EDITORIAL: Time for trustees to stop squabbling and protect our schools

This week the board of School District 27 (Cariboo-Chilcotin) voted to develop and submit a deficit budget to the Ministry of Education for the coming fiscal year. As reported in the Williams Lake Tribune, trustee Bruce Mack said, “The board will develop a budget for the coming year that retains quality education for our students. We recognize that with the current funding projections that this may mean a deficit budget.”

Well spoken, Mr. Mack.

While our own board snarls and fights turf wars over funding scraps, Mack's district is doing something constructive politically about a totally unacceptable funding formula. Could this be the start of a movement for real funding change in this province?

It might be if other districts are brave enough to follow suit.

Here in the lower West Kootenay (or however you choose to refer to this underfunded chunk of geography), the school board seems to be making a kind of logical error in their thinking. The dominant belief seems to be that, because enrollment is currently shrinking, losing as much funding as we are is an inevitable, if dismal, reality. What doesn't seem to be taken into account is that while part of the decrease in funding is--fair enough--due to declining enrollment, part of it is also due to the provincial government's current policy of funding all BC schools on a strict per capita basis.

This funding formula discriminates against rural communities and rural students while favouring urban schools. Communities in rural areas are smaller and more scattered than in urban areas. Serving these communities, therefore, tends to cost more. They are--sinful phrase--'less cost-effective'.

From a pencil-pushing Victoria or Vancouver perspective, this fact doesn't even appear to register. When we complain, we don't get any sort of meaningful response.

As a result, the schools in our district fall into the crack between urban centres like Vancouver which are naturally more cost-effective and schools like Salmo Secondary that qualify for plentiful extra funding due to their being classed as 'remote' through the accident of being a few kilometres further from town than ours.

The whole situation is absurd. And the fact that our board allows it to continue unchallenged is just plain wrong.

The role of a school board is to protect the quality of education in their communities. Our board, currently, is failing to do this in a responsible and effective manner. Part of this is due to internal divisions—some trustees appear to be so bogged down in partisanship that they have lost all sense of the bigger picture.

These trustees are so busy fighting among themselves that the real enemy is left free to sit in Victoria and pursue its anti-rural agenda with the effect that not a peep of cohesive opposition emerges from this region.

At the same meeting where it decided to write a deficit budget, SD 27 also dropped plans to close a number of its own threatened schools. Wouldn't it be something all our own trustees would be glad to agree upon: to decide not to close our own communities' schools? Imagine signs, not just in Warfield and Trail, but all around the region reading 'Save Webster AND Glenmerry AND Maclean AND Castlegar Primary'. Wouldn't that be something? Might that not stop the board squabbling, bring them together, and allow them to act as they should—in the true best interests of our children?

The farsighted trustees of SD 27 plan to write a letter to all the other school districts in BC encouraging them to also submit 'needs-based' budgets. We can only hope that our own trustees will jump on board what ought to become a rapidly-growing chorus of refusal to accommodate an anti-rural and short-sighted provincial government. If every underfunded district joined in this protest, accompanied by their urban brother and sister districts in a gesture of solidarity, would the government have any option other than to negotiate? We think not.

In terms of any legitimate 'planning for the future', this should be proposal number one.