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Robbing Peter

Kevin Berger – Leader Staff Much of the news coverage around the Education Amendment Act last week focused on the topic of Gay-Straight Alliances (GSAs) and the alterations to the rules around said clubs, such as removing the requirement that princip

Kevin Berger – Leader Staff

Much of the news coverage around the Education Amendment Act last week focused on the topic of Gay-Straight Alliances (GSAs) and the alterations to the rules around said clubs, such as removing the requirement that principals must immediately create such a group if a student has requested it.

Quite frankly, there’s enough being said on that topic that we have nothing particularly constructive to add to it. Instead, we would like to address another item: school fees.

Back in 2017, the NDP had passed legislation restricting schools from charging parents fees for instructional supplies or materials.

Some fees were still in place, of course. If you lived within 2.4 kilometres of your child’s designated school or chose to send them on a bus to a non-designated school, you would need to pay for transportation. But certainly parents were saving a fair bit of money each fall.

The NDP rollout of this initiative was a bit flawed, to put it mildly. They effectively sprang this on school divisions near the end of the 2016-2017 school year and required them to hastily throw together schedules of the fees that schools would charge in the following school year.

Of course, trying to anticipate every school trip you might be going on in the following school year is not the easiest task, so it resulted in a lot of headaches for school divisions.

One thing the NDP did right, however, was giving school divisions funding in lieu of the revenue they were losing through the elimination of school fees. Pembina Hills alone got $406,000, which they distributed out to their schools.

There was still some issue with the School Fee Reduction Grant in that it never changed from the time it was instituted. It’s likely that, as school populations changed, some divisions ended up having to eat some additional cost as their grant didn’t match up to their enrolments.

It had been unclear if the United Conservative Party would maintain the NDP’s policy of restricting schools from charging school fees, but last weeks’ announcement of the Education Amendment Act cleared up that mystery. Parents, breath a sigh of relief — you will not need to pay fees for instructional supplies this fall.

However, one question remains: what about the School Fee Reduction grant? The Education Minister was asked if the UCP would maintain that funding, and her response was effectively, “We’ll get back to you on that.”

Let’s be clear: if school boards are given nothing in lieu of the money they once collected through school fees, it will be inviting disaster. Many school divisions, including our own Pembina Hills, are absolutely starved for cash, and we would be putting an additional expense on their shoulders.

Either let schools charge the fees they once did or give them some money to compensate for those losses. Otherwise, the province is simply robbing Peter to pay Paul.

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