Telling Tales out of School

with Nick Martin

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• Why school taxes are about to go up (part two)

  02/6/2012 1:59 PM

  I put in what seemed like a simple request to the department of education — how much money do the school divisions have in surplus, and what percentage of their revenues does that represent?

  And soon I received a report on the amount of surplus as of June 30, 2010.

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     • Why school taxes are about to go up (part one)

  Um, that’s kind of a long time ago, do you have anything more recent?

  No, the 2011 data won’t be available until the fall.

  Well, that’s not very helpful to understanding the school board budgets that trustees must pass by March 15, is it?

  You’d think that the province would have a better handle on how much that school divisions have in reserve. After all, Education Minister Nancy Allan reiterated last week that it’s capped at four per cent of revenues, and the province has been urging school boards for years to spend down the surplus to hold down property taxes.

  As in so many things, the nuances of language are pretty key here.

  Calling it surplus will have the Manitoba branch of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation ranting like soccer parents who’ve gone off their meds under a full moon. The word ‘surplus’ conjures up visions of school trustees cavorting like Scrooge McDuck in vaults piled high with cash.

  Call the money contingency reserves, and you might get a different reaction.

  Ever since I started covering municipal politics in IngersollOnt back in 1973, I’ve been hearing that accountants tell councillors and trustees that it’s prudent to keep five per cent in reserve. We’re at four per cent max, and I’m doubting that the next provincial scorecard will show very few school divisions near their max.

  The money’s there for unexpected bills that have to be paid.

  Maybe the cost of utilities goes up in an extra-cold winter, maybe there’s a big jump in the price of school bus fuel. Maybe there are sudden maintenance costs, a furnace that quits or pipes that leak.

  Some divisions save up over several years to bring in a new computer system or other improvements, stuff that will help your kids, but which cost too much to be paid for out of one current budget.

  Then there are divisions who have to save up for contract settlements. There are five divisions so far going to arbitration over contracts that expired June 30, 2010; two have arbitration hearings this June and November, respectively, the other three are waiting for dates, and it takes months to get a ruling, certainly well into 2013.

  Meanwhile, the divisions have to stash away enough money to cover three years’ worth of retroactive wage raises and improved benefits that can’t be forecast until the arbitrator rules.

  Trustees, however, have been spending that contingency reserve money to keep taxes down, as the provincial government decreed.

  With Allan’s operating grant increases this year covering only one-third of the amount by which the expenses of operating the public school system normally increase, chances are that any improvements or any retroactive raises will come out of property tax increases — there’s precious little left in the cupboard.

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• Why school taxes are about to go up (part one)

  01/31/2012 10:36 AM

  OK, so Education Minister Nancy Allan has vanhelsinged the tax incentive grant with a wooden stake through the heart.

  What happens next?

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     • Why school taxes are about to go up (part two)

  Pretty much inevitably, school divisions will either crank up their property taxes, or cut programs. Maybe a little of both, and probably also scrape the bottom of the barrel on what’s left of their reserve funds.

  Presumably, Premier Greg Selinger and Finance Minister Stan Struthers turned off some of the cash flow to public education that’s been holding down property taxes.

  For the past four years, the NDP has been encouraging and enticing school trustees to freeze their taxes, by offering them extra cash through TIG. The government pumped in $61.4 million of TIG this current school year, and $135 million over the past four years.

  What each division received was based on a formula of what they spent over the previous four years. Like everything else in the education formula, it was convoluted, complex and confusing in the extreme. The eligibility and calculation rules seemed to change on a regular basis, there was catch upon catch upon catch, divisions didn’t know from one year to the next what to expect they’d get from TIG, but last March, 33 of 37 divisions accepted TIG and froze their school taxes.

  Short version, the expenditure increases in each of those 33 divisions were limited to the revenue from their share of the annual increase in operating grants, their chunk of TIG, and school taxes paid by properties new to the tax rolls, if any.

  It’s not just that taxes were frozen. Spending increases were effectively capped, and divisions struggled to maintain the status quo, with little if any wiggle room to make improvements. Feel free to email me with any improvements you’ve seen to your kids’ quality of education in the past four years.

  Let’s all take out our copies of the FRAME (Financial Reporting and Accounting in Manitoba Education). If you left it at home, you can find it online here.

  If you look at page 42, you’ll see that as of the current school year, the province puts $1,291,828,552 into public education, which is about 65.2 per cent of the $1.96 billion system. That’s the pot of money to which Allan added $25.5 million in operating grants, plus an additional $4 million to start phasing in over the next five years capping class size for kindergarten to Grade 3 at 20 kids.

  The money for TIG was rolled into that enormous pot. Each year’s allocation became part of the base operating grant from the province.

  But wait, here’s an interesting line in the budget. The education property tax credit is listed at an impressive $178,258,517 contribution to provincial funding of the public education system. Let’s be charitable and call that disingenuous at best — that money reduces the bottom line of your property tax bill, bookkeepers put it in one pocket and take it out of the other, and not a single penny of it is spent on public education.

  The real provincial contribution to operating the public school system is closer to 60 per cent than to 65.2.

  Whatever.

  Getting back to FRAME, the difference in spending this school year over last is $74.9 million, or 3.97 per cent. That’s pretty typical of how much spending has increased in these recent tax-frozen years.

  About 85 per cent of the entire budget is payroll, salaries and benefits for employees, the largest and highest-paid part of which is teachers. Any realistic discussion of cuts involves reducing payroll.

  Sure, in that other 15 per cent, you could turn down the lights and heat in the schools overnight, you could continue to delay maintenance and repairs of aging schools until they’re beyond saving, you could figure out ways to run the buses a kilometre or two less each day, you could have six kids share a computer terminal instead of four, and you could buy fewer books, if that’s even possible.

  You want to reduce spending, you cut jobs, pure and simple.

  But wait — the province is capping class size in younger grades, it’s keeping hundreds of potential dropouts in school until they graduate or reach 18, it’s added compulsory phys-ed for grades 11 and 12, it’s diagnosing more kids with special needs and mandating more support for those kids. All of those are good things, but all of them cost more money and require more people on the payroll, not fewer.

  Two-thirds of the province’s divisions already have labour peace with teachers through the summer of 2014, at two per cent a year, compared to a minimum of three per cent raises the past decade. That’s a little savings, but there are still increments, some divisions got two per cent by offering better benefits, and as the paragraph above indicates, the system will need more teachers.

  So school divisions are left with a gap of about $50 million in increased spending for 2012-2013, which, if there are no cuts, works out to a seven per cent or so increase in education property taxes.

  None of which addresses the ongoing bizarre nature of running a public education system at a local level based on the assessed property values of residential and commercial properties within a school division.

  Now that we’re into our 13th year of NDP majorities, can anyone explain why, in a socialist workers’ paradise, it’s an equitable public education system when Seven Oaks School Division has the highest property taxes in the city, yet spends less per student than the other five city divisions which all have lower mill rates?

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• A very troubled young man

  01/29/2012 7:05 PM

  Sometimes I get bizarre emails, sometimes they’re utterly weird, but few are as troubling as the one I received from a young man who included his name and address.

  He wanted to tell me about his years in a particular Manitoba community and school, and you won’t be reading any names here.

  Apparently his mother taught at the school he attended, and this young man wanted to tell me all about the reasons why his mother allegedly watched a boy having the living crap beaten out of him in the school, and did nothing.

  He tells that story better than I do: "The principal was a drunk and bullying was endemic among the students. She once observed one student pummeling another; the student getting the beating looked at her for help; she looked away. That was not because of weakness on her part; it was because the student being beaten had for months been allowed by other teachers to bully others ‘because he’s compensating for his small size.’," said my correspondent.

  Then he gets into his own alleged actions in the school. We’ll deal with two of them.

  He talks about his justification for hurling the N-word at a student who may have been the school’s only black. That student had pulled down my correspondent’s shorts in gym class, with girls present. ".I do not apologize for it, I do not regret it; had I known a worse insult to use on him, I would have!"

  And, skipping over some other stuff, we get to the time he beat up a girl in his class: "It was in a science class. I had been reading a book and had sat down in a chair . . . just as someone pulled it away. So, I landed flat on the floor on my backside, people laughing and smiling at me. When I got up, grabbed my chair and sat down, clutching my open book in front of me, I honestly do not think I was sane. All I could think of as I sat there was ‘somebody do something!

  "Somebody did; a girl walking by either accidentally bumped the table or jokingly ticked the back of my book so that for a moment I couldn’t read it; not that I was. That was enough; I literally saw red, leapt up and started pummeling her. Other students had to pull me off her."At least, he says he feels ashamed about that last incident: "What I did wasn’t right, it wasn’t because of anything she did, it was just that I was furious and she was there."He says he’s hoping that this will get published in the local paper where he lived, complete with his name and address. Let’s hope it doesn’t run.

  Look, I’m not going to play Dr. Phil here, that’s not only inappropriate but dangerous. But I’m hoping you’ll discuss all this with some mature person who’s reasonable and sensible, maybe your family doctor, and maybe someone can steer you to some help.

   

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