By Mary Gordon
The schoolyard can be a scary place.
Pam Fitzgerald knows first hand. Her son got a concussion after he was knocked to the ground by a bully. Only later did she find out the bully had been on a waiting list to get into a special education program.
He had been waiting for two years.
Pam Fitzgerald was near tears as she clutched a microphone at the Glebe Collegiate auditorium and told her story to about 100 parents and educators at one of four meetings across the city earlier this month. The meetings allowed the public to voice its opinions about the $30 million the Ottawa-Carleton District School Board must cut from next year’s budget.
A week later the board presented several budgetary measures, one of which would see special education cut by $24 million, or a quarter of its present amount, with annual savings of $20 million. A first draft of next year’s budget will be announced Feb. 5, which will again receive public input.
The board’s preliminary budget will be presented to the provincial government on Feb. 25.
Brownwyn Funiciello, a member of the board’s special education advisory committee, says she is baffled by the prospect of further cuts to an already slashed budget, and doesn’t see how any of them could work, especially to special education.
“I wish I felt confident that any strategy would work,” she says. “No one would be spared from the impact this would have.”
Funiciello says special education is already overburdened, estimating that about 4,000 children are currently waiting either to be assessed or admitted into its programs.
The staff is forced to spend much of their time filling out elaborate paperwork required by the province to assess or admit a child into special education programs.
“It’s a catch-22, where kids are waiting to be looked after, but the teachers are overloaded with paperwork to complete in order to get the funding.”
Joan Spice, Centretown’s school board trustee, hails Centennial Public School on Gloucester Street a flagship school for students with special needs, with programs specially designed for children who are visually impaired or autistic, among others. Twenty-nine of its students use wheelchairs. She says she couldn’t predict whether Centennial’s programs will suffer.
In order to make up the shortfall, Spice says school board staff will inevitably be lost, since 70 to 80 per cent of the board’s current $543-million budget goes to salaries. Spice restated the likelihood that no area of education will go untouched.
“The trouble is, we’ve got to make this up a million here, a million there. It’s going to be absolutely horrendous, but it’s going to come from everywhere.”
While many of Centennial’s programs target students with obvious disabilities, Nancy Myers, who co-chairs the board’s special education committee, says the invisible special needs students will suffer the most.
“No one’s going to do away with wheelchairs,” she says. “It’s the kids who are learning disabled who will suffer the most.”
One of those children is her son, Matthew, who was diagnosed with a language-based learning disability when he was two. Myers says that too often, these children fall through the cracks.
“Think of a kid who’s sitting in class and the teacher is writing all this stuff on the blackboard and it’s just gibberish to him. It doesn’t take long for that kid’s self-esteem to plummet,” she says.
“You have to have a lot of internal fortitude when it hurts so much and when you’re trying so hard.”