The chair of Prince George's school board believes a recent report demonstrates the government's current funding model for rural education is inadequate.
The report, a result of consultations with 400 representatives from school boards and schools throughout B.C., was quietly released last week. The feedback was collected between November of 2016 and April of 2017. Tim Bennett, chair of School District 57, said the district was among many voices from rural regions in B.C. who argued that government funding based on enrolment numbers needed to change.
The report found 78 per cent of respondents had seen between one and five schools close in their districts over the last five years. District 57 has seen the closure of four rural schools since 2010.
"Funding based primarily on enrolment does not reflect the higher costs of delivering comparable programs and services in low enrolment, remote environments," the report stated in its section on key findings.
The Ministry of Education is in the midst of a review of its funding model for schools in the province.
Bennett said District 57 oversees many schools that could be considered rural. He said many of these schools also function as community centres and cultural hubs for communities such as McBride and Mackenzie.
"In a pure people funding model, we felt that you're really forcing situations where schools are not going to make financial sense in communities," Bennett said.
"So part of that was to ask government to increase funding to support rural schools to ensure that schools stay healthy and vibrant in rural communities."
The issue of whether to change funding from a model based on the number of students has been controversial, with some Lower Mainland school districts arguing that the current model should remain in place. The vice-chair of the Surrey Board of Education has argued that a change in the formula would "hugely disadvantage" students in a district packed with over-capacity schools.
District 57 recommended the provincial government offer core funding for rural schools that would cover basic operations and infrastructure while providing a baseline of staffing. Bennett said many schools in the district also face higher operating costs due to snow removal, electric and heating costs.
The definition of a rural school is also unclear, according to Bennett.
"At one point government was talking about rural as being communities which only have one school. If that was the definition government was using, then Mackenzie, McBride and Valemount would not classify as a rural school," he said.
"If we asked the MLAs and asked the minister, at that time, everyone was giving a little bit of a different definition of what rural was."
The report also noted many districts faced difficulty in recruiting and retaining teaching staff, despite a program that offers an annual rural stipend of $2,300 to teachers.
Many of the issues related to funding can be traced to decreasing student enrolment over the last ten years, although most of those consulted for the report have seen either a decline in the decrease or an increase in enrolment in recent years.
