Dozens gathered outside the Vancouver School Board office at Broadway and Fir Street Wednesday to thank trustees for voting against the proposed 2016/17 operating budget and its $24 million in cuts, and to call on the B.C. Liberals to increase funding for public education across the province.
Teachers, support workers, parents, union leaders and opposition MLA Rob Fleming attended the rally.
At the event, Rory Brown, the president of the Vancouver Secondary Teachers’ Association, and Dan Graves, the president of the Vancouver Elementary School Teachers’ Association, presented trustees with a novelty cheque from the province for $79.4 million — the high-water mark for public education funding in B.C. It was stamped “past due.”
B.C. currently has the second lowest per-student funding in Canada and is about $1,000 below the national average.
“After 14 years of this kind of cuts, it’s just time to say enough is enough. We’re not going to have this anymore,” Brown told the crowd.
Graves also spoke.
“We also want to say thank you for the bravery shown by our trustees to listen to our community and to tell government what our community wants for our families and our students here in our public schools,” he said. “Nobody in B.C. asked for this type of education funding, the downloading of costs, the defunding of education. It’s not acceptable here in Vancouver, and it’s not acceptable around the province.”
Wednesday’s rally came a day after VSB chair Mike Lombardi and vice chair Janet Fraser sat down with Minister of Education Mike Bernier in Victoria to discuss the board’s decision to reject the budget and the options for both the board and the ministry moving forward.
Lombardi said the meeting was a positive one and included a frank discussion about the board’s long-range plans and the challenges it faces.
“We’ve got total agreement on the objective,” Lombardi said. “We both agree that it would not be useful to make cuts that take away from enhancing student learning and student success. So we’re both on the same page. The challenge now is what our senior staff can come up with in terms of options to make that happen [and] which the minister can go [along] with.”
In an emailed statement to the Courier, Bernier thanked the Lombardi and Fraser for meeting with him and said he and trustees share the same goal of delivering the best education for students.
The minister added he was pleased to hear the VSB chair say that he’s open to looking at school consolidations as part of the long range plan as it can make schools safer and boost programs and services for students.
Lombardi said senior staff at both the district and the ministry would be working to put together a budget that hopefully will avoid cuts that directly impact students and classrooms. He said both parties acknowledge there may be some creative ways to access some additional resources. Lombardi hopes to have something worked out in time for the board’s May 9 meeting.
Paul Faoro, CUPE B.C.’s president, told the crowd Premier Christy Clark is to blame for funding problems and called on Clark to make education her top priority.
“The premier was education minister in 2002 and her fingerprints are all over the funding problems this province has had,” he said. “It is absolutely shameful that people have to come out and fight to ensure that schools are open, schools are safe [and] schools are staffed properly. That should be her number one priority and I call on the premier to put that into action and get back to the table and ensure that there’s proper funding for all school districts across this province.”
Rob Fleming, official opposition critic for education and MLA for Victoria-Swan Lake, echoed Faoro’s comments while taking a playful jab at the premier.
“I know people would be willing to say [Premier Christy Clark] is a divisive character, but I’ll give her credit for this — she has managed to unite…British Columbians who are attached to their school systems in every region across British Columbia to bring pressure onto this government to reverse course where we’ve gone from the second-best funded province in Canada for education to the second worst where we are today.”
Fleming said the government’s assertion that funding issues and resulting budget cuts in Vancouver and other school districts are the result of local decision making is “absolute rubbish.” He said the budget for education in B.C. is made in Victoria, and a decade of cuts and downloading of costs onto school districts has left the public education system in critical condition.
“[Minister of Finance Michael de Jong] tabled a budget in February, and it’s still before the House right now, that has an additional $54 million in cuts [and]… an additional downloading in the tens and tens and tens of millions of dollars,” Fleming said. “For heaven’s sake, the money is there to at least bring us to the Canadian average. If you’ve got $230 million to give a tax cut to the top two per cent in British Columbia, then you’ve got the money to fix the public education system.”
Jim Iker, president of the B.C. Teachers’ Federation, called the cuts school boards are forced to make shameful and harmful to students.
“Isn’t it time that trustees actually had the money to decide on all the good things we want to have in our schools?” Iker asked. “We’ve had a generation of students, children in our schools that have had to go through a climate of underfunding and less support. It’s time for this government to actually see education as a priority, [to see] that our students, our kids, are a priority, and they have to start giving school districts the money back so they actually have real decision-making to make in terms of what programs we want to have back in our schools [and] what services do we want to have back.”
@jameswesmith
