No joy at schools whomever wins

Both the Liberals and NDP have cut funds in often insidious ways

by Andrea Reimer

If it's spring, it's budget time at your local school board, a fact most British Columbians have became painfully aware of from the agonized screams emanating annually from locally-elected school trustees as they grapple with a new round of budget cuts. Whether relief for critically under-funded classrooms is on the way from either of the two parties who could form government is still an open question for many school trustees.

For decades, school boards raised their own funds from local taxes. However, since the late 1980s, the province has been fully responsible for funding education and provides an annual funding envelope to school boards. Generally speaking, this amount has increased every year, something governments of all stripes have made a big to-do about in throne speeches and press releases.

Here's the part that you won't read about in a government press release: the province also imposes all of the major cost increases on school boards such as salary and benefit increases. In addition, school boards are subject to the same inflationary pressures all British Columbians are. Put another way, providing the same services each year costs more money each year. When government funding doesn't keep pace with these rising costs, school boards have to make cuts to balance budgets.

So when the BC Liberals say they have increased funding to school boards by $520 per student, it's a true statement. But they fail to mention that since they were elected, they've also increased costs by $650 per student. The resulting funding shortfall—$130 per student or $320 million across the province in the last four years—is what school boards have been making such a fuss about. The BC Liberals bought a little silence right before the election by providing enough funding this year to ensure boards didn't have to make new cuts, but there's very little money available to try and restore some of the lost services.

The situation in our schools wouldn't be nearly as bad if school boards weren't already reeling from a decade of cuts under two successive NDP governments that liked to play the same game of adding new costs without providing enough new funding to cover them. However, the NDP had another favourite trick for hiding their ongoing under-funding of schools: targeting cuts at specific student populations.

For example, support for ESL learners was "capped" at five years under the NDP. After that, if the students still needed support (something experts agree most ESL learners are likely to need), school boards would have to steal funds from other students to cover the shortfall. Similarly the NDP "capped" the number of some categories of special needs students that districts could claim funding for. If you were unlucky enough to have more than, say, 2% gifted learners in your school district, the "extra" kids would have to do without or again you'd have to take money away from other students to provide service.

This type of divide and conquer approach hampered a united front on advocacy efforts as different groups fought amongst themselves at the district level to grab a piece of the diminishing funding pie and different boards experienced different impacts. As a result, hundreds of millions of dollars in education services were lost during the NDP era with nary a whimper from many school trustees and certainly not from the provincial school trustee's association, headed for the last half of the decade by none other than Carole James.

Not all education services were under-funded by the NDP. Under this cloak of confusion the Ministry of Education's budget ballooned from just over $100 million in 1991 to almost $1 billion when the NDP left office in 2001. Like the BC Liberals after them, the NDP increased support for private schools which accounts for much of the increased Ministry budget. But the NDP also had a great number of pet projects and used the Ministry as a vehicle to implement their ideas. Their costly effort at a province-wide standardized test—Foundation Skills Assessment (or FSA)—was one such project. What the FSA has turned out to be is simply a foundation for the Fraser Institute's annual report card on schools, the front line of privatization of the public school system.

It's hard to decipher from the 2005 NDP election platform whether they will change their under-funding ways. Their one-year budget boasts they will give $39 million more than the BC Liberals have promised in the upcoming school year, but their figures include funds that will go to ministry projects as well as classrooms. It's also completely silent on whether funding would keep pace with costs over the next three years if the NDP were to form government.

The BC Liberals position is quite clear in that regard. Their three-year budget projections released this spring show only minuscule increases in each of the next two years, completely out of step with projected costs. As a result, whatever pain boards saved this year will be felt in the $100 million in cuts projected over the next two years if the BC Liberals are re-elected.

The upshot of all this is that there will be no joy in education-land no matter who wins the May 17th election, a sad reality for our kids and a system that so desperately needs stability. The only hope is that the annual spring advocacy efforts of school boards, parents, students, teachers and education support staff grows to be a year round effort by thousands more voices so that no matter the year and no matter the government, our youngest British Columbians are a budget priority.

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