Well aware of the school closures debate in School District 57 are provincial officials on both sides of the Legislature.
The Citizen contacted Minister of Education Margaret MacDiarmid and NDP leader Carole James, who both spoke of hard economic times, but differed on how the massive losses in provincial revenues should be meted out.
One of the harshest criticisms of the government's handling of the provincial financing was not telling local government father in advance that the cuts were coming. SD57 officials were putting together the budget for the coming year, already facing a shortfall of about $4 million, only to learn in September that the amount would almost be double that, hence the proposal to close or drastically alter 14 schools.
"The ministry absolutely would have provided that information earlier if we could have. We have had that conversation with school districts, we know that was not welcome news," said MacDiarmid. "We had just a stunning drop in provincial revenues and also a higher amount of public expenditure, for reasons the Ministry of Finance has detailed. We are spending more on many of the key areas of the province, but it was a spectacular drop in global economic conditions, and we could not predict the way it was affecting our province until that time. The suddenness is something we have heard about from many school districts and we are sensitive to it."
James, 11 years a B.C. school trustee, said people can see the global economic crisis, but she wondered why the provincial government had a hard time seeing the effects coming. She also dismissed the idea of cutting the Ministry of Education's budget at all, of all areas to find savings.
"No question, these are difficult economic times globally, but particularly in difficult economic times, that is when you invest in the key areas for future economic success and growth. That means you keep your school districts strong. Short changing them is short changing economic growth," she told The Citizen. "Nobody makes sound financial decisions when you're in a panic and this government has put school districts into that frantic mode of having to make drastic cuts in almost immediate fashion."
MacDiarmid cautioned that SD57 was facing a great financial crunch outside the economic crisis. More than half the budgetary concerns facing the Prince George district was already in play due to falling student enrolment, year after year.
"The average household is not replacing itself anymore in the same numbers as before," she said. "Right across Canada the number of children per family has gone down. It has been happening in almost all school districts in B.C., but we definitely have seen it in a more pronounced way in the Prince George school district."
"I lived there (Prince George) when they closed 12 schools in 2002 and 2003 and I saw all the difficulties and disruptions that caused," said James. "This just shows that school boards have been put in desperate positions because of this government downloading costs onto school districts."
She cited orders to school districts to buy greenhouse gas offsets, pay increases in health coverage, pay the difference in salary increases negotiated by the province, pay some of the costs of implementing the all-day Kindergarten program the government ordered for the coming year, etc. At the forefront was the cancellation in September of the Annual Facilities Grant to each school district, costing SD57 a surprise shortfall of more than $3 million. These, James said, have nothing to do with declining enrolments.
"We are already hearing from economists that this will be a growth year for the B.C. economy and that the B.C. economic recovery is leading the nation," said MacDiarmid. "But the full restoration of government revenues won't happen right away. That will take a while to ramp back up so I'd say we are looking at another challenging year ahead, but that recovery is underway."
She stopped short of saying the Annual Facilities Grants would be back sometime in the next year or two, but did insist that capital assets (school buildings and other structures owned by school districts) could not be left indefinitely without funding for repairs and maintenance.
James advocated for rural schools to be pulled from the Ministry of Education's typical funding formula. Because those schools are also the economic driver and the cultural hub of small communities with no urban amenities, they should be calculated differently, she said, and funded not just out of the Ministry of Education purse.
This is just one of the ideas that is being generated by the dialogue now underway regarding the closure of schools. Trustees expressed hope that many such innovations would spring forth in the mandatory 60-day public consultation process that started Tuesday night, but the net financial effects would have to apply to the immediate budget that has to be tabled late this spring and must somehow find $7 million in concrete savings.
