Impending school closures are portrayed in the media as school districts having to have balanced budgets and having to avoid deficits by making tough decisions.
The real issue is that our school districts are funded by a government that uses a simplistic funding formula based on an arbitrary cost per student while our school districts have to deal with real world issues such as rural areas, varied building configurations and busing. The funding formula that our present Liberal government uses has, on average, cut $614 per student in a public school per year from 2002 to 2014. That is $4.2 billion cut from the budget over a 12-year period. At the same time, the increase in our tax dollars that fund private schools is shocking. In 2015, an additional $30 million was allocated to private schools in B.C. At this time, 50 per cent of the funding that private schools receive comes directly from the taxpayers' pocket. That means that your tax dollars subsidize schools to which the rich or ideologically motivated parents (including Premier Christy Clark), send their children.
The present provincial government uses simplistic 1980s economic theory when phrases like trickle-down economics, deregulation and privatization swept from the boardrooms of Wall Street into government legislation. This provincial government seems completely uninterested in funding public education. It appears that the government is bent on slowly destroying our once great education system.
Could this be in order to clear the way for American-based education management organizations to take over your child's education? For-profit companies manipulate share prices to maximize shareholder value by hiring poorly paid associates to facilitate the dissemination of cloud-based web content provided by corporate partners to your child.
What could go wrong?
Stephen Gunner
Spallumcheen