World News
After the last bell: When schools close, residents fight to keep rural Manitoba communities alive
It’s been five years since Prawda, a 200-strong Manitoba community on the Trans-Canada Highway, lost its only school. It has turned into an occasionally visited business centre and a playground in need of repairs.Chenelle Zalitach has fun on the playground outside the former Reynolds Elementary School in Prawda, which she attended. Her daughter, two-year-old Tenley…
It's been five years since Prawda, a 200-strong Manitoba community on the Trans-Canada Highway, lost its only school. It has turned into an occasionally visited business centre and a playground in need of repairs.
If the neglected slide in the playground of Prawda's former elementary school could talk, it might tell of the kids who giggled when the school in rural Manitoba thrived, and those who must have cried.
“I remember one of my friends knocked a tooth out on this thing,” says Chelsea Zalitach, 23, standing at the foot of the slide, which time hasn't treated kindly.
Her classmate tried to climb up, she remembers, long before the red paint on the slide was peeling away. They landed face-first.
Away from the slide and unkempt shrubs peeking up from the snow slumps a wooden platform, maybe five feet high. There's a zipline atop, which kids would hang onto. It's a playground activity that likely wouldn't exist today without many more safety precautions.
“We were the only school that had it,” Zalitach says, looking out at the sagging zipline.
It's been five years since Prawda — a 200-strong community east of Winnipeg on the Trans-Canada Highway that's a pit stop on the way to the cottage for many — lost Reynolds Elementary School.
The school, with its playground still in need of repairs, has now become a fledgling business centre, with a family therapist, and an open salon for a hairdresser.
Some say a community dies when a school closes. Without it, family and businesses flee. That's what happened in Prawda and small villages around it, the Zalitach family says — but a school closure doesn't have to mean the end. There are encouraging signs, like what the Prawda school has become.
“Hopefully we can get the community going again … start doing stuff again,” says Chenelle Zalitach, Chelsea's older sister.
From Chenelle's front window, the 25-year-old can see her childhood home across the street. Her old school is a half-kilometre away.
She likes being close to her family, and the place where she formed so many memories with her classmates.
Suddenly, ‘there was no kids left'
She doesn't need a yearbook to remember the names of those classmates.
When she graduated from Reynolds Elementary School in 2007 to go to school in Whitemouth, Zalitach was one of five students in Grade 6.
“There was no talk of closing the school when I left and then all of a sudden it was, like, there was no kids left,” she says. There were around 30 students at the kindergarten to Grade 6 school at the time.
The next year, the Manitoba government implemented a moratorium on school closures, in response to a public outcry when 13 schools — Prawda's not among them — were on the chopping block.
Since then, the province has only shuttered schools in cases where the school division has made a closure request and the province approves. Nine schools have closed in the last decade, including the K-6 school in Prawda in 2014, and schools in Domain and Birch River this past summer.
In Prawda, the enrolment exodus was quick, with the school dropping from 30 students in 2010 to eight or nine by 2013-14. No students were planning to attend the next year, since every parent chose to enrol their child in nearby Whitemouth or Falcon Lake, The Carillon newspaper reported at the time.
It saddens Chenelle Zalitach that her two young children cannot attend the same school she went to.
“Even if there wouldn't be that many children there, I think it's just so beneficial to have a school in your community.”
She says kids of different ages became friends at the tiny school, because there was nobody else. Christmas concerts became community get-togethers. The skating rink became a second gym.
At a community meeting in 2014, residents spoke of repurposing the school. Taylor Plett — who graduated with Chenelle — turned the school into a business centre in 2016.
Prawda is working to turn a closure into an opportunity.
“It just seemed like the community was losing all of its businesses and resources,” Plett wrote in an email.
Her response: create an affordable place for businesses.
A play group for toddlers and young kids operating out of the former school has become a ray of hope for the community. Lately, there have been more kids in the area to fill up the group, Plett says.
“There were so many opportunities for my generation when I was a kid and I want that for my future children as well,” says Plett, who also started a Chamber of Commerce in the rural municipality of Reynolds and began organizing a Christmas hamper drive.
It's that kind of sense of community that keeps Miranda Hardy, who lives just west of Prawda, in the area.
Before the school close, she had imagined she would be one of those mothers chauffeuring her kids to Reynolds Elementary, grabbing a coffee on the way home to Hadashville, which funnelled its youngsters to the school.
Its closure reverberated here, too.
Since 2014, Hadashville's grocery store closed and families, young and old, went elsewhere — but Hardy has no plans to leave.
“I was a big-time city girl, and I would never be able to go back,” Hardy says.
Fighting for sense of community
It's not always easy to maintain that sense of community once a school closes, though.
Further to the west, the residents of Domain are realizing how much work that can take.
Domain's K-8 school shut its doors in June because of shrinking enrolment. As communities around it like La Salle and Ste Agathe are growing, more parents are choosing to place their kids in those bigger schools.
Without events like school concerts in their own community, people in Domain have to find other ways to make sure residents have an opportunity to get together.
Sometimes that's informal — like a recent occurrence when some of the locals chased suspected thieves out of town in the middle of the night.
“That was kind of nice — we had a town reunion,” Leslie Enns says, chuckling.
Birch River School, almost 400 kilometres northwest of Winnipeg, had around 270 students when Stella Chmelowski became secretary in the 1970s. The school also closed this June, when enrolment dipped below 30 students. Swan Valley School Division is trying to sell the building.
Chmelowski worries about Birch River. There isn't a restaurant where you can get a cup of coffee, she says.
“The street I lived on, there's only four houses left.” There were 13 homes when she arrived in the '70s.
In Prawda, there's an understanding the community must rally together to halt that kind of decline.
Residents have started by turning the school into a home for local business. Next, they hope the hemp company that bought the former provincial tree nursery near Prawda will plant hundreds of jobs.
For the people who continue to live and work in the community — like Jacey Herle, who works at Sophie's Restaurant in Hadashville — rural life has a charm worth preserving.
She tried living in the city and elsewhere, but chose to come back to the area where she grew up.
Living and working in a small community isn't always easy, but its relative simplicity is appealing, she says.
“I think it's all that you make it.”
School's out forever
These are the nine schools that have closed in Manitoba in the past decade:
- Cypress River — 2009.
- Graysville — 2010.
- Reston Elementary — 2011.
- Kenton — 2012.
- Reynolds — 2014.
- Chapman School in Winnipeg — 2016.
- Minitonas Elementary — 2018.
- Birch River — 2019.
- Domain — 2019.
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