School Trustees: Out with the old and in with the…
TORONTO – Summer School is out. Time to get back to the real thing: the basics, according to the press releases from the Ministry of Education. Just what that involves will depend on which side of the ATM you find yourself.
If you find a sharp note of sarcasm piercing through the analysis, I hope you will indulge the writer with an extra dose of leniency on behalf of your children and grandchildren. Those children are an invaluable “asset” for school boards and for the societies they serve. Yes, societies plural.
As per their Constitutional standing, property owners may send their offspring to a Catholic or to a “Public” board. It is Catholics who have the option, provided they submit evidence to the assessment department of their local municipality that they are indeed “Roman Catholic” – firm believers or casual adherents to the tenets thereof. Otherwise, their property taxes flow by default to the public board.How much, you ask? In core education funding for goods and services required to provide for the kids under their care (those for whom trustees have a fiduciary obligation), approximately $15,000 are budgeted for each student registered in a board. There are just over Two million (2,000,000) pre postsecondary school students in Ontario.
A quick basic mathematics calculation suggests just over $31 billion for what used to be called Grants for Student Needs -exclusive of the equity investments in land, “bricks and mortar”.
The Toronto District [Public] School Board has an annual budget that exceeds $3 billion to service over 200,000 students – 10% of the provincial total. It also has a real estate arm whose assets are valued at $20 billion. Is there competition for “bodies”? To ad spice to the equation, two weeks ago, in what will be a precedent-setting case in the USA, 37 districts were awarded a settlement of c. 18 billion USD in return for withdrawing their lawsuit against META (Facebook, Tik Toc etc., family of tech companies). It promises well for the Ontario boards of education who have file a similar suit for 8 billion CDN.
There are 72 Boards in Ontario, 29 of them Catholic. At first glance, because the law firms in the suit were awarded 42% in contingency fees, in Ontario, assuming a similar outcome, about $4 billion should/must be made available for remediation of “damage to students”, as per agreement in the USA. Good luck.
Ontario has already taken steps to circumvent the intention and the process. It has placed the most populous School boards “under supervision” because they have dysfunctional internal trustee relationships, incompetent financial senior staff, and senior administrator who resent trustee engagements on behalf of parents.
But everyone can sniff the aroma of cash injection. First in line? Teachers’ unions; second? [Catholic] Trustee Organizations who were asleep at the wheel when Catholicism was under attack by special interest counter-culture clubs.