A McBride Secondary student has won a battle with the school district for the right to stay on school grounds while she works on her distance education courses.
School officials told the student, Rebecca Marsh, she had to leave while studying German 12 from North Island Distance Education School and Biology 11 from Kamloops Open On-line Learning - courses that are not available at the school.
The student's father, Phil Marsh, fought the school board on its policy, which he was told is there to protect the school and its staff.
The school doesn't get funding to supervise her or for that block, he said he was told.
"The school principal told me... it's going to be the end of McBride school as we know it because more kids will start doing this, taking distance education, and they'll lose staffing and have to close the school," Marsh said.
Marsh argues distance education is necessary to make up for McBride Secondary's shortfalls.
"McBride is a rural school that cannot possibly provide the variety of courses that today's student may require to successfully enter a university of their choice," he said.
Marsh said he was also told allowing Rebecca to study distance courses in school could open the door to more students seeking the same privilege. But despite the risks, Rebecca nonetheless won the reprieve.
"I don't think they really had much choice," her father said. "She's a bus student and once they pick her up and drop her off at school, to force her off the school grounds when it's -20 with no place to go and 10 kilometres from home, I kind of suspect they were probably running into a legal issue."
School district superintendent Brian Pepper did not allow The Citizen to speak to the principal, and wouldn't comment specifically on Marsh's case.
However he did say schools do not receive funding for the courses students take through distance education, and that could jeopardize the school.
Since enrollment at McBride was only 106 students as of the end of September, "a swing of three, four, five students has a significant impact on their budget and on their ability to provide programs to all the other kids in the school," Pepper said.
"In a larger school, it may be that the library is open, it may be that there are support centres are open, it may be that there are tutorial rooms that are available and so making an allowance to fit a child in in extenuating circumstances is relatively easy."
He said extenuating circumstances are taken into consideration. For example, a student may bus to school and take three in-school classes in the first and third blocks of the day, which would make it inconvenient for the student to leave the grounds.
