Hot potatoes strictly a local call

OK, so Education Minister Peter Bjornson will not allow school boards to close small schools no matter how few students they have, he’s capping school divisions’ contingency reserve funds at two per cent, and he’s threatening to impose tax freezes on trustees next year.

But Flin Flon school board is on its own to decide if it wants to make students take a breathalyzer or provide saliva for a litmus test, for in-school drug and alcohol testing. Bjornson says the minister has no role to play in whether this is legal under the Public Schools Act or his safe schools policy, not to mention the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

Just checking what’s ministerial edict and what’s a matter of local school board autonomy, for those of you keeping score at home.

Moving right along, I’m wondering how many parents from St. James Collegiate, George Waters Middle School, and other schools will be out at Portage and Ferry Monday afternoon when the new head shop has its grand opening on 4/20.

Sorry, "head shop" is, like, totally so last century — it means a retail outlet for drug papaphernalia.

It reminds me of the time there’d been a notorious drug bust in a school by an undercover officer posing as a student, and a demonstration on the street outside the school a few days later. One mother I sort of knew was there at the demonstration making sure her kid didn’t come out on the sidewalk and end up in the media. She told me, "My son deals drugs in the school, but he’s smart enough to know that you only sell to students that you know."

To which I replied, "Bravo for you for raising such a bright young lad."

On other topics, child the younger and I were bringing in the mail, and she was quite rightly wondering why James Bezan MP was writing to us.

I explained that he comes from up around Selkirk, but that Bezan and his Tory colleagues like to let us know that they’re doing such a great job that we would never want to have another party lead the country.

This mailing was about child care, but other Conservative mailings sent by Members of Parliament who represent ridings other than our own, have very helpfully made us aware that our own MP, Anita Neville, is actually a combination of Captain Hook, The Sheriff of Nottingham, and Benjamin Linus.

And speaking of St. James Collegiate -- as I was about 23 paragraphs ago -- I’ll be there Friday and Saturday for volleyball club provincials. If you’re involved in running the canteen, please tell me that you’re going to have tacos in a bag ... they are so not good for you, and so goooooooooood.

So this morning I’m driving to work, and pull up beside one of the buses decked out to promote U of M’s "One University, Many Futures" campaign, and I was just kind of thinking, did it occur to anyone that maybe the students in the ad could or should have been more ethnoculturally diverse?

As I write this — I can so multi-task, lol — I’m watching the webcast of the national spelling bee to see how Ye-Young Won from J.B. Mitchell School does. I was recalling when I finished third in the spelling bee at Winston Churchill Collegiate in Scarberia back in 1961 — no mean task, it had about 2,500 students.

I can’t remember what word I flubbed, but I remember the prize and still have it somewhere. The English teacher who ran the spelling bee fancied himself as a reincarnation of Homer, and had self-published an epic poem on the battle of The Long Sault.

What??? You say it’s not on the language arts curriculum in Manitoba? Peter, how can you allow such an outrage to occur on your watch?

Nick Martin, Winnipeg Free Press