Somewhere, the late Art Steffler is smiling.
The scrappy long-time trustee, who served an incredible 42 years on the Dufferin-Peel Catholic District School Board, always loved a political battle, and he loved nothing more than a fight with the big, bad Ministry of Education.
The current imbroglio with Queen’s Park over the Catholic board’s budget deficit has been brewing for many, many years although it only got on the radar for most of the public when the accusations and counter-accusations started making headlines.
During budget discussions in 2002, Steffler foreshadowed the current stalemate with the Ministry when he argued that trustees should defy the law and refuse to balance their budget, which was $6.3 million in the red at the time.
“Don’t we have any backbone?” Steffler asked his fellow trustees at the time. “If we want to draw attention to it and to show we’re not getting enough (funding), we have to go with the $6 million (deficit).”
At the time, Steffler’s stance was dismissed by his colleagues either because they considered it grandstanding or they thought it premature. School boards always live in hope of getting additional funds from Queen’s Park if they play nicely.
There is no doubt that trustees are right when they state that most of their deficit problems stem directly from the inadequacies of the provincial funding formula.
The Ministry (no matter which party is in power) loves to mandate new programs in big shiny announcements and then issue grants that cover only a portion of their costs. Boards have been shuffling money from other programs to cover chronic shortfalls for programs such as special education and busing for years and raiding their reserves until, as in the case of Dufferin-Peel, they ran out of them.
The legislation requiring a balanced budget led to the annual shell game where trustees “balanced” their budget by assuming the ministry would give them the money they needed to break even during the year. Which the government often did.
Boards have been paying lip service to the idea of a balanced budget for as long as they have been required to have them. “It’s not against the law to file a balanced budget and then overspend,” Steffler said at that 2002 administration and finance session. “We’ve been doing it for 20 years.”
Trustees would still rather face the wrath of the ministry and its threat of personal fines of $5,000 for trustees who don’t approve a balanced budget (are the defiant Dufferin-Peel trustees going to be charged?) than the wrath of parents (and voters) whose children will lose services.
Having travelled this far along the high road, the trustees can’t back down now.
They did not want their fingers on the knives that made the cuts, so they passed the blade over to supervisor Norbert Hartmann. He will do the dishonours.
While the trustees’ resolve is admirable in many ways, it is also fraught with potential problems, not the least of which is that they have abdicated basic control of the system that we elected them to run Nov. 13.
They must have read with some trepidation the story in The Toronto Star yesterday wherein Toronto trustees, who lived through the supervisor’s takeover there in 2002, reflected on that experience. Most said they would never willingly go back under supervision.
As a voter, you can’t help but have mixed feelings about this situation. Would you rather have an unelected bureaucrat (competent as he may be) making the critical financial decisions at Dufferin-Peel or an elected trustee who can be held responsible at the next election?
The worst danger might be that the Ontario government finds that its political and fiscal agenda is much easier to impose through a supervisor, without the voice of the local community being expressed.
Ironically, by taking their tough stance, Dufferin-Peel trustees might be making it easier for the government to declare all of their ilk redundant.