Editorial

Speed kills

Raymond Charles Yellowknee comes back before the court on June 12. If the matter is not further postponed, the judge will pronounce him a dangerous offender or not.
Either way, it’s likely Yellowknee will spend years in jail. It seems only fair that he should, although no amount of time behind bars will, or ever could, make up for the four lives lost due to his actions on a cold January night in 2007.
Yellowknee is a pathetic figure. He should never have been behind the wheel of a vehicle in the first place. He probably shouldn’t even have been free to walk the streets, let alone drive somebody else’s vehicle at high speed in an attempt to escape the police.
But people like him are among us. He’ll be out of circulation for a while – hopefully a long while – but there are others out there inclined to behave stupidly, especially while intoxicated. And here’s something to think about: many of them are not habitual offenders, as Yellowkknee was. Many of them could be regarded as ‘ordinary’ folk, who just happen to think driving while drunk is okay, because…well, everybody does it and ‘nothing bad has happened to me so far.’ Or too fast, or while paying attention to something other than the road.
The ditches of highways east, west and north of Slave Lake are adorned with many crosses – memorials to people killed in car crashes. They’ve become the graveyards of the modern age – for a society that drives too much, too fast and too recklessly.

School questions
There’s a monumental task ahead for everyone involved in making St. Mary of the Lake School into a success story. The challenge would be severe enough without the disillusionment many are feeling after the failed attempt to move to another school division.
The story about why that didn’t succeed - despite an overwhelming vote in favour of it - is probably a very interesting one. But it likely won’t ever be told, publicly, and maybe it doesn’t matter. What’s done is done, and sensible people need to get down to the job of building, or re-building, the conditions that make for a happy, healthy school.
That would seem to go without saying, but there are yet more complications. The Living Waters division and its supporters - and indeed the province - seem to be pinning their hopes on a new $13 million Jr/Sr High building across the highway.
The first question that arises is why the province would spend that kind of money on a school that has next to no senior high school enrollment. The decline in student numbers in the higher grades at St. Mary’s has been steep and steady in the past couple of years, thanks at least partly to the loss in confidence that led to the vote to leave the school division. Would a new building solve that lack of confidence?
What would make more sense at this point would be to build a single new school on the new site, for students from both the public and separate systems to use.