There have been numerous stories and letters to the editor in this paper lately about the potential school closures in School District 57.
But, several months ago we ran a story called "enrolment spells trouble for education budget." The story starts out by saying, If School District 57 paid attention only to the amount of money they got from the province each year, and the amount of students enroled in the district each year, there would be 32 fewer teachers in SD57.
The story went on to mention that not only should there be less teachers, but there should also be five less professional staff, 52 less CUPE staff, 13 less custodians, 13 less vice-principals and principals, six less trades staff and five less exempt personnel, all of which were full-time equivalent positions.
Even though enrolment has continued to drop, and even though the Ministry of Education pays districts their core funding based on the number of students they have, SD57 decided to hold on to 126 full-time staff.
Why?
At an average of $50,000 per staff, a quick push of a few buttons on a calculator means a total of $6.3 million, and that's just for one year. How many schools would this have kept open?
How long has the school district being doing this?
At the time, Prince George District Teachers' Association president Linda Naess said, "We've known for the past few years that the district has put extra money in to keep the cuts at bay, due to lack of provincial funding.
"Thank you for keeping the cuts away from the classroom for as long as you have. We see that they have done that, but we also know, as they do, it will end in the next few years unless the government starts properly funding education."
Although the teachers' union would have you believe the extra staffing was done with the intent of better education for your child, because it would mean a smaller student-per-teacher ratio, some believe it was simply to keep unneeded staff employed.
If the money had been forwarded to years when the provincial funding was less - and used for a situation like we have today - instead of keeping unneeded staff employed, maybe we wouldn't have to close any schools. After all, three years at $6.3 million could keep a lot of schools open.
According to SD57's secretary-treasurer Bryan Mix, the decline in staff has not corresponded with the decline in students or district income.
Why not?
Only someone who uses tax dollars to run their business could keep it running with this sort of bad math. Any other business would have laid off people a long time ago.
Maybe this time the school district will do a better job with its math, after all they are educating our children.
