Editor:
Hello my name is Paul Budding, and I am a electrician with School District 79 [Cowichan Valley].
I have seen the underfunding of school districts firsthand. In maintenance alone, we don’t have the resources to maintain our buildings properly, and it shows. We have 24 active schools with minimal trades. For example, we only have two painters to service all these sites, and the list goes on.
Our busing is skin and bones now; our custodians are laid off in the summer, spring break and Christmas to save money. These are the best times to clean these buildings to boot. These are the conditions that exist in the buildings that our kids are in.
We stand to loose 18 teachers this year, and something has to break. We have wonderful trustees that campaigned on the platform that they would fight for more funding and called it the restoration budget. They are asking for extra money from the government over the government-imposed budget to try to restore some of the damage done over the years. The reward is a threat by the Liberal government to remove our locally-elected trustees if they don’t put in a budget with $2.5 million cuts by June 30. Is democracy dead? Are we in China?
I support our Duncan SD79 trustees and OUR restoration budget.
Paul Budding
Duncan
