Education numbers don’t add up

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 04/08/2021 (1142 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

THE Manitoba public school system that cost $2.5 billion to operate in the 2019-20 school year will soon be hit with profoundly earthshaking changes — with no clue how much the province will provide as it approaches full funding, or how the money will be spent and divided across Manitoba.

The government’s own FRAME (Financial Reporting and Accounting in Manitoba Education, annual reports at https://www.edu.gov.mb.ca/k12/finance/frame_report/index.html) documents show provincial funding for public education has been all but frozen since the 2016 election — even though enrolment rose four per cent and Statistics Canada reports Manitoba inflation was up 7.1 per cent.

By its penury, the province has been shifting the burden onto education property taxes — a source of revenue it’s about to phase out of existence.

Whenever someone would propose the province take over full funding of public education, I would ask, “100 per cent of what?” There isn’t a clue what the education budget dollars will be. The province will pay for the entire public school budget, but ask for a definition of “entire public school budget” — and there’s nary a whisper about that from the Tories so far.

The Pallister government’s track record certainly suggests no one should expect an increase in spending on education. So, will it be the same money, with the province replacing property taxes? Or less?

Ominously, FRAME lists more than $425 million in current spending so inextricably tied to the existing system that how — or if — it gets spent or cut in future is a critical unknown. Keep holding your breath.

Manitobans will be utterly gobsmacked by local staffing/programming changes if the province decrees uniform per-student spending across its incoming 15 regions — divisions which, with their disparate assessment bases, now have a range of $5,536 per student from the low end to the high end. If you’ve been reading the paper, do five years of Tory government lead you to think they’ll go high end?

There are clues within FRAME, and the endangered dollars jump off the page. In many categories, in which annual inflation was previously met or exceeded, more recently the dial barely moved: repairs, library services, maintenance, staff development, clinical services and even transportation were less than inflation. Guidance is an exception.

In the four school years prior to the 2016 election, the NDP responded to the surge in French immersion with an 11.7 increase in funding per student; since then, there has been only 1.5 per cent more per F.I. student for that same ongoing enrolment surge. Per-student spending in those final NDP years rose by 10.4 per cent; in these later Tory years only 2.8 per cent.

Don’t forget Manitoba is heading toward province-wide bargaining with teachers, the predominant education cost — but how many teachers will the Pallister government plan to employ, and how much will they be paid? Cue the sinister soundtrack.

So skewed is the reliance on assessed property values, and so ineffective the funding formula, that successive governments have fiddled with injecting hundreds of millions of dollars to try to make it right, instead of scrapping the formula — until now.

The province pays out a staggering $290.6 million in equalization to try to offset inequities among now-moribund divisions, equal to 20.3 per cent of the provincial funding. Commercial property assessment has been concentrated in barely one-third of divisions; Winnipeg School Division, for instance, can fund so many specialized programs because it reaps 40 per cent of its assessment base from commercial properties — barrels of cash about which other divisions have only been able to dream. In the new educational world, WSD will effectively no longer exist.

Gone will be huge budget lines that guarantee divisions won’t lose money over the year before; gone too the NDP’s bizarre tax incentive grant that divisions were allowed to keep if they froze taxes for one year. Paying trustees is a pittance overall, but that money’s also disappearing, along with the far heftier bill for division administration.

Will all that money be redistributed? Does Finance Minister Scott Fielding look like Scrooge gleefully awakening on Boxing Day? By the way, Education Minister Cliff Cullen has been keeping mum about private schools. They get per-student grants equal to half of what is spent in the public division in which they’re located.

Awkward.

The big unknown: will Bill 64, the Education Modernization Act, set a price tag and then design a budget-driven public education system to fit within the dollars? Or will Manitoba design a public education system meeting every student’s needs, with regional, ethnocultural and socioeconomic variations, and only then determine what public education will cost through collective bargaining agreements and the market price of buses, fuel, heating, lighting, maintenance and chalk?

Nick Martin is a retired Free Press reporter who covered the education beat for many years.