Schools take one more hit

How much more can education take?
The Dexter government is once again instructing school boards to spend less money this year and next year. The boards knew it was coming as the government continues its four-year plan to eliminate budget deficits before it has to go to the polls.
It would be nice if it was for a good reason, but it isn’t. The government wants Nova Scotians to believe education costs need reining in because they’ve gone up 43 per cent in a decade. That’s 4.3 per cent a year. We ask, what Nova Scotians’ costs haven’t gone up that much over that time?
The most recent mandate to cut, as New Glasgow school board member Jamie Stevens says, means school boards are further distracted from their ultimate mission to focus on improving every students’ outcomes.
Less money means less vision, less hope.
More money means more possibilities and makes Nova Scotia more competitive in Canada and the world. It means students do better.
Media is partly responsible for the real tipping point education has reached in the province. Too much time has been spent chronicling school boards in varying stages of dysfunction, too little on how much these cuts hurt now and have hurt for years – and far too little about what marvellous things are happening in schools.
We could be writing more about the passion that goes into the academics and the extra-curricular activities that constitute real schooling.
We also need to honour something that either gets ignored or misrepresented.
School board members are elected. The elected members of the Chignecto-Central Regional School Board aren’t just passionate about education. They get it.
They represent in Nova Scotia a fourth level of government. They are equals, and it is unfair to dismiss them as well-meaning incompetents when that migratory subject of eliminating school boards resurfaces.
It’s easy to view election results and wonder how few people actually voted for school board members and how many of their choices were informed ones – and then raise that up as a reason to get rid of them all.
Using that logic, let’s just kiss our entire democracy goodbye.
It doesn’t have to be that way.
If school board members and staff, administrators and teachers, parents and students stare down this continuing assault on education, that’s when it will tip the right way.

Steve Goodwin