When B.C. forests go up in flames, we spend what’s necessary to save trees and take care of our communities. When communicable disease endangers public health, we don’t count the cost — we send in our doctors and nurses; we make tough decisions and act on them.
So when kids work in overcrowded classrooms, and schools deal with pressures hardly anyone imagined 20 years ago, you’d think we would rise to the occasion. You’d think we would deal with basic changes in our neighbourhoods and the wider society. You might imagine that the stewards of our school system would remember to take inflation into account when they set the budget. After all, good public education comes at a reasonable cost.
But there’s no sense of urgency. Educated citizens are needed in the province, yet B.C. has fallen well behind the rest of Canada. We are the only province where there are fewer teachers and staff workers than five years ago, even though we have had years of population growth.
K-12 enrolment in B.C. went down 4.9 per cent in the five years ending 2010, but elsewhere in Canada, when provinces had declining enrolments, they took the opportunity to increase educator staffing. It was a way to repair years of underfunding.
Meanwhile, in B.C., the 2013 budget announces “flat funding” until 2016 for public schools.
Members of the B.C. Association of School Business Officials estimate the system is hundreds of millions of dollars behind where it was a decade ago. Funding has not kept pace with cost pressures, new and old. We spend almost $1,000 less per child for public education in B.C. than the national average.
You would think we had an unlimited amount of time in which to fix our education funding problem. But we don’t.
More than ever, B.C. teachers must act as social workers, public health officers and fundraisers, not just educators. They have always taught and they have always taught well. Student standings in national and international surveys continue to show this.
Pressure on schools, individual teachers and support workers continues to grow. School personnel respond as best they can to moving and growing populations, to a blossoming knowledge economy and to rapidly changing communications.
And still our schools operate with inadequate supplies and support. In well-off neighbourhoods, parents may be able to raise funds for the essential tools of 21st-century education, but elsewhere in urban and rural B.C., fundraising for classrooms and needy children is usually wishful thinking.
Meanwhile, the public system is told to find money for increased medicare and pension premiums, for Hydro rate hikes and for dismantling the HST. Next year, this short list of price increases will add more than $46 million to the cost of our public-school system — yet none of this will be funded by Victoria.
When forests burn, we feel the heat. We hire planes and engineers and front-line workers. When there’s a long-term threat from infectious disease, we get the shivers and hire permanent staff to solve immediate health problems and prevent new outbreaks.
But when we need education specialists and dedicated full-time teachers in far greater numbers, and a whole generation of children depends on them, we have turned off the financial tap.
Buildings are cleaned and maintained less often. Fewer courses and programs are offered. Education assistants have less opportunity to work with teachers and others to address student needs. Clerical workers who once staffed every local school office are less and less available when students or their parents need them.
Meanwhile, inflation continues to undermine the education system, with visibly negative effects. Parents, teachers and staff members worry about the breadth, depth and currency of the education their children receive. They ask what it will take to persuade the provincial government to get moving — to make public education B.C.’s highest priority.
The B.C. Liberal government claims it gives schools the “highest funding ever.” But that claim is myth. Think of the many new costs downloaded to local school boards. And remember the government’s failure to fund inflation.
We are at the end of a decade of shortfalls. Education funding is inadequate. It is time to face up to that fact.
John Malcolmson, a Burnaby-based sociologist, is a CUPE researcher. Bill Bruneau is a University of B.C. professor emeritus.
