Ottawa is stuck with a school board with no fiscal control over its budget — a school board that has been emasculated to the point of irrelevance.
If the province isn’t prepared to give the board back its power to set education tax rates, then maybe it’s time to scrap the board altogether.
As it stands, the board has been reduced to role of provincial axe man. With no control of education tax rates, the board can only balance its budget by cutting programs.
While the school board has proposed cuts with all the compassion of a baby-seal hunter, it has little other choice. The board is entirely at the mercy of the province. It robbed the school board of all taxation powers in 1998. Once locally controlled, school board revenue now comes from provincial taxes and other provincial funding.
The province doles out the money, while the board does the dirty work of balancing the budget when revenue falls short. The current school board is a good example of how hopeless this has become.
Some trustees were elected on a platform of keeping schools open. Centretown trustee Joan Spice, for example, defeated former board chairman Albert Chambers by promising not to close schools.
But these promises could not be kept. How could school board members seriously promise not to close schools when they have no control over the money needed to keep them open? The answer, of course, is they can’t. School boards no longer have power or purpose.
Over the past several months board members have been forced to perform circus-like stunts to try and avoid the problems faced by the previous board. There were rumours of mass resignations and there are plans to cut programs that no reasonable person could accept.
The school board must hack away at our carcass of a school system, while the provincial buzzards watch from above. Now, as a last-ditch effort, the board has resorted to creative accounting — adding to its budget an imaginary $50 million, which it is unlikely to get.
If only the board had the power to set an appropriate tax rate, all of these shenanigans could be avoided.
Caught between a rock and a hard place, the board can at best stall, cross its collective fingers, and hope for some imaginary provincial money to arrive.
The board lost control of the school system years ago. Unfortunately for the trustees, they’ll be the ones left to take the blame when things go wrong. How very smart of the provincial government.
How unfortunate for Ontarians who no longer have school boards able to perform the essential task of putting together a budget.
The school board, as it exists today, must be scrapped. The meetings it holds are futile; the role it plays is meaningless.
If the province wants to control school board funds, it must accept all the responsibilities that come with it — including a balanced budget. Let the province deal with the public school crisis. After all, it is responsible for it.
— Colin Campbell