New funding system the answer, not takeovers

According to Education Minister Kathleen Wynne, there's a difference between a previous government's appointment of supervisors to run dissident school boards and her appointment of Norbert Hartmann to head a "management team" with instructions to balance the books of the Dufferin-Peel Catholic District School Board.

The titles may be different but we suspect the functions will be pretty much identical. Any way you look at it, the school board's trustees have lost perhaps their most important responsibility, since budget control ultimately determines both the quality and quantity of the services it can provide to staffs and students.

It used to be that Ontario's school boards had complete command financially. Although they relied heavily on provincial education grants, any shortfall was made up by imposing property tax levies. That all ended when the government of premier Mike Harris eliminated the boards' taxing powers and replaced local education levies with an education levy on all properties.

At the same time, the Harris government came up with what has been described, rightly or wrongly, as a "one-size-fits-all" funding formula that some of the province's largest school boards said made it impossible for them to balance their books without making unacceptable program cuts. Their deficit budgeting led to them being taken over by provincially appointed supervisors who effectively left the elected trustees with nothing to do.

It will be interesting, indeed, to see what the Dufferin-Peel board will have left to do now that Hartmann, a former provincial assistant deputy education minister, has been ordered in by Wynne to find ways to balance the board's books by cutting another $7.5 million from its $270-million budget, a task the trustees refused to do. Ironically, in 2002, as a Toronto District School Board trustee, the new minister fought hard against the decision by the Harris government to send in supervisor Paul Christie to balance that board's books.

As we see it, the major problem facing both the Dufferin-Peel board and the Upper Grand District School Board is the inflexibility of the current funding scheme, which both boards say fails to provide for the real cost of

transporting kids to and from their schools. (The Upper Grand board did manage to balance its books, but only by dipping into its reserves, which barring an improved formula will soon disappear.)

Interestingly, even the former Progressive Conservative governments of Harris and Eves admitted the funding formula wasn't working and Premier Dalton McGuinty has promised to reform it but hasn't done so, no doubt in part because of its complexity.

Similar financial problems to those afflicting the local boards affect many of the province's other 70 school boards, including some of its largest. Both the Toronto public and Catholic school boards may soon face similar provincial takeovers, and the Upper Grand board is not alone in having managed to stay in the black only by dipping into reserves, staving off inevitable financial difficulties for at most a few years.

Sending in outsiders like Mr. Hartmann, at a reported salary of $1,500 a day, may temporarily balance a board's books, but it is at best a stop-gap solution.

Clearly, the time has come for the McGuinty government to make some major reforms in the funding area.

One option would be simply to revise the formula to make it reflect actual costs faced by each board.

The Harris government's answer was the creation of the district boards and elimination of their taxing power.

In our view, this was a serious mistake, a form of overkill that led to the current unsatisfactory situation.

We think the answer lies in a return to a form of county and regional school boards, with title to all the school properties resting with the county or region and the boards themselves becoming agencies of the county or region with an ability to seek supplemental funding from the county or regional council.

Such an arrangement would make it possible for the school trustees to make a case publicly for financing beyond that provided in any provincial funding formula.

For its part, the province should make a commitment to gradually phase out the provincial education levy on properties and ultimately fund the education system from other revenue sources, principally personal and corporate income taxes.