Capital mega-roundup

Time to close a bunch of capital-related browser tabs that have been open since the last roundup.

• The Strathroy Age-Dispatch on a local accommodation review that, in Thames Valley language, would clean up some lingering accommodation issues in western Middlesex County;
• A donor steps up in Peterborough to indicate he'd give whatever amount it takes to bring Peterborough Collegiate and Vocational Institute to current accessibility standards;
• A Kincardine school review requests a 90-day extension to continue its work;
• The Simcoe County DSB reassures the City of Orillia closed schools it bought don't have mould;
• A Near North DSB (think North Bay and area) reacts to continuing problems with potable well water at a school in Britt;
• The Limestone DSB (think Kingston) recommends keeping a Grade 7/8 presence at a school in a shuffling of programs across a few schools;
• DSB Ontario North East (think Kapuskasing and points beyond) recommends keeping two very small high schools open -- good training for us southerners in some of the differences between there and here;
• Editorial from the Hanover Post encouraging readers to come to the next review committee meeting;
• District School Board of Niagara starts its annual rounds of consultation (thanks, Community Schools Alliance); and,
• Bruce Grey Catholic DSB waits for the City of Owen Sound to allow it to demolish a historic wing of a high school that is being marred by entropy.

Loved reading the northern article -- Hearst and Smooth Rock are 160 kilometres down Highway 11 from each other (with Kapuskasing and other settlements in between) -- so the realities on the ground of an accommodation review there are very different than in many parts of rural southern Ontario, where the next school is usually within 10 to 20k and schools considered as part of the same review are usually within 30k of each other.
Was disappointed however, given some recent stellar reporting from St. Catharines on the DSBN Academy, to see a bad headline and confusing copy on the municipal consultation. The way the article is written leads one to believe that municipal partnerships will solve declining enrolment. Partnerships help take vacant space off board pupil-place rolls that reduces the financial impact of declining enrolment. Partnerships don't -- at least between municipalities and school boards -- actually lead to the increase in birth and fertility rates and/or migration rates needed to boost school-aged populations within the region.