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Provincewide School Closings
SQE Secretary-Treasurer Nancy Wagner will appear on CTV’s Provincewide this Sunday, November 15, at 6:30 pm. Nancy will be discussing the recently-released Parents for Education report on declining enrollment and school closings. Among other things, Parents for Education is calling for changes to the funding formula (ie, more money) that will allow small schools to keep their doors open. School for Thought notes that, while Ontario’s public school enrollment has declined by something like 90,000 students over the last six years, the number of school-age children has decreased by only about 20,000. Why has enrollment dropped by so much more than the number of school-age kids, you ask?
It suggests to us that more and more students are choosing alternatives to publicly-funded schools - options like home schools, private schools (Ontario has 921 of them), dropping out of school and, in the case of new Canadians, being sent back to the old country to live with grandma and get a decent education there. If we’re correct, Ontario’s enrollment decline indicates a high level of dissatisfaction with Ontario’s publicly-funded schools. Our hypothesis is borne out by the burgeoning enrollment in supplementary education services like Kumon and Sylvan. Ontario school boards might want to consider offering public schools that would lure many of these students back from their alternative settings - to wit, schools that offer a rigorous academic education in a very structured setting.
And if the province is foolish enough to agree to give even more money to school boards, there is a strong possibility that most of it will disappear into the bureaucracy like usual and many schools will close anyway.