SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT

The high cost of non-transparency

On Thursday, People for Education released a report documenting the fees that Ontario high schools are charging their students for a wide variety of things, including course fees and charges for extra-curricular activities and optional programming. On Friday, the Ministry of Education released guidelines on school fees. This is a remarkably speedy response from the education bureaucracy! However, that’s not what I want to focus on.

First, a personal tale. Back in the 1990’s, one of my children attended a public school that was rolling in money. In addition to extorting money from the parents for the usual stuff like school photos, pop machines, mandatory $1.00 dances (in school time), fund-raisers, yearbook fees - it seemed as if there was a new request at least once a week - the school also bussed the kids to Toronto twice a year to see a musical (at approximately $75 a pop), plus there was an annual ski trip to Quebec (at approximately $350 a pop) for the approximately 200 grade 8 students. I’m guessing that the school took in between $150,000 and $200,000 from these money-making activities every year. That’s a lot of money.

It seemed to me then, and it seems to me now, that the school should have been accountable for this money. Along with a member of the school council, I asked to see a record of income and expenses, but the principal refused to provide this information. My friend and I did not pursue it, because of course we were powerless, but I believe that the principal was in the wrong. Even if no one was stealing from the school’s money pot, and of course I have no indication that anyone was, the principal should have prvoided a scrupulous accounting of the fund-raised money in order to ensure that no one was exposed to temptation. With huge amounts of unaccountable money sloshing around in some 4,800 schools in Ontario, the chances are very high that someone somewhere has his or her hand in the cookie jar.

So, for what it’s worth, that’s my take on the People for Education report. Yes, certainly make fund-raising fair - but go further: require every school to publish financial statements scrupulously documenting how much money was received and what it was spent on.