My Ward 10

Where You Belong

Educational system is on brink of collapse – call for sea change in how the system is funded.

Toronto (June 16th) – Faced with a 12th year of budget cuts which are gutting their local schools, parents of students in Toronto public schools brought their demands to Queen’s Park today and called on the Premier and his education minister to take a radically new approach to education management and funding province-wide.

To make their point they issued an invoice which demands payment not just for millions in funding past due, but demands a radically new approach to education management and funding. These parents want the education system funded and managed the same way the province funds the health care system – envelope funding with designated priorities and targets.

“We have an education system that is in accelerating decline and the province is oblivious to the crisis,” said Mark Jackson, Co-chair of the Ward 10 Council in Toronto. “Universal design and centralized decision-making are a recipe for failure. It assumes that Wawa Ontario has the same student profile and needs as Windsor, Ottawa or Toronto. The result is that the province ends up discriminating against large cities. The time has come for the province to back off and let local school boards take control of their own destiny or face massive collapse of the system.”

The group contends that the province is increasingly removing local flexibility boards need to address unique local community circumstances. The province is setting down too many parameters on how local communities can spend their budgets. ESL is a case in point. Instead of making it available just to new immigrants, some cities need ESL flexibility to ensure that all school age children (immigrant or not) can speak English well enough to be benefit from class instruction.

“Our $100 million budget shortfall in Toronto is just the canary in the coal mine,” said Jean Rajotte, the other Co-Chair of Ward 10. “It is a symptom of a larger and far more serious problem. What we have here is not just a budget deficit … but a leadership deficit. McGuinty talks a lot about the knowledge jobs of the future, the hi-tech jobs, but what does he do? He cuts millions from textbooks and computers, the fundamental learning tools of the 21st century.”

Rajotte goes to add that community-oriented schools are being dismantled and merged into factory-size education mills so that the buildings can be sold off. “Larger schools are merely a band-aid, not a sustainable model: like burning the furniture to heat the house. What we need is to open up of the silos between ministries like social work, public health, education, community, province and city, so that we can turn these tremendous assets into hubs for our communities, rounding out our vision of education to include adults, health, recreation. We don’t need a quick buck, we need a creative long-term vision that’s responsive to local needs.”

For parent Sherry Biscope, the main concern is what she sees as the dire future of the largest school board in Canada. Since 2001-2002, Toronto has lost 33,000 students, 12 per cent of its students while the youth population in the City has grown by 20 per cent.

“Clearly students have been de-selecting Toronto schools and choosing schools outside the city because we are not meeting their needs,” said Biscope. “Toronto cannot sustain this rate of attrition. We have a dying board … $1 billion in cuts in the past 12 years. Instead of cuts, the province needs to let the city re-engineer its schools. There are creative solutions if the province would stop micro-managing and let us get on with saving our school system. The province needs to step aside and give us the flexibility to do it.”

The new approach calls for:

• the Province to stop micro-managing local boards
• a move to envelope funding with designated provincial priorities and targets to achieve specific government goals and benchmarks
• more flexibility with the budget envelope to deliver programs tailored to local needs – ESL, special education
• heavy investment in textbooks and computers, the fundamentals of 21st century learning
• no budget cuts at all to special education
• allow school boards/schools to re-categorize space so that schools can become community hubs
• allow some flexibility to create magnet schools – schools with tailored program delivery to retain students
• allow the continuation of smaller schools through creative means to make them financially viable

“The education system is the titanic heading for that big iceberg”, added Jackson and Rajotte. “The question is can we turn it around in time. The province needs to not dismiss us, but act now.”

For more information, please contact:

POPULATION YOUTH AGE 15-20
GROWTH PROJECTIONS
FOR THE CITY OF TORONTO

Source: Toronto Public Health
See 1999 – 2017 projections of the population pyramid http://www.toronto.ca/health/hsi/hsi_popchart3.htm

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