“It would be my suggestion that you hold the line on the budget and in fact work towards rolling it back towards the provincial average,” concerned taxpayer Greg East told Flin Flon school trustees last week.
Armed with pieces of paper bearing the fruits of his research – including a note about the Flin Flon School Division spending $2,183 more per student than the provincial average – East respectfully said aloud what some, perhaps many, residents are thinking.
That thought – or question, rather: Why does the FFSD budget keep going up even as enrollment goes down or, in some cases, rises only modestly?
Trustees cite the higher cost of doing business in northern Manitoba, and there’s certainly something to that. According to East, school divisions in Thompson and Swan River spend a bit more per student than does FFSD (The Pas, however, spends quite a bit less).
For 2016-17 in particular, FFSD is, in the words of Trustee Angela Simpson, “really scared” by the prospect of a change in provincial government.
“So in my heart I believe we’re [budgeting] so that we’re not caught in a bad, bad situation next year,” Simpson recently said, adding that a previous change in government left FFSD short of the revenues it had projected.
In light of such statements, it’s no surprise that trustees did not view East’s “hold the line” proposition as viable. They voted to approve a 2016-17 budget that doles out a record $14.62 million and ups spending by $521,234.
That’s hardly an anomaly for Manitoba. According to the Frontier Centre for Public Policy, public education costs in the province soared 48.5 per cent between 2002-03 and 2012-13 even as enrollment shrunk 3.5 per cent.
Across Manitoba, the education system faces nowhere near the same pressures to contain spending as do municipalities and other tax-funded entities.
The reason is that education has become highly politicized, with the NDP pumping record dollars into the system while portraying any effort to reduce costs – no matter the context – as an assault on our children’s future.
Whether more money translates into better results is debatable. After all, Manitoba students earned Canada’s worst scores in math, science and reading in 2013, according to a Council of Ministers of Education report.
That said, there is much more to education than how Johnny does on an exam when he is 14. When I look at a school like Hapnot Collegiate, for instance, I see many quality initiatives underway to prepare students for adulthood, and not all of them revolve around book learnin’.
But back to East and his heretofore unsuccessful quest to contain FFSD spending. One of his ideas is to have trustees look at whether alternative high school Many Faces Education Centre still needs its own building given that a) its enrollment is 68 students and b) a no-longer-full Hapnot is right next door.
The idea that Many Faces could operate within Hapnot has been around for years, though no one within FFSD has bought into the concept.
Some are surprised to learn that even if trustees were interested, politicians in Winnipeg have given themselves the final say on any school closure in Manitoba. It goes back to this whole idea that any reduction in education is always bad, no matter the context.
But education should not be treated as a sacred cow. As with any other bureaucracy, taxpayers must feel free to question education spending without being accused of taking kerosene and a match to our children’s future.
That might be hard for some politicians to swallow, but it’s the truth.
Local Angle is published on Fridays.
