Lower education funding means increased taxes

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 28/02/2025 (203 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

At a time when many Brandonites are struggling to afford the basics of life, and are already facing higher city property taxes and water rates, Manitoba’s NDP government is making the situation worse.

On Wednesday afternoon, the Brandon School Division’s board of trustees voted to approve a 6.78 per cent property tax increase for the coming fiscal year. The hike could have been even higher — it was initially projected to be a staggering 8.79 per cent — but the trustees spent six hours identifying ways to cut expenses and reduce the increase.

As a result of those cuts, the division will be hiring fewer teachers than it initially planned to. That will translate into five fewer full-time equivalent teachers from grades 4 to 8, and 10 fewer FTEs from grades 9 to 12. It also means that class sizes at those grade levels may grow, along with the student-to-teacher ratio.

That’s not a good outcome for taxpayers, teachers nor students, but it represents a tough compromise that the trustees were forced to make because of inadequate funding from the province. The division received more than $6 million in additional funding last year, but the province provided only $3.3 million this year, of which a portion was earmarked for specific initiatives.

The division received just $2.7 million in extra funding for operations — far less than it received last year — in order to address a 10 per cent increase in its operating budget. That forced the trustees to grapple with a shortfall of $6,699,768, excluding budget requests.

The only options available to trustees to fill that gap were to fire staff, raise taxes or some combination of the two — and that’s what has happened.

Three questions emerge from these facts: Why are the division’s expenses so much higher? Why isn’t Brandon receiving the level of funding it deserves? And why didn’t the province warn the trustees and the public that this was the scenario they were facing?

As to the first question, almost all of the budget increase is due to higher salaries for teachers and other staff. Through province-wide bargaining, the government has given teachers huge raises, but hasn’t given divisions the money required to pay those higher salaries. The government may look like heroes to the teachers’ union, but they have stiffed Brandon property owners with the bill.

As to the second question, the funding shortfall is almost certainly tied to the fact that the province is running a huge deficit and is struggling with both the upcoming provincial budget and its commitment to balance the budget before the end of its current term.

They are strapped for cash and they are forcing local property owners to bail them out through higher taxes. Taxpayers in other school divisions are likely in a similar position.

As to the third question, the government media release that announced this year’s funding increases for the various school divisions neither disclosed nor alluded to the fiscal squeeze that trustees were being placed in. In fact, taxpayers and trustees were misled about the level of funding.

As we pointed out two weeks ago (“Time for a new, equitable education funding formula,” Feb. 12) the province’s news release that announced this year’s funding for school divisions referred to a “nearly five per cent increase in school funding for 2025-26,” with Education Minister Tracy Schmidt quoted as saying that “This year’s funding increase goes beyond the rate of inflation and is consistent with last year’s funding increase, giving school divisions confidence in stable funding to help them best allocate their budgets.”

We now know that none of that was true. The province’s education funding is rising by just 3.4 per cent overall, which is nowhere close to five per cent. Beyond that, the funding increase for 11 of the 37 school divisions in the province, even with nutrition funding included, is actually growing by less than the inflation rate. How are those division supposed to pay all those higher salaries with what is in reality a funding cut after accounting for inflation?

They can’t, and the government — Schmidt in particular — should have been honest about the situation when the funding announcement was made. Instead, they said nothing and even tried to spin the meagre funding increase as a positive. By doing so, Manitobans were misled and trustees were left to figure out the true reality just days before the budget deadline.

Manitobans — especially students — deserve better. They deserve a fairer funding formula, and they deserve a greater level of candour from their education minister.