You have admire the dedication and
drive of the group in Benalto that has been working so hard to keep
the hamlet's K-to-6 school open. You also have to give credit to
Chinook's Edge school division that runs the school, for their
efforts over the past years to serve that community, despite falling
enrolments.
Dedication and perseverance are a great
starter for wonderful things that can change a town or a city.
They're what make communities whole and worth living in. But there
comes a point where resources need to match these great qualities.
Chinook's Edge serves about 11,000
students, a great proportion of them outside large urban centres.
Their board and administrators see the stats every year — the
general migration of young people to the cities, where the jobs and
opportunities for raising families have moved.
In past decades, young people who chose
to stay in the communities where they were raised were the fuel for
the continued existence of vital civic amenities, like schools.
But when a certain critical mass is
lost, when communities no longer have enough young families in them
to maintain a school, hard decisions need to be made.
In Benalto's case, per-student funding
for what eventually became a 22-student K-to-6 school rose to almost
$16,000. The average cost that the school board administers ranges
from around $7,000 to $9,000. The disparity could no longer be
supported.
Enter the parents. Currently, there is
an application before the province to grant a local non-profit group
a licence for a charter school.
Reports have it there are 13 charter
schools operating in the province, and they receive 70 per cent of
the regular annual grant per student. They occupy 23 school
buildings, 20 of which are owned by school districts in Edmonton and
Calgary. Alberta is the only province in Canada that does this.
The non-profit groups must provide a
program that meets the provincial curriculum for each level. They
must pay their teachers (who must be Alberta Teachers Association
certified, but who are not part part of the union), plus heating and
maintenance and other costs.
Translation: there must eventually be
tuition fees.
Right now, Benalto's parent group has 44
students pre-registered for Grades 1-6 from the community, plus
another half-dozen ready for the kindergarten program. That's if
education minister David Eggen agrees to grant a charter.
All of this is great. All of this shows
the dedication communities have for their children's education.
All of this shows that for communities
showing a loss of young families as a portion of their populations,
costs to families will have to rise.
It is no secret that a lot of parents
of public school kids gripe about school fees. Think about the costs
about to fall on parents in small villages and hamlets, as an
alternative to paying transportation costs to send their kids to
school elsewhere. Not to mention the cost to the community of losing
a school, which only accelerates the loss of young families.
Back in April, interim Tory leader Ric
McIver proposed a motion that would have granted charter and private
schools full per-student funding, plus the power to demand unlimited
tuition fees.
Not bad for the leader of a party that
preaches austerity.
Meanwhile, survey after survey shows
strong public support for not publicly funding private schools with
tax dollars — at all.
People ask: why do we take tax dollars
out of the public system to fund elite schools in big cities?
Well, because regular schools in small
communities need the help.
Apples and oranges? Sure. Alberta's two
big cities house almost the entirety of Alberta's charter schools
under a philosophy that parents deserve choice, not to support places
like Benalto, struggling to keep a school of any kind at all.
Best of luck to Benalto as a whole. The
dedication and passion of your people do you proud.
But sooner or later, these parents will
likely be faced with the same questions as Chinook's Edge: how do you
fund public-standard education in a school not big enough to maintain
it?
Follow Greg Neiman's blog at
Readersadvocate.blogspot.ca
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