NDP Promises to cap extra school fees

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This article was published 31/03/2016 (3767 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

PARENTS, your kids’ school won’t be plundering your wallet as often if the NDP is re-elected — Greg Selinger will cap all your school’s extra fees at $100 a child each year.

Selinger made the promise Thursday morning at a small park and children’s playground in Transcona.

“We want schools to be affordable for parents,” said Selinger.

The cap would cover renting musical instruments, paying for lunch supervision, materials for shops and art, intramural sports charges and — brace yourselves — that enormous list of school supplies you take to the mall every August.

“We want the school supply package not to be onerous,” the NDP leader told reporters. Selinger lauded schools that handle the annual ordeal of classroom supplies by buying bulk at fixed cost, rather than sending parents out individually.

Just in case the schools can’t cut it at $100 a child, a re-elected NDP government would have a $1-million fund to help schools meet the cost, which works out to about $5 a student in Manitoba.

“It’s a figure we put as a base figure” and could go higher, Selinger allowed.

Selinger said the NDP would talk to schools about how they’d accommodate parents for whom $100 would be a challenge, and the government would also have a chat with the school system about how much it expects parents to spend on field trips.

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“Field trips can be very good forms of experiential learning,” he said, but they can also be expensive. “We don’t want to have two tiers” of kids who can and can’t afford to go.

— Nick Martin

Nick Martin

Former Free Press reporter Nick Martin, who wrote the monthly suspense column in the books section and was prolific in his standalone reviews of mystery/thriller novels, died Oct. 15 at age 77 while on holiday in Edinburgh, Scotland.