The Reminder is making its archives back to 2003 available on our website. Please note that, due to technical limitations, archive articles are presented without the usual formatting.
The province is willing to pump $100 million of new annual funding into Manitoba's cash-strapped school divisions Ñ provided the government gets primary control over how the cash is spent. That's the word from Premier Gary Doer, who spoke of the potential funding during a weekend interview with the Winnipeg Free Press. "We're not just going to put more money in without making some changes," he told the newspaper. Doer said this cost control would likely include giving the province authority over wage and benefit negotiations with teachers and support staff. Currently, the individual school boards conduct their own negotiations. "You can't have a discussion about where we're going on funding without talking about how to control costs," the premier told the Free Press. More funding would be welcome news to school boards, which have been calling on the province to up its share of education costs to 80 per cent. Many school boards have come under fire for relying too heavily on local taxpayers to cover rising education costs. "Provincially, probably the greatest challenge is the funding," Flin Flon Superintendent of Schools Blaine Veitch said in an interview with The Reminder last year. "The percentage of provincial funding continually decreases compared to expenditures of the division. As the provincial support decreases, that means there is more requirement on the local taxpayer."
