Having read Glen Hansma’s letter, Teachers respond Feb. 25, I am just a little tired of the rhetoric that the funding of the private schools should be cancelled.
I am a taxpayer. Therefore, I pay for public school taxes just like any other person in this province.
For that reason, I would think that I am entitled, just like any other taxpayer who has children going to school, to receive $7,000 for my child’s education.
Yet, for my child’s education at the private (Christian) school, my school of choice only receives half of the amount the public school receives per child.
If you can do the math, then the amount of $358,000,000 you quoted in your letter, that is doled out to the private schools would have to turn into $716,000,000 that would need to be given to the public school system should each and every child from the private school be removed from those schools and put into the public system. Why don’t you see this as a bonus?
We, who pay the very same taxes you pay, are giving you an additional $358,000,000 to spend on the public school students, while we, who send our children to a private school will need to find an additional $3,500 per child out of our own personal pocket.
And that only talks about the operational cost of running a school. Nothing has been said of what we pay out of our own pocket for the capital costs.
I am not sending my child to a private, what you deem rich kid school. But so what if there are people who do?
Are they not entitled to that $7,000 for their child? But they only get $3,500. If they can afford to pay a much larger amount on top of that, so be it. Let them be.
It is so unwise to request that the funding for private schools be dropped. Just to prove that point, we should close our private schools for a day and send each child of those schools to the public system in which they reside.
Maybe then you would realize that you have more money to spend because we chose to pay a large sum out of our own pocket, at no cost to you, for our own choice of school.
Yolanda deBoersap
Vernon