Hey kids, here’s a good reason why you should pay attention in math class: Someday you’ll be a taxpayer and will need to figure out where all the money you’re shelling out for education is going.
Trying to make heads or tails of education funding is tricky business. The funding formulas are complex and every dollar passes through several sets of hands and pocketbooks along the way.
Perhaps the simplest way to look at it is this: money follows students. And the fewer students you have, the less money you get.
That’s the dilemma currently facing Aspen View Schools, as they deal with yet another deficit budget.
And they’re not alone. Virtually every rural school division in Alberta faces the same problem, with declining enrollment numbers leading to reduced provincial government funding.
But the overly simplified “money follows students” concept cuts both ways; for example, Aspen View is pulling $1.75 million from its $5 million reserves to balance this year’s budget.
Wait a minute, $5 million in reserves? If money follows students, where did this $5 million come from? Is it the product of prudent budgeting in the past, knowing that the deficit situation of today was coming? Or is it money that was intended to be spent enhancing education, but wasn’t?
Aspen View also acknowledges that it’s overstaffed. But walk into almost any classroom in the division and see what the teacher-student ratio is like.
The problem, of course, is that while Aspen View has fewer students, they’re spread hither and yon across a vast area from Vilna to Smith, Rochester to Grassland. If they all lived within 10 minutes of Athabasca, the solutions would be easier. But they don’t, so Aspen View has a dozen different buildings to operate and maintain, several of which are well below capacity.
The problem with all these funding formulas and both school-based and centrally-administered budgets is that they can’t possibly address every situation. But, under a provincially-run system, they have to.
Unless the system changes dramatically, Aspen View will have to continue squeezing square pegs into round holes to attempt to balance their budget, in what will most definitely be an uncomfortable process.
