Finance

During our discussion on finance in our Professional Teacher course we discussed at length the breakdown of how our public education is paid for.  Approximately 60% of the money comes from the provincial government, while the rest is produced through local taxes (property tax).  I was surprised to find out that the federal government does not contribute to the funding but I was more shocked when we discussed the inequality that this funding system can often create.

What I am referring to in my “inequality” statement is that the urban schools will gain more funding because they have more people to tax and gain their money through.  Also property taxes in cities are higher so the schools gain more money in this manner to.  There are a few strategies that the government uses to combat these issues, such as giving rural schools operating grants but I think more needs to be done to ensure that rural students are getting the same opportunities in their education.  I am from a small rural farming community and I can see firsthand that the educational opportunities that I had were not as fulfilling as the learning experiences that urban students had at their disposal.  For example, my school division could not draw on enough property taxes to equip our schools with the latest technologies and many of our programs and teachers were cut to try and save money.  Before I even entered high school they had already cut the Art and Spanish programs, and in my grade 12 year they tried to cut the band program as well until the community rallied and found a teacher for the position.  I believe that the education system is strong in our province, but things may need to be tweaked in order to give all students the same level of excellence.

Another thing that I learnt about finance during our discussion was how hard it is to find money to cut when forced to downsize the budget!  We preformed an exercise where we had to look at a school budget and cut out 1.2 million dollars.  The task was easy enough when skimming a little off the top of all of the programs/professionals but when you got into the big group the conflicts began happening.  Some people were really passionate about technology so that could not be cut, but then other people said the arts couldn’t be cut, etc.  This really pointed to the problems that administration have when doing budget cuts, every single person has their own opinions about what is important in a school system.  This exercise really opened my eyes to the complexities of budgeting... and I hope I never have to set on a board and make these tough decisions!