School Board, Sell Your Mall? That's No Way to Fund Education

You couldn't find a better example of B.C.'s shoddy approach to school funding than Education Minister Mike Bernier's half-baked, last-minute proposal that the Vancouver School Board sell Kingsgate Mall to cover part of its budget deficit.

The ongoing dispute between the provincial government and the board is, on one level, simple enough. The school trustees went through the budget process and decided that meeting student needs, after some cuts, would cost $502 million in the coming fiscal year.

Drummond Report: School boards fear loss of independence

School boards can’t raise taxes to boost their budgets. Collective bargaining with teachers and support staff has largely been taken out of boards’ hands.

Now, the economist advising Ontario on where to find cuts to help deal with the deficit has said the province should be able to order boards to sell unused buildings — such as closed schools — and also gut 70 per cent of non-teaching staff such as psychologists, education assistants and guidance counsellors.

School boards say Don Drummond’s recommendations, if implemented, would not only affect the quality of education but also further erode their independence.

“If they wanted to do that, why don’t they just do away with us?” said Toronto District School Board Trustee Sheila Ward, of the proposal to give the province the power to force boards to sell buildings.

No minister of the government has that expertise, she added — even she and her fellow Toronto trustees realized they didn’t have such expertise and that’s why the board created the arms-length TLC (Toronto Lands Corp.) to manage its real estate, she added.

“I don’t think any minister sitting at Queen’s Park can begin to have the knowledge that we have here of our facilities, our schools,” Ward added.

Toronto board to fight budgetary ‘assault’ on pools, sports and nutrition

Toronto’s public school board will look at — and make public — how all the cuts proposed in the city budget to school pools, parks and recreation, and nutrition programs will negatively impact kids.

“People of this city will not tolerate this assault on children’s programming any more than they were willing to tolerate an assault on libraries,” said longtime trustee and former chair Sheila Ward at a committee meeting Monday night.

Toronto District School Board chair Chris Bolton said it’s important to get “facts and figures out there” so that communities know exactly how and how many kids such cuts will affect.

Under a proposed budget, the city is looking at eliminating programming at seven of the 33 school pools it operates, as well as after-school programming at 12 sites and support for school nutrition programs.