The Opposition NDP’s education critic called on Moose Jaw’s MLAs to stop defending the 2022 provincial budget and said they should instead be listening to the concerns of educational stakeholders.
“I guess that’s my challenge to the Moose Jaw MLAs,” said Matt Love, MLA for Saskatoon Eastview and a classroom teacher who ran on an education platform. “(These) statements have been discredited by folks who have a good understanding of what this budget will do to classrooms, and to hear them continue to use those statements, I think is irresponsible.”
Love referred to the statement from the STF and referenced additional media releases from the Saskatchewan School Boards Association (SSBA) and the Chinook School Division in Swift Current.
The SSBA statement reads, in part, “Boards have worked very hard to find efficiencies with buildings, transportation and office procedures — but when the operational funding doesn’t cover inflationary costs, the dollars aren’t there to pay for any investment or additional services that students need.”
The Chinook School Division statement was addressed to families and apologizes for the staffing cuts they will need to make because of the province’s underfunding. It states that years of government underfunding have required increasing cost-cutting measures, and thanks parents and caregivers for their support “through this challenging time.”
“Depending on future funding from the province, in order to ensure the long term financial viability of the school division,” the school division said, “the board may have to look at additional solutions to reduce the remaining deficit.”
“Every year, the government says this is a new record level of spending for education,” Love said. “Of course it is. Of course it is — every year, we have hundreds more students, costs are rising, just because it’s a record level of investment doesn’t mean that it’s meeting the needs of our classrooms.”
Love said that this year’s budget is not dissimilar to previous years in that it is a small increase in overall funding that does not meet real needs. He noted that in 2021 there were 1,600 more students and 352 fewer teachers in Saskatchewan classrooms and said that situation has become normal.
“We shouldn’t be dismissing the comments from people like the SSBA and the STF, and individual school divisions,” Love said. “We need to be listening to those people instead of dismissing them and telling them that they’re wrong.”
Trent Wotherspoon, the NDP’s finance critic, said in a previous interview that for school boards, inflation is built into the costs of heat, fuel, employment contracts, and all the supplies needed to run an education system.
“So what we see in the provincial budget, by way of the dollars for education, amounts to a cut,” Wotherspoon said, “because the dollars they provide fall far short of the increases to those very things — the contracts, the cost of heat, the cost of the utilities, the cost of supplies. So now school divisions are in this terrible situation, once again, because of this government’s callous approach to education.”
Lawrence and McLeod pointed out that the operating funding for schools will increase by 1.5 per cent, while enrolment is projected to increase by only 0.7 per cent. They also said that the capital funding will increase by 8.3 per cent, “well above the rate of inflation.”
Love took issue with that math, calling the 8.3 per cent number “the most glaring flaw” because it includes the recent “massive federal investment in early learning, child care, and licensed daycare — that money will have no impact on public education.”
The 1.5-per-cent increase in operating funding, Love said, comes nowhere close to covering the cost of inflation, let alone increased enrolment.
The Greater Saskatoon Catholic Schools Division said that “increases to costs are projected to far exceed the increase in revenue from the province,” and the “butter can only be spread so thin on the bread, as the saying goes.”
Robert Bratvold, education director of the Saskatchewan Rivers School Division in Prince Albert, echoed those concerns when he told the media that the provincial budget “doesn’t even come close to covering our fixed cost increases.”
“Tim McLeod was a school board trustee,” Love said. “He used to fight against cuts to education, and now (it seems) he supports them… I mean, I quoted (from an article on) Moose Jaw Today during question period a couple of weeks ago — comments from Tim McLeod about how our schools don’t need band-aids, they need surgery.”
