A decision to delay changing the way school districts are funded has come as a relief to school administrators in North and West Vancouver.
That’s partly because nobody knows yet whether local schools will see more or less funding under a new system.
“One of the reasons nobody’s looked at the funding formula since 2002 is you’re going to have people who sees themselves as winners and others as losers” under a new system, said Chris Kennedy, superintendent of the West Vancouver School District.
Kennedy said most educators are also less concerned with how the province comes up with the figure that each district will get to spend on education than they are with how much that total number will be.
On Wednesday, the province released a report from a panel that has been considering changes to the way schools are funded.
Among the recommended changes is putting more of the total funding available into particular needs including special needs kids, Indigenous education and school districts with particular geographic or population challenges before dividing up the rest of the funding among school districts.
The panel has also recommended changing the way funding for special needs is calculated, eliminating the need for all children to have specific diagnoses in favour of allocating dollars based on statistical estimates of how many children would need extra help.
That’s a “friendlier model”, said Christie Sacre, chair of the North Vancouver Board of Education, and would eliminate long waits for assessments which currently take up time and resources.
But it also has the potential to short-change urban districts where more families with special needs students tend to live, in order to access specialized services, she noted.
Other potential changes include providing extra money for school districts to account for social issues increasingly being dealt with by the school system, including poverty, mental health and children who are in care of the province.
The panel also recommended a change away from funding high school students based on how many courses they take in favour of funding based on the number of actual students who are registered.
That would likely benefit North Vancouver, which has faced funding shortfalls when large numbers of students have taken less than a full course load. But it would likely have the opposite effect in West Vancouver, where students often take more than a full course load.
Education Minister Rob Fleming said a “working group” will be created in January to ponder how the recommendations can be put in place. That group won’t report back until the fall of 2019.
Attention will now turn to teachers’ contract negotiations which will focus attention back on issues like class size and composition.
The teachers’ contract expires in June.
Since the teachers’ win in Canada’s top court, school districts have been working with contract language restored from 2002.
As the recent funding review panel noted, that has brought additional resources into classrooms, but has also resulted in time-consuming paperwork calculations as well as inequities between school districts, which all had different standards for class size and composition written into their old contracts.
