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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.
I wonder how long it will take organizations like People for Education to realize that the “more money” mantra just isn’t flying with Ontarians any more?
They should be very careful for what they wish for in a new funding formula because the Minister may just take the advice of People for Education and come up with a new funding formula, but one that reflects the reality that it should cost LESS not MORE to educate and resource fewer students.
Taxpayers are catching on that they’re paying way too much to educate fewer students and that the answer in new funding might just be to start scaling back those allocations.
The Minister herself is looking to offer up some kind of new “partnership” plan for school boards in the new year that I’m anticipating will encourage boards to outreach for new dollars anywhere they can.
The flaw there is that most small town boards and rural boards having been reaching out for years….but the fact remains that those other partners are feeling the pinch too as there are just fewer and fewer children to go around.
That parents are choosing alternatives is one reason for the enrollment loss but there’s always more to the story.
In rural and small town Ontario we don’t need a principal at every school. It’s just not money well spent.
We also don’t need to be paying parents to be “engaged” in our schools, yet money that could be used elsewhere is buying dinner for some school councils to entice parents to “engage”. Imagine that! Paying parents with their own tax dollars to take and interest in their child’s schooling. Parents should be insulted, but then maybe it’s the government’s way of buying parent silence?