The Star – Cathy Dandy
“Schools must close! This has been the cry for 18 years now as successive provincial governments continue to create a crisis in order to extract money from the education budget. School boards, easy targets because of some dysfunctional trustee antics, are attacked. “Under-enrolled! Inefficient use of resources!” cry the mandarins who developed the formula to measure school use. In these hard financial times, when the provincial government is facing billion-dollar deficits, these arguments might sound rational. But the funding formula that drives the provincial hand-wringing has two major flaws — there is no evidence to suggest the numbers are in the best interests of students, and the numbers ignore the fact that these schools are a community investment. The funding formula was created to pay for a certain number of square feet containing a teacher and 30 students and that’s it..”(more)