Pilot program in five elementary schools gives families a break from lunch-supervision fees

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This article was published 19/01/2024 (669 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

There may be no such thing as a free lunch, but families from a handful of city schools are getting free supervision over the noon-hour.

A new pilot program in the Winnipeg School Division is doing away with fees for lunch supervision in five elementary schools this winter to reduce barriers to attendance and spare families an extra monthly expense amid a cost-of-living crisis.

“What we’re really trying to do is not nickel-and-dime parents for all sorts of things that should be under the umbrella of public education,” said Matt Henderson, chief superintendent of WSD.

A total of $200,000 has been earmarked to pay support staff, who will take on supervision duties in lieu of parent advisory council recruits, to monitor kindergarten-to-Grade 6 classrooms for the remainder of the school year.

Fort Rouge’s École LaVérendrye was the first to get rid of its fees at the start of the month.

The pilot is being phased-in across the division in the coming weeks. Centennial’s École Sacré-Coeur, Shaughnessy Park School in Shaughnessy Heights, Carpathia School in Sir John Franklin and Minto’s Isaac Brock School are all involved.

“The norm now is that both parents are working, so it’s not feasible for a parent to pick up kids during the day and feed them lunch,” said Melissa Dupuis, a mother of two in the division.

The status-quo fee schedules — remnants of generations ago when mothers were typically homemakers with flexible schedules — varies from school to school.

It costs Dupuis about $700 every academic year so that her children, now enrolled in Grades 1 and 3, can spend the entirety of the school day at LaVérendrye. Change is “long overdue,” she said.

PACs often run lunch-supervision programs, meaning volunteer caregivers are tasked with hiring staff and overseeing programs for their children and their peers.

Henderson said PACs have expressed concerns about the time-intensive work in recent years. He estimates it would cost roughly $5 million to have universal no-fee lunch supervision in the division, the largest in the province, with about 15,000 early years students enrolled in 60 schools.

Division administration is planning to survey families involved in the pilot program and bring a recommendation forward to the board of trustees. A permanent end to the fees could begin as early as 2024-25.

“We’re confident we’re going to unroll this (across the division); it’s just a matter of how quickly we can,” Henderson said.

The superintendent noted that both St. James-Assiniboia and Seven Oaks divisions, where he previously worked, have already made the “ideological decision” to stop asking parents to pay for the line item.

WSD provides subsidies on a case-by-case basis and currently covers the full cost of monitoring children throughout the entirety of the day at William Whyte Community School, located in one of the lowest-income neighbourhoods in the city.

People for Public Education included ending school fees on its list of resolutions for Manitoba’s kindergarten-to-Grade 12 system in 2024.

“Annual fees are charged to caregivers to pay for basic learning essentials (yearbooks, supplies). These fees must stop. School fundraising to supplement school expenses also must stop,” the advocacy group said in a report released this week.

maggie.macintosh@freepress.mb.ca