Election-campaign promises on education often ‘more symbolic than comprehensive’: school board superintendent

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 10/04/2016 (3535 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Can anyone easily grasp why school tax bills went up 16.9 per cent in West St. Paul, but only 3.26 per cent in Seven Oaks School Division as a whole?

Party leaders are doing a great job of ignoring the complexities of a $2.25-billion kindergarten-to-Grade-12 public education system that can’t be sorted out in 15-second sound bites.

All claims to the contrary, it’s an inequitable system because the amount of money school divisions spend on children is largely based on the assessed values of property within an arbitrary geographic area; and further inequitable because only a handful of school divisions receives the enormous bounty of the bulk of commercial property assessment, which brings in tens of millions of dollars without adding a single child to that area’s classrooms.

Heard all that on your doorstep from a candidate so far?

West St. Paul is within Seven Oaks School Division, which has one of the proportionally smallest commercial assessment bases in Manitoba, thus placing the overwhelming burden of school property taxes on homeowners.

Which is why Seven Oaks has some of the highest school taxes in the province, while spending less per student than the average.

Mill rates get calculated by taking the amount of money school trustees want to raise and dividing it by the assessment base. If home values in older houses go up by four per cent in the majority of the division, but already highly priced houses soar in value 20 or 25 per cent in a swankier suburb, their share of the tax burden also increases way beyond the 3.26 per cent.

Can we squeeze that into a 15-second sound bite?

Instead, we get NDP Leader Greg Selinger promising to cap parents’ extra school fees at $100 a child a year.

Liberal Leader Rana Bokhari would make kids exercise daily, though she won’t say by how much, or what academic subjects would make way in the timetable. She’d spend $50 million over five years on full-day kindergarten, though she didn’t cite any of the studies she says support its benefits, and wouldn’t or couldn’t say what she’d do with the ongoing provincial plan to spend tens of millions of dollars on capping K-3 class sizes at 20 kids by 2017.

It was Liberal Charleswood candidate Paul Brault who said at a debate the media didn’t attend that the Liberals would scrap the 2008 moratorium on closing schools, leaving the decisions to trustees. Even when the NDP allowed school closures, there was a lengthy community consultation process that took years.

In post-secondary education, there are various plans to improve student financial aid, bursaries and loans, but nary a word about grants and tuition. Grants add an annual percentage increase; there is no element of per-student funding. And tuition increases are capped at the increase in provincial growth.

Green party Leader James Beddome says a Green government would fund the public school system 100 per cent, with equal per-student spending across Manitoba. He’d replace school property taxes with money from progressive provincial income taxes.

If anyone says the province will fund 100 per cent of public education, or 80 per cent, or any number, ask 100 per cent of what? Would it be $2.25 billion? More? Less? Putting it all under provincial control with no ability to tax locally could produce a profound change in how much is spent locally.

As for equal per-student funding, there is now more provincial money if kids need to ride a school bus, have a special need or want to learn in French.

“Serious issues of equity are not coming up,” said Seven Oaks superintendent Brian O’Leary. “Very often in a campaign, they’re trying to communicate things that are very straightforward and easy to communicate. In a 35-day campaign, you might get four or five education announcements, more likely three, that are more symbolic than comprehensive.”

Winnipeg Free Press | Newsletter

Dan Lett | Not for Attribution

Tuesdays

A weekly look at politics close to home and around the world.

Sign up for Dan Lett | Not for Attribution

Sign Up

I agree to the Terms and Conditions, Cookie and Privacy Policies, and CASL agreement.

Christopher Adams, a political scientist at St. Paul’s College, predicted there’d be more in the final few days of the campaign that would appeal to middle-class parents.

“It’s a bread-and-butter sector. It’s typical PC territory to talk about the performance of our kids in the three Rs,” Adams said.

nick.martin@freepress.mb.ca

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.