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.
No one knows for certain what will happen with students from the lake areas outside Flin Flon in the fall of 2008. That's when an agreement expires in which the Frontier School Division makes up the approximately $1,500 shortfall in government funding for lake students attending the Flin Flon School Division. Unless some sort of extension or alternate arrangement can be worked out, our school board will be stuck between a rock and a hard place. What could they do? Option A would be to turn away the children based on the principle that Flin Flon taxpayers should not foot the bill Ð even if only partially Ð for students outside the property tax base. The consequences of this would be tremendous. With some 70 lake students at (approximately) $7,500 a pop from the provincial government, our school division would be out at least $525,000. Each year. That's enough to pay almost nine teachers earning an average salary. In other words, it's a substantial amount, particularly for a small school division that's only been getting smaller. Option B, of course, would be for the school board to continue to accept the students by using its own revenue, including some from local taxpayers. That's another tough scenario. The school board is there to represent the people of Flin Flon proper, not those outside the boundaries who cannot participate in board elections. Does the voting public want to see its taxes cover this added cost? If the answer is no, as I suspect it is, then the proper course of action for the school board seems obvious. No matter what happens, one party that doesn't deserve any flack is the Frontier School Division. Rightly or wrongly, the lake students are within the Frontier catchment area. It's true that the vast majority of Frontier's funding comes from the province, not a local tax base. But is it really fair to ask one school division to pay for its students to attend class in another? Ultimately, if these students are to continue to come to Flin Flon, the responsibility should rest in the lap of the Manitoba government. It was they that drew up the school division boundaries, and it is they that pocket the annual residency fee from people at the lake. The ideal resolution for everyone involved would be for the province to continue to bridge the funding shortfall to the Flin Flon School Division once the agreement runs out. But as we all know, ideal resolutions are not always the ones that are reached. One More Thing... Kudos to the Camp Whitney Committee and the Rotary Club for all their hard work in upgrading Camp Whitney. Those of us who grew up in Flin Flon have plenty of fond memories of this summertime destination. Incidentally, the showers have been a particularly welcome addition. Perhaps I'm a wimp, but the thought of spending two or three days in the wilderness without a shower (or at least one of those old metal bathtubs) was never all that appealing. Local Angle runs Fridays.
