More on that later. First of all I want to focus on the good news and congratulate St. Paul Elementary Community School on making Today's Parent (a national Canadian parenting magazine) Top 20 Schools list. SPECS was chosen for its tenacity and community-mindedness after the flood on November 2, 2007 that destroyed the bottom floor of the school. It is great to see national recognition for one of our schools!
I also want to thank SPECS staff for their hard work and all of the construction contractors in ensuring that students were welcomed back to their home school for the first day of classes. SPECS underwent a complete modernization after the flood and after some politicking. There are still some finishing touches to be completed, but all-in-all the school looked great today and the energy was fantastic!
Now on to the not-so-good news. Speaking of modernizations, as some of you know, Racette Community School was announced for a modernization at the same time as St. Paul Elementary. Since we did not receive enough money to complete both projects properly, Alberta Education suggested we take some of the funds from the Racette project to get SPECS done, since they were still displaced from the flood. We went ahead with the suggestion and everything was on track until the government released its budget in the spring and said there were no NEW capital dollars. Even though Racette was a previously-announced project, there were no new funds to make up for the original shortfall in dollars we recognized when both schools were first announced.
We had a chance to meet Education Minister David Hancock last Tuesday. We knew it wasn't a good sign when we arrived at the Legislature Building and saw the front page of The Edmonton Journal stating that the government was projecting a $6.9 billion deficit after the first-quarter update. It wasn't a surprise when the Minister said he still didn't have any money for us, but thanks to our parent rep, Tanice Olson, trustees and staff, some key points were made that the Minister will take into consideration for when money is available. For instance, we still have use of the space over at the old Glen Avon School, which will reduce both construction costs (by 40 -50% because Racette would be vacant) and time (one year for construction instead of two). Our MLA Ray Danyluk also went to bat for us and said that the Minister will review the situation with his staff in the next week or so to try and give us more of a timeline.
Two days later, on August 27, Minister Hancock delivered the news to all board chairs that Education needs to cut $80 million out of this year's budget and they are taking some of that out of our reserves and reduction in some grants. That's fine. We will do our part to ensure taxpayers' dollars are used efficiently. What wasn't fine was how they calculated the clawbacks. St. Paul Education is now facing a reduction of almost $600,000 in its reserves - reserves that we had been prudently saving for the past 14 years in order to build a new central office. We are facing deductions from our reserves that are three times larger than some of other larger boards, like Edmonton Catholic. Where is the equity? Boards that had larger reserves had more money taken back. It did not matter if these reserves were earmarked to fund certain projects. Some of the hardest hit boards are from rural areas, so our board and some of the others in the area are now setting up a meeting with our local MLA to find out the reasoning behind these methods.
So here we are at the start of a new school year and we are already facing some challenging times. This year we are looking at $80 million in cuts to Education. Next year, we are already being forewarned that we could be looking at $300 million in cuts. We obviously have a lot of catching up to do across this province, financially. Let's just keep our students learning a priority and keep the cuts out of the classroom.
No comments:
Post a Comment