Education no longer atop the issues

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 03/10/2011 (5224 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

THERE was a time when public education was an important issue in this province, often mentioned in the same breath as health care.

That was back in the dim past of August, before the writ was dropped for Tuesday’s provincial election.

“I kept thinking there’d be this big education week,” in which the parties would make major announcement after major announcement, Education Minister Nancy Allan said this weekend.

That never happened. Time’s pretty much run out.

Allan, running for re-election in St. Vital, also expected there would been heavy-duty attacks on the NDP’s 12-year track record on public education, and that hasn’t happened either.

The Tories designated Morris incumbent Mavis Taillieu to speak on behalf of the party. She said the Conservatives would like to cap class sizes at 20 students for the younger grades and would like to move toward the province’s covering 80 per cent of the public school operating grants.

But the Tories can’t make financial promises on education, Taillieu lamented, because the NDP has botched the economy so badly.

“It’ll take years to address that, how to replace money on the provincial side. There’s no magic bullet,” she said.

You won’t hear the Tories or Liberals staking out positions or making many promises on issues such as the alleged no-fail policies, amalgamation, the moratorium on school closings, provincewide bargaining, private school funding, or testing.

Green Leader James Beddome certainly has opinions on those issues, but the Greens haven’t campaigned on them.

So with what are we left?

The NDP is standing by its track record of investing in public education beyond the level of provincial growth every year, said Allan.

Premier Greg Selinger has promised to cap class size at 20 kids in kindergarten to Grade 3, at a cost of $20 million for additional teachers and $85 million for additional classroom space. Whether that’s enough money is still to be seen.

“We’re the only party that’s taken a position on class size and composition,” said Allan.

Selinger will also eliminate education property taxes for seniors and for farmland, at a cost of $49 million, details still to come.

Taillieu said that NDP education policy is often “the top-down, big brother approach.

“We don’t want to see a huge spike in taxes to implement the cap” on class size.

Tory Leader Hugh McFadyen has promised to create a teachers advisory committee to counsel government on education issues. And he would expand the school resource officer program, to station more police in schools.

Taillieu said the school resource officer program will be available to all schools, to improve safety and to reduce bullying. In fact, McFadyen has promised only eight additional police officers for Winnipeg and Brandon.

Liberal Leader Jon Gerrard hasn’t had much to say about day-to-day school issues, but he’s passionate about the big picture, programs from prenatal care through high school to improve graduation rates and reduce dropouts.

Gerrard would expand on existing fetal alcohol spectrum disorder programs, and he’d institute universal hearing screening for newborns among a slew of improvements for catching problems before kids start school.

“We’re missing a substantial number of kids who’ve got problems,” Gerrard said. “We need a full effort at the front end. A hearing problem becomes a speech problem, a speech problem becomes a learning problem, a learning problem becomes a behaviour problem.”

Gerrard has promised to double the number of truancy officers in the city, but not the old-fashioned image of someone grabbing a kid’s collar and dragging him to school. That person would be an attendance counsellor co-ordinating a wide range of programs and public and community agencies helping to keep that child in school.

“One of the reasons we’ve got a crime problem is because a lot of kids are dropping out of school,” said Gerrard.

Beddome said the Greens favour local decision-making and broad reform of taxation. What’s vital is every child have the most equitable as possible opportunity for a good education, including children in private schools and children living on reserves.

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.