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The Cost of Bondage
The Waterloo District School Board has decided to take another run at solving one of its most troublesome and controversial issues, the question of defining catchment areas for its 16 high schools. Because the board’s approximately 2000 support staff are “too busy” to tackle the problem, its trustees have just voted to spend $100,000 on an outside consultant to come up with recommendations. Now, $100,000 is a respectable chunk of change, and the Society for Quality Education plans to be first in line with its application for this contract. However, since we are aware that there’s a slight possibility we won’t get the job, we’re giving our faithful readers a sneak peak at our recommendations regarding school attendance boundaries.
Abolish them. Eliminate them. Get rid of them. Eradicate them.
School attendance boundaries give schools a guaranteed supply of students and funding, which is more or less the definition of a monopoly. This policy could have been taken right out of a Soviet central planner’s manual, and it works about as well as the rest of the Soviet policies. Instead of trying to centrally control the enrollment decisions of every one of its approximately 20,000 secondary students, the Waterloo DSB should eliminate school attendance boundaries and encourage its schools to compete for students. The schools will be the better for it and the board will have saved $100,000.