The Ministry of Education recently released a report on Class Size and Composition. In it we find that School District 22 (Vernon) has the highest class size average in the province for primary grades 1 to 3. We share that ‘honour’ with about four other districts. The reason for this is simple: in the School Act, prior to Bill 22, school districts were not allowed to exceed a district-wide average of 21 students, but the maximum size for this particular grade level is 22. The effect in our school district for the past couple of years is that at the end of September new classes were created in order to bring down the average.
This caused some disruption to the kids who were ‘dispersed’, but it also caused a disruption to the district staff’s planning because they had to hire teachers when they had not budgeted for these positions.
So the district submitted through the B.C. School Trustee’s Association a suggestion to the province to either fund the classes or eliminate the requirement to have a maximum average class size. Bill 22 eliminated the maximum district average class size. This means that although the maximum is capped at 22 for grades 1 to 3, there will be more classes at or close to the maximum. As it turns out, this report also showed that class size averages are higher in Vernon than the provincial averages in every grade.
This indicates that the management staff in Vernon is doing a bang-up job of filling desks in a very efficient manner.
But these numbers are only one issue. Another issue for teachers is who is sitting in those desks. In these classes there are many children with special needs. For many of your readers who attended school a while ago, these special needs children were taught in separate settings. Today’s classrooms have everyone together in one classroom except for a few children whose needs are too great to accommodate in a regular classroom.
Many children need additional support because it takes them a bit longer to master concepts or skills. There are more and more classes since this system was introduced in 2006 where the maximum of three ministry-designated special needs children has been exceeded. It is a measure of the frustration felt by teachers that the number of teachers who disagreed with the composition of classes has gone from one or two in 2008 to over 100 this year in the Vernon district.
The fix with Bill 22: remove the limits and then have educators compete for additional support. In some ways that already happens. In one local elementary school, the learning resource teacher asked for 12 students to be tested so they would qualify for more support – the answer was to ‘pick your top 3’. That is the level to which we have declined: ‘special needs triage’, or ‘hallway education’.
B.C.’s provincial budget portion for public education has dropped from 19.67 per cent in 2000 to about 11 per cent now. In the 1990’s it was more like 26 per cent of the provincial budget. The government has been making choices to deliberately underfund public education.
Is there more money being spent in terms of actual dollars? Absolutely. However, when the portion of the budget has fallen to less than half of what it was a decade ago, the message is that the B.C. government does not believe in public education as a spending priority. They spent plenty of your money on attack ads against teachers!
Every year since 2002 when the government started their under funding program, there have been cutbacks to our local school district ranging into the tens of millions to date.
Every spring, about now, we can read in the paper how large the cutback will be for the Vernon School District; for the 2012/2013 year, this district is under funded to the tune of $1,061,441.
B.C. spent on education 3.6 per cent of gross domestic product in 2000 and it is now down to less than 3.1 per cent. Compare these figures for Canada overall at about 5.2 per cent or Finland at 5.9 per cent of GDP. B.C.’s expenditures on this basis of comparison match the Philippines, Nicaragua and Kyrgyzstan.
I am not trying to make the case that the solution to all the problems we have in education can be solved by throwing more money at it. B.C. had one of the finest education systems in the world, but Finland’s performs better. Other countries that don’t perform as well on international tests spend far more than Finland on the basis of GDP. The statement I am making here is that if our society truly values education as an investment in the future, then what sort of future are we looking at when we divert resources away from education?
In B.C. our government has been making choices about its spending priorities based on their mantra of ‘taxes are bad’ and we are hearing from education, health and the legal systems that the government’s priorities are misguided at best.
Bruce Cummings, President, Vernon Teachers’ Association
