Prince George, B.C.- The effort to save the Dunster School of Fine Arts continues. 

The Dunster Fine Arts School Society has called a meeting for tomorrow evening to talk about their next steps to save the school from closure.

The latest deadline in their negotiations with School District 57 has passed, and the Society will look at its next steps. “Where do we go now?” asks Peter Amyoony, one of the founding members of the Society. “We have made several decisions about which path we want to take, but once on that path we have found it to be a dead end or that someone has put a fence at the end of it.”

Time is running out.

The Society had presented the School District with an offer to pay $10 dollars for the building and the property. Amyoony notes the community   has been very good at upgrading the building and the grounds,   putting a new roof on the building, building a new gym, and installing a new playground.

The School District countered with an offer to sell the property  for $39.5 thousand dollars or fair market value, which ever is higher.   The counter offer at this late date was too much for the community to support says Amyoony “ The timeline was totally untenable, you just can’t give a community three months notice on something like this.” 

The Society would like to own and operate the building which the School District provides the education component. It is a model that works in the community of Wells.

The summer holidays are impacting the efforts to save the school as Society members and School District officials are out of town.

The School District has already boarded up the school and is moving forward with plans to bus students to McBride.