minister of Education, Bernard Drainville, “come to fruition as quickly as possible” in order to avoid the closure of the school. The signatories also ask Quebec to “ensure the financial sustainability of the College”. At the time they sent their letter, the school was facing a February 20 closure. At the request of Mr. Charbonneau, an emergency sum has since been released by Quebec, giving the school a one-month reprieve. “But for the rest, nothing has been resolved,” he laments.
The College has been in a difficult financial situation since the early 2000s. In 2003, it transformed into a cooperative, and staff members have invested, over the years, $10,000 each in the mission of the establishment . In 2012, then again in 2018, Quebec provided funds to the College which, one thing led to another, transformed into a specialized school.
Today, almost all (96%) of the students at Collège des Hauts Sommets have intervention plans put in place to overcome academic challenges. Half (51%) arrive at this school with academic delays; 15% to 20% have an autism spectrum disorder. Attention disorders with hyperactivity “are almost the norm,” explains Mr. Charbonneau. With support, 89% of the school’s students manage to obtain a secondary five diploma in the regular program.
To reflect the type of services it provides, the College applied for specialist school status from the Ministry of Education in 2019, in the hope of receiving the funding that comes with this status. The ministry first committed to supporting the school so that it meets the required criteria. Then came the pandemic. “I resubmitted a request in the fall of 2021,” says Mr. Charbonneau. New requirements arrived, the hiring of an additional remedial teacher, new training, the establishment of an “action plan”. Without news from the government, the director general made a request again at the start of the current school year. “All criteria and targets have been achieved. “No one told me it didn’t work,” he explains. However, Mr. Charbonneau says he has no news. “It’s a bit like a transplant that doesn’t take. […] It seems like the education system is rejecting us,” he says.
Facing his creditors, the general director says he needs emergency aid to “finish” the current school year. Afterwards, the ministry requires “a modification of the permit to sustain our funding”. Parents of students at the College already pay around $10,000 per year to send their children there, most of whom are housed and fed there. “There are some who remortgage their house,” notes Mr. Charbonneau. Raising fees more than it does each year is therefore not an option, according to him. “From our assessment, we are pretty close to what the majority of parents can pay,” he says.
Legault arrested
In interview, Mme Marois explains that the signatories sent their letter to the Prime Minister to “give support” to Minister Drainville, whom she says she contacted personally about the College. “I spoke to Bernard, I said: ‘I don’t want you to feel rushed, on the contrary. But we want the Prime Minister to know that there are not many institutions like that, and we think that it deserves to receive special attention,” she explains. “We want to raise awareness at the highest level. »
Mr. Charbonneau makes the same kind of observation. In the three parties that have succeeded one another in power since his arrival as director general in 2008, he has always heard politicians “in favor” of supporting his school. “But it seems that the education system… Even inside, the civil servants tell me: ‘We are working hard to get this resolved, so that you can continue.’ It gets exhausting, it’s difficult. If society does not want us to do what we do, we should be told,” he concludes.
Philippe Couillard said he was impressed by the “personalized approach, the care that the staff had” at the College when a member of the family of his partner, Suzanne Pilote, attended the establishment. In addition to lasting funding, he would like the government to send “a message of recognition about the usefulness of what is being done there”.