The ruling on Catholic schools isn’t really about religious education in the province. Instead, it’s about attempts by communities to circumvent the established school boards and keep their schools open through any means necessary.
The act of scribbling St. in front of Theodore School in magic marker wasn’t about the community having a sudden religious awakening. Instead, it was a way to get around the school division – then the Yorkdale School division, now Good Spirit – deciding that continuing to operate the school was not financially viable. The way to get around this was to start their own school division with their own school, and it has been operating since, though their division was eventually integrated into the Christ the Teacher Catholic School Division.
This wasn’t a first in the province. Take the Englefeld Protestant Separate School Division. It has one school in it, the Englefeld School. This is not a Catholic school for the simple reason that almost everyone in that town is Catholic, it is in no way a minority. The town’s website proudly showcases their Catholic church next to their Protestant school.
This explains the weird quirks that define the school. No other school division in the province has a single school, because for all the attempts at reducing the number of school divisions in the province it stands alone, unable to merge with anything. It can’t merge with the public school system, it’s not a public school. It can’t merge with the Catholic school divisions, because it’s not Catholic. But it also could not be a Catholic school because the constitution stipulates that it has to be a minority religion, and there is absolutely no way you could ever consider Catholicism a minority religion in the predominantly German-Catholic town of Englefeld, Saskatchewan.
What is surprising is that this decision did not come about after the establishment of Englefeld’s Protestant-on-paper school. After all, the case was exactly the same as the one in St. Theodore, both in motivation and end result, but here we have a ruling that affects Catholic education province-wide, while the earlier Englefeld school merely kept that school open in the rural town. Perhaps it’s due to society getting more secular in the intervening decades, perhaps the Good Spirit School Division has better lawyers than the Humboldt Rural School Division, but this decision was inevitable as small towns attempted the same trick. Given that school divisions aren’t exactly flush with cash thanks to the most recent budget, some of the smaller schools in the province might be getting nervous and looking towards the example of these two “religious” schools if their worst case scenario happens.
For the most part, even if it was against the constitution, student religion was allowed to slide with the public and separate systems because we have always known that there are decisions beyond religion that go into school choice, including programming, teacher preference, proximity and so on – for example, parents in Yorkton who want a French Immersion program have to go Catholic. It has been allowed to continue because it wasn’t an issue worth a fight, until recently.
Englefeld and Theodore played with fire when they decided to take a creative interpretation of the constitution in order to keep their schools open. I don’t blame them, it’s hard to entice people to a community if there’s no school there, especially when neighbouring towns aren’t especially far away. Englefeld got away with it, but Theodore might have burned down the entire separate system in the process.
