Fifty-four million dollars is being stripped out of BC public education over the next two years. Though the exact figure is not known for Powell River, it is expected to result in a reduction of about $100,000 this year and about the same amount next year, which means roughly another five per cent drop in funding for School District 47.
For the better part of the last decade, the district has been in funding protection due to declining enrolment. That means each year the government will provide only 95 per cent of the previous year’s funding as a buffer to allow districts to adapt to a community’s changing demographics. Over the years, as Jeanette Scott, Powell River Board of Education chair, said, great effort and hard decisions have been made over closing schools and streamlining the system in this community.
There is no doubt those decisions were difficult and have lead to much greater workloads for those left to run the schools. Long gone are the days of assistant school superintendents and elementary school vice-principals.
A point arrives, however, when there is nothing left to reduce. Further cuts actually damage rather than strengthen.
That’s why the premier’s glib, off-hand comment about going after low-hanging fruit comes off as something of a slap in the face to all educators in the public school system and in particular those who have been responsive and financially prudent.
Maybe there are districts, ones that have not had to contend with declining enrolment, which are spending taxpayers’ cash fast and freely, but that is certainly not the case in School District 47.
The problem with the low-hanging fruit comment is that many of BC’s 60 districts already have done much to streamline costs. They have had to.
Yet independent private schools in the province continue to be given greater amounts of taxpayers’ money to operate. According to the BC Teachers’ Federation report on the 2015 BC Budget, private schools around the province are looking at a $30-million increase in funding for 2015, almost exactly the amount that is being taken from public schools. That increase is a continuation of a decade-long trend which has seen a 61.1 per cent increase in funding for private schools compared to a 19.7 per cent increase for public ones.
Where is the fairness for taxpayers who send their children to be educated in BC’s public school system? Certainly they deserve that as well as some savings.
