School division funding will jump $25.5M

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This article was published 31/01/2012 (5381 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Provincial funding for Manitoba public schools will see a 2.2 per cent increase in the 2012-13 school year, but gone is the provincial tax-incentive grant.

Education Minister Nancy Allan said the $25.5-million increase will ensure all school divisions receive at least the same level of funding as they did last year.

“These are challenging economic times for our province and for all Manitobans,” Allan said in a release. “But the best way to build for the future is to ensure our kids are getting a strong foundation in school and are ready for the challenges ahead of them.”

School divisions with added pressures, such as growing enrolment, will receive increases beyond the 2.2 per cent.

Dropped from the budget is the tax-incentive grant, which provided $135 million over the past four years in exchange for divisions freezing taxes.

Brandon school board chairman Mark Sefton said there was a sense of relief at the division when they heard there would be an increase in public school funding.

“We’ve been hearing things from both federal and provincial politicians … for some time about how tight things are, and we’re hearing about how Manitoba is facing a pretty tough deficit as a result of flooding,” Sefton said. “You always hope that kids aren’t going to have to carry that on their backs.”

Sefton said it’s too early to tell how the increase will affect Brandon School Division.

“We know that in some areas, we’ll see some slight increases, we know that in some areas we’ll see some slight decreases,” Sefton said. “We have to go through and do the analysis … Our staff is looking at every detail.”

Part of the puzzle is dealing with the dropped TIG, but Sefton isn’t too concerned.

“The $1.8 million (TIG) that we accepted two years ago, it’s still in play,” Sefton said.

The options for school trustees, who must set budgets by March 15, are “increase your revenue, cut your expenditures, or some combination of both,” said Carolyn Duhamel, the executive director of the Manitoba School Boards Association, following the province’s announcement.

She also said most people in public education wanted an end to TIG because of shifting criteria for eligibility, difficulty in administering it and not knowing how much a division would get from one year to the next.

But they also wanted that extra money to be part of operating grants, to be included within the funding formula rather than left outside it, Duhamel said.

Manitoba Teachers’ Society president Paul Olson said teachers welcome the stability of the operating grants exceeding inflation, but also want the province to fund public education 100 per cent, so how much each division can spend is not based on the local assessed values of residential and commercial properties.

“We expect government and the divisions to adequately fund education,” Olson said. “If boards need to do that (increase taxes), then boards need to do that.”

Tory education critic Cameron Friesen said the real story Monday is Allan failed to do anything to improve student achievement. But when asked several times for ways Allan might have done so, Friesen could not suggest anything.

Allan also announced the province will provide $4 million to help school divisions begin reducing class sizes to 20 students in kindergarten to Grade 3.

» jaustin@brandonsun.com, with files from the Winnipeg Free Press