| Education system costs protected Numbers promising
if school boards get tools to turn budget promises
into classroom realities: QESBA Quebec City, March 17, 2011 – The Quebec English School Boards Association (QESBA) reacted with cautious optimism to the education measures included in today’s provincial budget delivered by Finance Minister Raymond Bachand. The key figure for QESBA’s nine-member school boards – and ultimately, the 105,000 students served by English public schools across Quebec – is the 4.3 per-cent increase for a total of $330 million projected in system cost allocations to public education. That figure pays for salaries, infrastructure maintenance, debt service, new programs and all other operating costs of public schooling in Quebec. QESBA was also looking for evidence in this budget that some major new initiatives to improve services to students in the classroom would be, first, adequately funded and, second, flexible enough to allow English school boards to properly deliver programs adapted to their students’ particular needs.“QESBA sees some real positives in today’s numbers,” noted Vice-President Carolyn Curiale, who was present at the budget lock-up in Quebec City. “That said, this budget, like every other one, will prove its worth when the details become clear. We will be working very hard with the Ministere de l’Education, du Loisir et du Sports to ensure that our English public schools fully benefit from measures aimed at improving classroom technology, maintaining and upgrading our school buildings and refocusing on after-school activities.”Specifically, the budget earmarks $240 million over the coming years for new technology expenditures, on Smart boards, computers and teacher training in this area. QESBA welcomed the announcement of this plan in Premier Jean Charest’s inaugural speech earlier this month. Many of our school boards are already well-advanced in providing such technologies, however. QESBA is encouraged that today’s measure appears to support teacher training and related expenditures in this area. That will be essential if we are to move forward. “We don’t want our Boards penalized for being ahead of the curve,” Curiale explained. “Where Smartboards and personal computers for teachers are already in place, we expect the equivalent resources to be given to us to move further ahead in equipping our students and teachers for the 21st century. ”QESBA is eager to play an active role in the intensification of English second-language instruction, for which annual recurring expenditures of $25 million are projected by the year 2016. Quebec’s English public schools and the 8,000 teachers who serve it have world-class expertise in second-language instruction and, of course, in teaching in English. QESBA’s member boards have indicated their readiness to work with the francophone counterparts on linguistic exchanges. The Association will be expecting precisions from the MELS on how this program might move forward, and how the students in English public schools will be included in such linguistic exchanges. A third budget measure, prescribing additional support to school sports activities, is also of interest to the Association. Once again, the key consideration – not answered in the budget documents – is: How will our students benefit? “Our English sector has a proud tradition of commitment to school sports and extra-curricular activities. Student success is all about inclusion, teamwork and developing the whole child,” said Curiale. “This budget provides for at least one school sports team in every high school. At some of our schools, students travel from so far that they can’t stay after school for activities. This budget measure must provide us the flexibility to include all of our students, not just those who live close to school.”Finally, QESBA reiterates its frustration at the continued and almost total exclusion of Quebec’s English public schools from a major budget measure of $22 million that reduces the number of students per class at the elementary level. This budget does so, at the Grade 5 and 6 levels in disadvantaged neighbourhoods and in Grade 4 elsewhere. Because of the huge territories and low-density student populations in many of Quebec’s English elementary schools, QESBA projections indicate that virtually no students will be beneficiaries of this initiative, virtually no new classes will be opened, virtually no new teachers will be engaged. “We have brought this serious problem to the attention of two different Education Ministers, to no avail,”, Curiale said. “This is a major government expenditure, and it’s not acceptable that it is one from which English-speaking Quebec is basically excluded.” |