Random Access

The fat is in the fire and somebody's going to get burned.
The report handed down yesterday by the two auditors who reviewed the $15 million deficit of the Dufferin-Peel Catholic District School Board is being treated by most media as a rebuke to local trustees and administrators. It is.
But the analysis by William McLean and Pierre Filiatrault is also a surprisingly even-handed analysis that confirms much of what school boards have been saying for years about the inadequate funding model that is the bedrock of public education policy in this province.
It's also a troubling reminder that the adversarial system isn't just restricted to our courts.
The main fault that the investigators found with the board is that its underlying policy over the past few years, as Queen's Park slowly strangled its flexibility in spending and forced it to shift money from other areas to pay for special education, salaries and busing, was outright denial.
Hoping that things will miraculously return to what they used to be, not surprisingly, turns out to be really bad public policy.
As the report astutely points out, the board's biggest mistake came in 2002-03 when it reached a deal with teachers for raises of 6.5 per cent, which corrected an historical anomaly (Catholic board teachers were always behind their public counterparts). The board matched that raise for non-teaching staff, unlike its sister boards, thus creating many of its current fiscal woes.
"While we fully comprehend the board's motivation and reasoning for agreeing to such a collective agreement, we remain somewhat puzzled by the board's lack of action in subsequent budgetary exercises to address this issue," the report states.
Life went on as normal, with the expectation that the Titanic would make a course adjustment in future, thanks to the largesse of the provincial government. Some trustees must have been giddy with excitement at the election of the Liberals in 2005, believing the good old days were back.
Instead, Dufferin-Peel is going to get the reality therapy that other boards have already experienced. It will have to make a lot of the administrative staff cuts those boards have already suffered.
It will have to revisit some tough and unpopular decisions that it could not or would not make in the past: implementing alternate-day Junior Kindergarten to save busing costs and cancelling busing to regional programs at Holy Name of Mary and St. Sofia Eastern rite schools in Mississauga being two of the most challenging. That won't be popular with parents.
The report verifies many of the complaints Dufferin-Peel has made, on behalf of all other boards. There is credence in the boards' long-standing complaints that busing costs are underfunded, confirms the audit. Despite years of study and innumerable prototypes of new bus funding models, the problem persists, especially in high-growth areas such as Peel.
There's still no sign of the school closing regulations that would allow Dufferin-Peel to get on with the messy business of consolidation.
The salary gap, the difference between what Ontario pays for "average" provincial salaries and what Peel pays is killing local boards and the, "minister must move as quickly as government resources allow to narrow the gap," states the report.
Speaking of the minister — Gerard Kennedy, King of Edubabble and Glibness ("We don't want to micromanage from Queen's Park") — he says to Dufferin-Peel as he heads out the door to be the designated saviour of the Liberal Party of Canada: "Oh, by the way, can you have a plan in place to deal with all this stuff by Friday?"
Of course, he adds, he's not interfering in any way with the independence of local trustees to make their own decisions.
Which once again begs the question: who's running our schools?
We ostensibly elect trustees to do that, but they don't make policy, they can't raise taxes, they're totally dependent on grants and they have to go and sit in the quiet corner when the minister is unhappy.
If Dufferin-Peel doesn't see the light and acquiesce to a lot of cuts it clearly doesn't endorse, what will be the consequence?
In its conclusion, the investigation team says that in its meetings with board officials their frustration with the ministry came through loud and clear. "It was made very clear to us that a large part of the board's frustration was due to the perception that its message to the Ministry of Education ... was not being heard. Through our many discussions with senior officials of the ministry, it has been made clear to us that the ministry was well aware of the problems that boards were having with the funding model. The board can thus rest assured that its messages were indeed heard."
That may have been meant to provide comfort to Dufferin-Peel, but it may be the scariest statement in the whole report.
It says, "yes, they hear your message. They just don't care about it."