EDUCATION AMENDMENT ACT, 1996 / LOI DE 1996 MODIFIANT LA LOI SUR L'ÉDUCATION
ONTARIO PUBLIC SCHOOL BOARDS' ASSOCIATION
CONTENTS
Monday 13 May 1996
Education Amendment Act, 1996, Bill 34, Mr Snobelen / Loi de 1996
modifiant la Loi sur l'éducation, projet de loi 34, M. Snobelen
Ontario Public School Boards' Association
Donna Cansfield, president
Mike Benson, executive director
Kathleen Wynne; Peter McCreary
Peter Clutterbuck
Martha Harron
Susanne Eden
STANDING COMMITTEE ON SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT
Chair / Président: Patten, Richard (Ottawa Centre / -Centre L)
Vice-Chair / Vice-Président: Gerretsen, John
(Kingston and The Islands / Kingston et Les Îles L)
*Agostino, Dominic (Hamilton East / -Est L)
*Ecker, Janet (Durham West / -Ouest PC)
*Gerretsen, John (Kingston and The Islands / Kingston et Les Îles L)
Gravelle, Michael (Port Arthur L)
*Johns, Helen (Huron PC)
Jordan, Leo (Lanark-Renfrew PC)
Laughren, Floyd (Nickel Belt ND)
*Munro, Julia (Durham-York PC)
Newman, Dan (Scarborough Centre / -Centre PC)
*Patten, Richard (Ottawa Centre / -Centre L)
*Pettit, Trevor (Hamilton Mountain PC)
*Preston, Peter L. (Brant-Haldimand PC)
*Smith, Bruce (Middlesex PC)
*Wildman, Bud (Algoma ND)
*In attendance / présents
Substitutions present / Membres remplaçants présents:
Grandmaître, Bernard (Ottawa East / -Est L) for Mr Gravelle
Skarica, Toni (Wentworth North / -Nord PC) for Mr Jordan
Also taking part / Autre participant et participantes:
Boyd, Marion (London Centre / -Centre ND)
Clerk / Greffière: Lynn Mellor
Staff / Personnel: Ted Glenn, research officer, Legislative Research Service
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The committee met at 1534 in room 151.
EDUCATION AMENDMENT ACT, 1996 / LOI DE 1996 MODIFIANT LA LOI SUR L'ÉDUCATION
Consideration of Bill 34, An Act to amend the Education Act / Projet de loi 34, Loi modifiant la Loi sur l'éducation.
The Vice-Chair (Mr John Gerretsen): Before dealing with the first delegation, there is a report from the subcommittee on committee business that I would like to deal with first, please. It's a very short report. Could I have a motion that we accept the report of the subcommittee?
Mr Toni Skarica (Wentworth North): What does it say?
The Vice-Chair: "That the initial amendments to Bill 34 be in the office of Lynn Mellor, committee clerk, on Friday, May 17, at 4 pm, and that one copy of all amendments received be available for each caucus for pickup...."
Mr Skarica: Here it is. Yes, okay.
The Vice-Chair: You didn't think I'd have you move anything else?
Mr Skarica: You never know.
The Vice-Chair: Are you moving that, Mr Skarica?
Mr Skarica: Yes.
The Vice-Chair: Is there a seconder?
Mr Trevor Pettit (Hamilton Mountain): I'll second that.
The Vice-Chair: Mr Pettit seconds it. Any discussion at all on it? All those in favour of the subcommittee report? Carried.
ONTARIO PUBLIC SCHOOL BOARDS' ASSOCIATION
The Vice-Chair: Next we have our first delegation, the Ontario Public School Boards' Association. We have with us the president, Donna Cansfield, and the executive director, Mike Benson. Welcome to our meeting.
Ms Donna Cansfield: Thank you for the opportunity to present on behalf of the public school boards in this province. We serve 1.7 million learners in Ontario and represent over 90 public school boards.
General comments: We recognize that the intent of the legislation is to implement previously announced government policies for the purpose of managing decreased education transfers. The association has continuously stated its intention to work with the provincial government in attempting to find the best possible solutions for all parties to achieve the government's difficult goal. However, the association has become increasingly disappointed with the government's lack of specific measures to address the impact of the policies on the province's students, teachers and property taxpayers.
For example, Bill 34 will make junior kindergarten a permissive program. The association urges the government to proceed as quickly as possible with a review of alternative staffing.
The Minister of Education and Training has publicly stated that early education and junior kindergarten are under review by the minister. Before any other decisions are made, we urge the government to complete this review and make the results public. The association also urges the minister to consult with the public boards and others in the education sector prior to the government's decision.
This was a particular piece of the bill that we found somewhat disturbing inasmuch as differentiated staffing currently occurs across this province and has occurred across this province for probably 22 years, so we found it rather amusing to see that this was here when -- I'll give you an example -- my own board has itinerant music teachers. That is differentiated staffing. We also have a youth counsellor. The Toronto Board of Education has had library technicians for over 22 years, so we can't figure out why this particular issue can't be addressed as it has been in the past. In 1960, for example, we had differentiated staffing for junior kindergarten in the city of North York. Since it has existed in the past, we can't figure out why this is an issue now. It's one of the reasons our association had asked for it. It's happening in some jurisdictions; permit it to happen in others.
Our recommendation is that the provincial government proceed as quickly as possible with its review of the value of the junior kindergarten and early childhood education programs and that it make the results of its study public. The association and other education partners must be consulted prior to the government's decisions regarding junior kindergarten as an early education program.
Our next issue is around adult education. Bill 34 amends the Education Act by adding a new section which will permit a board to direct certain persons, as described in the section of the bill, to enroll in a continuing education course or a class operated by the board rather than a secondary school program. We value the role that adult education plays in our schools for a variety of reasons. Obviously one is that once the adult is in, there's more encouragement for the adult to participate with the child.
There is an issue, though, around the proposed addition to the Education Act. For example, it states, "A person who has been directed in accordance with this section to enrol in a continuing education course or class does not have a right under this act to attend or be admitted to any class or course provided by the board that is not a continuing education course or class."
We're very concerned with the wording of this paragraph. Our legal counsel has indicated that this could be considered "indirect" or "constructive" discrimination under the Ontario Human Rights Code. It could be argued that while discrimination based on age is not definitively expressed, the criteria laid out in the act result in exclusions, restrictions and preferences based on age. The province could be charged with and would have to defend challenges under the Ontario Human Rights Code. We ask that this issue be looked at and reviewed.
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We believe in the fundamental principle that a secondary education must be available to all, regardless of age. Restricting the access of students over the age of 21 violates this principle. If the economic future of this province is dependent upon a well-educated workforce and if you truly believe in lifelong learning, the one thing you don't do is restrict that learning. If anything, you would think you would find ways to encourage that learning to continue rather than put restrictions on it.
We've wondered why, again, we weren't part of the consultation on this on how we could provide the education that's needed as we go into the information age. I understand they're now writing the text. The fact that we're now out of the information age and going into another and that you wouldn't continually encourage education to continue as a lifelong process seems rather restrictive in this particular case.
Actually, the statistics are that in 1993, 77.8% of all adult continuing education expenditures were at the public boards of education. Over 80,000 learners over the age of 21 were enrolled in adult day school programs in public schools. What we've been able to do is provide courses that meet the needs of those students so that they're not necessarily at the regular school day. A good example would be what's happening in Metropolitan Toronto where they can accommodate these students. They start at 3 and they go until 9 in the evening.
The other issue that is significant is the difference in the funding levels. A provincial grant for a full-time equivalent secondary student is $4,920, which is already considerably below the actual cost, while the grant for a continuing education student is $2,257. The difference in funding levels will, for many boards, be the deciding factor when determining whether or not to offer adult courses as part of the secondary program in the future.
I believe that if the folks had done their homework, they would realize that in particular parts of this province there are continuing adult classes in regular day schools in order that the regular students can have a course, because there are no other opportunities. There are many parts of this province where we don't have colleges to offer adults someplace to go to take courses. So of course they do in their local school, and what it does is it enables the school to provide a good course because of the mass of folks for both the secondary student and the adult student. Now what you're going to do is penalize the secondary regular day student because there will not be sufficient mass numbers in order for the course to go forward.
That's part of looking at the variety, the diversity within this province and the complexity in running a secondary system. There's no one quick-fix solution that fixes the whole province from one perspective or another.
Our recommendation is that section 3 of Bill 34 be deleted, based upon the principle that education leading to an Ontario secondary school diploma must be equally accessible by all learners regardless of age.
If the government persists in changing the definition of an adult student, the association recommends that section 4 be strengthened to recognize an exception where a specific course is not provided within a reasonable travelling distance.
We recommend that in the exceptions where adults may attend as regular day school students, they be funded as such.
Cooperative service delivery: This particular bill permits boards to enter into cooperative agreements for a variety of bodies for specific purposes laid out in the act. The long and the short of this is that it's nice and it isn't going to make a hill of beans as far as working together.
One of the reasons this association came forward in the beginning to ask that this be mandated was that we have the facts, the statistics to prove to you that it isn't working where it is permissive. The boards are using this particular section of the act as a means not to work together, and we're saying that if you want to redirect those dollars back into the classroom, it makes sense for shared services in terms of transportation, buses, paper, just about anything and everything that you can think of that doesn't have to have a specific public or separate attached to it. There are no public buses; there are no separate buses; there are simply yellow buses. They should be taking the children to school regardless of which school it is.
As long as it is continued that you encourage to separate, then that will continue to happen because the boards are simply not working together if they do not have to. This is probably the one area where we were particularly disappointed with the government.
We recommend that this section be deleted and the following text as per private member's Bill 37 be substituted:
"Where two or more boards have the same or part of the same area of jurisdiction, the boards shall cooperate in the provision, purchase and use of goods and services."
We support the concept of reporting on cooperative measures undertaken.
With the extractions from the grant-negative boards, we're very concerned to see this particular piece of legislative amendment. The accountability for the collection of provincial taxes lies with locally elected politicians and not with the provincial government, and we do oppose the legislated effort by the provincial government to force school boards to give locally raised funds to provincial general revenues. Such action would be considered an indirect tax on the part of the province and, as such, could be challenged as unconstitutional.
We recognize the government's intention, however, to equally influence all boards' budgets with regard to the cuts in education, and we suggest that the reductions for those boards that currently do not receive government grants should be negotiated with the affected boards and not legislated. This method worked well during the situation with the social contract extraction, and it also should be noted that the boards affected by a negative grant could be increased without public consultation by simply changing the grant distribution form.
This is where we have our particular concern. You change the grant distribution form and you could make a significant number of boards in this province negative. Then there is nothing that would preclude this government from forcing all of those boards to give over taxation. We find that an unacceptable way to decrease the provincial debt load. This is something that happened in Alberta, and we're not particularly pleased to see that the possibility exists that it could happen here.
The clause gives the provincial government potential power to access funds that are now earmarked for local education spending in communities across Ontario. As I indicated, this is what happened in Alberta. A few per cent of those dollars went into the consolidated general revenue fund instead of into education and now the children in Alberta are suffering for that.
Our recommendation is that section 9 of Bill 34 be deleted, and we suggest that the provincial government negotiate any necessary reductions to negative-grant boards with the affected boards.
With regard to teachers' sick leave entitlements, we recognize that this amendment gives boards greater flexibility in negotiations and is supportive. We're supportive of any amendment that would give school boards the choice of action when negotiating with their employee groups. We're just simply disappointed that we didn't have more flexibility and more opportunity.
Although we are concerned with some of the legislative amendments in Bill 34, we believe in the long run the proposals contained in the bill will not produce significant savings for boards but actually will increase bureaucratic red tape. I brought with me the regulations under which education exists. Actually, they ran out of paper and they printed a few more.
Just to give you an idea, we put forward to this government almost 30 potential changes to try to get rid of this, or reduce this somewhat. You know the principle KISS, "Keep it simple, stupid"? Wouldn't it be nice to run a system that wasn't bungled by so much red tape?
We could go through and give you a litany of examples, both within this government and all sorts of other ministries, which restrict our opportunity to do our job in an effective and efficient way. We lobbied the government to try to manage some of those changes and we weren't very successful.
As I indicated before, we have concerns around the age of the adults. We do, however, recognize that there is another area out there with adults who are immigrants and refugees, and typically they are funded under the LINC program, or language instruction for newcomers to Canada. We would not like to see any restriction of access of those kinds of federal dollars to meet the needs of the immigrant and refugee adult population in this province.
The tangible opportunities for cost savings must be captured by this government if it is serious about giving local school boards measures to manage the cuts to the education system. Quite frankly, the legislation that's included here leaves the school boards with minimal flexibility to adjust to the funding cutbacks.
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We ask again that you be more involved with us and simply ask us where we could work with you to find solutions to help us manage the kind of cutbacks the province is proposing for the school boards. As it stands now, the reason you see the significant number of adjustments in the number of folks out there, the teachers declared surplus, is that unless there are opportunities where we can capture the savings and direct them back to the classroom, it simply translates into jobs and programs.
I think junior kindergarten is an excellent example. Rather than provide us with the flexibility to offer this program with differentiated staffing, as it had been offered in the past, so that we could keep a program that we all know is good for children -- the lists and lists of research material are there -- instead the program is gone, the children suffer and there are no jobs. Nobody wins, least of all the children in the province.
That's where we are concerned. We appreciate the need to deal with the serious financial situation of the province, but we would sincerely like to work with you to find the solutions, and we believe we can do that if the government is prepared to listen.
The Vice-Chair: Thank you very much. We have about five minutes left for each caucus, and I believe today we start off with the NDP.
Mr Bud Wildman (Algoma): Thank you for your presentation. I was interested in your comments with regard to adult education. Are you concerned that if you have to move to the continuing education model and level of funding, there are a number of adults who are currently benefiting from returning to the public school system who will not have access to education programs that will enable them to graduate or to gain their graduation equivalency?
Ms Cansfield: Absolutely. The assumption is that continuing education classes are offered around the province; the fact is they are not. The reason is because there is no place to offer them. A number of schools just don't have the facility or the capacity to offer continuing education programs, so where possible they encourage the adult to become part of the regular school system, especially in the north.
It's foolhardy to suggest that you can just slip from one model into the other, because the infrastructure isn't there. You'd have to recreate the infrastructure. Again, I keep saying it: This province is the size of western Europe. It's not tiny. You can't have one-size-fits-all. Mike has a perfect example: It doesn't work in pantyhose and it doesn't work in education. You've got to look at the needs of the community and fit the needs to meet the community, as opposed to Queen's Park trying to find a solution that will just blanket everybody.
Adult education is a perfect example. In Metropolitan Toronto we have far more flexibility by virtue of critical mass, but even at that, if you take away our opportunity to provide full adult schools because you're going to claw back through the negative grant, what will happen? You'll cap the number of accessible adults into the program. "Excuse me, you can have some lifelong learning, and no, you can't. You're 101 on the list, and you're 102 and you don't count." You have to look at the needs of the people out there.
It would have been far simpler to sit down and say, "Okay, here's the problem, bring the folks in, and how do we find a solution?" as opposed to writing a piece of legislation that's very restrictive by its nature.
Mr Wildman: I notice, and you alluded to it just now, your concern about inadequate consultation prior to the drafting of the legislation.
As an aside, Mr Chair, after watching Mr Saunderson's performance in question period today, I'm not surprised that they didn't consult with the boards. It's obvious from his performance today that Mr Eves and Mr Harris didn't consult with him with regard to VLTs.
If you were asked your opinion prior to the drafting in regard to adult education, how would you respond to the comments that Mr Snobelen has made before this committee that adults, by the very fact that they're adults, don't need the same kind of program that is designed to serve adolescents and essentially are self-motivated and can perform without all the supports that might be provided by the secondary school system for _olbcefs?Ðs j
nsLelOVÑT_ere's no q,,e,tion that ...ü,,lts learn ·i -- ferently. ¢o0/00ý are visu_lÑlearners, -- ÷_e are aura_ _earners. P"o"ôe learn d~f -- erently; e'ý_ the child_e_ do. But i -- _ðe intent ~sÑto get som_òždy back in...oÑthe schoolÑs_ãtem to go o_ to a post-s"condary situ_tion, then a_¬some point ^ou're going ...o need someo_e to teach t_em OAC physi_s, and I'm suggestiog to you it isn't necessarily a continuing education teacaer.
Had I the opportunity, I would have suggested we bring in, because of distance, distance learning, the independent learning centre, TVOntario, which has an extraordinary background in curricula and distance learning, the boards from the different regions that would be affected, both large in critical mass and small in terms of rural and northern, and sit down and problem-solve how we could do this in a more effective way if it wasn't just a cost issue of reducing dollars but actually providing good education for those folks out there.
We were trying to do that on the ed finance reform working group, where we indicated we appreciated that adults necessarily might be funded differently from junior kindergarten, and I'm sorry to say the decision was taken out of our hands and pre-empted by the government. They made the decision before we even had an opportunity to address the issue. I still believe we can do this if we bring folks together to problem-solve on how we can provide an education to an adult in this province.
Mr Wildman: If there is not a change in the provision under the bill, do you think the commitments made by the minister will enable boards to avoid adversely affecting classroom education in meeting the targets they have to for cuts?
Ms Cansfield: No. It will affect the classroom and it will affect the secondary classroom. In those areas where the adults are part of the secondary class, it actually will affect jobs if that class is cancelled. So it will definitely affect the classroom.
Mrs Julia Munro (Durham-York): When we're talking about continuing education and adult education, I wonder if you could explain the difference for us in terms of courses of study and the certification of teachers in those two situations.
Ms Cansfield: In a continuing education course, that could be ballroom dancing, it could be upholstery, any number of those types -- bridge lessons. In an adult, it's a credit course, the same as any secondary student would receive in order to achieve their secondary school diploma, and they must have 30 credits in order to get that and six OACs in order to go on to a post-secondary institution, in particular university.
You must have folks who are capable of teaching those types of courses, and currently only a school gives an Ontario secondary school diploma. By limiting the access to an adult, you limit them to the access of that OSSD. I know then the next thought is, just give them a GED, a general education diploma. Prior learning assessment -- you know, you've done this, therefore you get that credit. Unfortunately, universities don't like GEDs. They would prefer something that has a little more substantiveness to it, such as a diploma.
Mrs Munro: I want to ask a further question related to that. Aren't credit courses also included in continuing education?
Ms Cansfield: It depends on how the boards put their continuing education together, and each board is different -- again, meeting the needs. It may fall under the umbrella of it, but under that umbrella will be the credit courses, the non-credit courses and the general interest courses, because the school boards also will offer such things as English-as-a-second-language non-credit courses in addition to English-as-a-second-language credit courses, again depending on the needs of the student in terms of achieving a secondary school diploma.
Mrs Munro: Would they not do that according to the demand within the community?
Ms Cansfield: Sure they would, of course they would, but the difference is that a secondary school diploma requiring a teacher who is certified to teach physics cannot be served at $2,267 a student. It requires more money to do it. I'm not suggesting the money that's there is the only way, but we weren't given an opportunity to try to problem-solve on how we could accomplish both and what we're saying is we would have liked that opportunity.
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Mrs Munro: Is it possible to look at this in terms of a per-credit funding as opposed to an overall funding?
Ms Cansfield: That's certainly one of the ways they've started to look at it in Alberta, that the money travels with the student and is based on the credit. That's an opportunity that could be looked at, but it was not part of any discussion.
Mr Bruce Smith (Middlesex): Thank you for your presentation. I found your comments on cooperative service delivery interesting. Does the association keep any data on the number of boards that are currently involved in cooperative servicing agreements? Do you have that type of information available to you?
Ms Cansfield: We put together something called An Exemplary Practice which was commissioned by the previous government where we looked at those boards that are in a cooperative delivery model and we do have some of those.
Unfortunately, we have far more which are not in a cooperative delivery model and I can give you Metropolitan Toronto as a good example. I'm a trustee in Etobicoke and I sit at the Metro level as well. When we first started to look at cooperative services and we asked the separate folks to come and speak to us, they wouldn't even come and speak to us; they weren't even interested. "When it suits our needs we'll be there."
I'm sorry, I'm very concerned about keeping dollars in the classroom for children and minimizing as much the impact on our employees whom we value. Turf is something that has to be stopped. We need to find ways to look at those administrative areas that do not impact in terms of providing the service, so busing is a good example, purchasing paper is another, pencils, computer services. There are any number of areas where we could be working together and we're talking big dollars. We're not talking a few million. We're talking $200 million, we're talking big dollars and unfortunately, it's not been goodwill that is encouraging us to conform.
Mr Smith: Of the 90 boards that are members of your association, can you give me any idea of the number of cooperative servicing agreements that exist pre-Bill 34?
Ms Cansfield: We're probably 10%, maybe 15%.
Mr Mike Benson: I think it'd be a little more than that. We don't have precise numbers on that. Part of the problem here is that the funding mechanism itself does not encourage cooperation. Busing is a classic example and that really needs to be fixed so that there's a fiscal incentive to cooperation or a penalty for not doing so, that kind of thing is another approach to take, but this is too weak.
Ms Cansfield: In the north they've had a number of cooperatives that have been very successful. By virtue of geography, they've been able to do it. In the south in particular, because they don't have to, the geography doesn't constrain them, they've just maintained their own independence.
Mr Richard Patten (Ottawa Centre): Good to see you again. Let me try to summarize what I think is your overall message, and if I'm not correct, please correct what I say. It seems to me what you're saying is, "Listen, if you're going to cut, then work with us to look at the best way to do it and on what kind of bases, over what kind of period of time," realizing that things have to be financed and that having gotten into the budgets of the school boards, to protect the classroom, and mucked about on this and that and one thing or another, I believe you're saying that has now caused a whole variety of problems for the system and vulnerabilities for the government, legal and otherwise. Is that a fair statement?
Ms Cansfield: You've summarized it very well.
Mr Patten: Thank you. Would you hire me?
Ms Cansfield: Absolutely.
Mr Patten: Thank you. All right, in terms of this whole discussion, and you've articulated very well today in terms of adult education -- I'll come back to junior kindergarten in a moment -- it seems to me those practitioners directly in adult education seem to be saying to us, "We have a chance to work with the whole person." It's not a course-by-course arrangement; the atmosphere, the context, the support structures are very different for people who are in or have been in vulnerable positions. To provide that extra support is decidedly different, and that is what gives that program a highly respectable success rate at this particular point. Someone who is venturing back to school after having gone through various difficulties -- and we heard some personal stories here last Thursday, which were quite heart-wrenching -- that this makes a decided difference. You need skilled people, you need certified people to work with this, and in the end we may be penny wise and pound foolish because we will not be providing the support for people to either go on to higher education or go into the workforce. How does that fit with your --
Ms Cansfield: You're right. If the intent is to educate folks to go back into society in a productive way, then I think it's incumbent upon all of us to sit down together and find a way to do it. Had I been asked, had the association been asked, we would have pulled in people like TVOntario, because of distance learning, Theresa González from the Independent Learning Centre. We would have talked to the folks in the north, because as you know, your local training boards are up, even though you cancelled the OTABs; people like ourselves, Jack Playford from the continuing education, who have got strong history in terms of adult education, and we would have been able to problem-solve on how to keep something that is vital to the economic wellbeing and prosperity of this province in place.
Instead, because it's a quick-fix solution and it's economic by nature, it's a political expediency that's economic, it doesn't deal with the real issue, and the issue is educating adults in order to become good, productive citizens to help us to have a better Ontario in the future.
Again I state, we brought forward something called Removing the Barriers to Cost-Effective Education last year. We said, "Give us two years and look at these things seriously," a little of which, 10%, 20%, dealt with labour. The vast majority dealt with things like streamlining the capital, looking at demanding boards work together. There was $1 billion in this and it was ignored, virtually, and yet I believe sincerely that if we get our act together -- it's time to fish and cut bait -- we can solve this, if you work with the people who deliver the programs in the first place.
I don't know, guys, it's not rocket science, it's called talking to each other. The people who put in place the policies and the people who enact them need to talk to each other before one does the other.
Mr Patten: By the way, do you have any indication from the ministry in terms of its time frame on the study that the minister said would be performed in terms of junior kindergarten?
Ms Cansfield: No, I have not, and I've just discovered that supposedly there's something out there on capital already and we are not even a part of that. Here we are: We've got the schools, we carry the debentures, we know the problems, and we're not part of the solution. It makes no sense.
Mr Patten: So what you're suggesting is that the decision to change the funding basis of junior kindergarten without a study is putting the cart before the horse.
Ms Cansfield: That one in particular. I mean, I can't have anybody who hasn't listened to Fraser Mustard and the Canadian Institute of Advanced Research sit back and say that zero to six isn't probably the most critical time in anybody's life, and to suggest otherwise is somebody who lives somewhere else, on another planet, because it is. Again, we appreciate that maybe the existing way wasn't the only way, but we weren't part of the thinking and finding a solution to that problem.
We're saying, let's help you; we can do this. I believe if you bring the teachers in, they'll help as well, because we have children involved in this, kids. Your children are your reason, I hope, for what education is all about, because if it's not, then get out of the business.
The Vice-Chair: Thank you very much, Ms Cansfield and Mr Benson, for your presentation.
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KATHLEEN WYNNE PETER MCCREARY
The Vice-Chair: Next we have the Oriole Park School Association. With us today are Kathleen Wynne, Peter McCreary and Abby Bushby, if you'd like to come forward, please. If you could identify yourselves, please. Now there are only two of you.
Ms Kathleen Wynne: There are only two of us and I'll explain that. My name's Kathleen Wynne, and Peter McCreary and I are going to be sharing this time. Abby Bushby actually is going to be speaking at another time, representing another organization. She wasn't meant to be on today. Peter is from the Oriole Park parent association. I'm actually a member of Area North Education Council in the Toronto board and I'm a member of a working group on education finance. I'm not from Oriole Park, but we're colleagues. I'm a parent.
The Vice-Chair: You have half an hour together. That includes any questions or comments there may be.
Ms Wynne: I'm not going to take a lot of your time and I want to thank you for affording me the opportunity to speak to you. I'm a parent with the Toronto Board of Education. I have a daughter in grade 6, a daughter in grade 9 and a son in grade 10. I'm not a teacher, but I work as a mediator and a consultant in conflict resolution in schools and other organizations. In that capacity, I have visited dozens of schools around the province, private, public, alternative and separate. As a parent volunteer in my own children's schools, I've worked closely with teachers, accompanying classes on field trips, coaching school teams and assisting in classrooms.
My reason for coming to you today is that I'm concerned there are proposals contained in Bill 34 that will amend the Education Act in such a way that education in this province will be even more seriously eroded than it already has been in the past years.
I'm particularly concerned with two areas. The first is with the idea that junior kindergarten is to be seen as an option for boards of education. We know, and the previous speaker alluded to, the wealth of literature on starting children early on the road to academic success and the earlier we can do that the more productive those people will be. There's a lengthy discussion in the provincial Royal Commission on Learning report, volume 2, that was recently produced and we also know that with present levels of funding for many boards, junior kindergarten won't be an option at all.
In the Netherlands, where my first two children were born, the education system begins at age two and a half to three years, recognizing that not all families will be able to afford private nursery school, and also recognizing that publicly funded school can create opportunities otherwise inaccessible to large numbers of people. It's also worth noting that in Dutch culture the provision of early schooling is framed as an education issue rather than a child care one, since many mothers still stay at home with their children.
My second locus of concern is around the issue of school boards in urban centres being asked to consider contributing to the provincial education budget. I am aware that there are legal issues surrounding this proposal and that it becomes a taxation debate that must be taken up by province and boards. But I'd like to speak to it as a philosophical issue and I think we need to look at what's being proposed. The suggestion is that somehow these urban boards in Metro Toronto and Ottawa particularly are well enough funded that they can afford to contribute to the general coffer. This would be an ideal situation if all the schools in Metro Toronto and Ottawa-Carleton were managing well enough to subsidize others. From my experience travelling around this province and from my more intimate experience with Toronto schools, we are not close to this situation, so that any formula for funding education in this province has to recognize that it costs more to educate a child in an urban centre, and for good reasons, than it does to provide the same education in other jurisdictions.
Finally, there is a general myth abroad that education has been overfunded for years, that the system is abundant and fat. In most schools in and out of Metro Toronto, this is absolutely not apparent. Children in Toronto schools are contending with decrepit physical plants, outdated resource materials and an aging teacher population that's demoralized by the lack of opportunity to hire new blood. Children in schools outside of large urban centres do not have access to the diversity of programs that are possible in a system with a large student population and are also dealing with outdated resource materials in centres where options for enrichment are limited. Our education system is treading water to keep its head up, whether the context is the city or the country.
I believe that students across the province should share similar opportunities, but that does not mean bringing schools to some lowest common denominator. That means ensuring that all schools live up to at least a minimum standard, a standard that policymakers have set with excellence in mind. Quality early childhood education, including junior kindergarten, should be part of that standard and it will cost more to create and maintain that standard in Toronto than it does in Orangeville or Peterborough.
I have a sister with four children who lives in Bradford. She and her children are just starting out in the school system there, and when we compare notes it's quite clear that the system in Toronto is more accessible, more user-friendly and, I contend, more reflective of the needs of its population than the one in which she finds herself. That is an argument for supporting the Simcoe County Board of Education as it grows and develops, not for stripping the Toronto board. The debate surrounding education in this province shouldn't be allowed to disintegrate into a battle between city and country.
If passed as it stands, Bill 34 will further debilitate our school system to the detriment not just of Metro Toronto but of the entire province, and I hope that Bill 34 will be reconsidered in its entirety in light of current realities in the education system in this province.
I thank you for your time. Peter is going to speak to you, and then we'd both be happy to answer your questions.
Mr Peter McCreary: I prepared my remarks on one page, which you have in front of you, so I'm just going to speak generally to those comments. My qualification is that I am a parent. I have two children in a school here in the city of Toronto called Oriole Park Public School, which is a small school built in 1925. It has about 280 students. I'm now in my fifth year, if I can put it that way, at Oriole Park school, although the kids are actually the ones in school, but for me it's been an education as well, as you can imagine if you have children.
The thing that struck me first about Oriole Park school was that it was built in 1925, as I said before, and it looks exactly today the way it did in 1925. This does not suggest a great deal of investment in terms of budget capital investment. Furthermore, there's been a problem with the gym floor in that school for all the years I've been associated with the school which, as I say, has been just over five years. We're waiting for the Toronto Board of Education budget to permit the kind of repairs we need. I make those comments not because I don't think it's a good school. It has about 280 students.
Incidentally, they have a lunch program there. Both my children go to the lunch program. They had lunch there today. There's no place for lunch, so they have lunch on the floor in the hall. A building built in 1925, as you can imagine, doesn't have a nice, neat, clean facility, so they eat sitting on the floor.
The other thing you should understand is that Oriole Park is in a relatively affluent area of the city, which is Eglinton and Avenue Road, and the parents are very involved in the school. We had a very successful May fair, I must say, on Saturday. The teachers appear to be very good, and I have confidence in public education in Toronto from my experience at Oriole Park school. But what I don't perceive is any fat in the system. I just don't perceive it. That was one of the reasons I joined the parents' working group on education finance: to try to learn something about education finance.
What I learned is that the budget for the Toronto Board of Education was about $611 million in 1995, and about 90% of that is teachers' salaries. Some of my friends who are consultants say, "That's no problem. We can reduce the administrative costs," but there don't seem to be a lot of administrative costs left to reduce.
What I've understood the government policy was was to extract about $22 million-plus from the board of education's budget in 1996, and this was going to be done using some tools. We were told in March there would be tools in the form of amendments to the Education Act coming out and we would be able to, by studying these tools or amendments to the Education Act -- "we" meaning parents -- so that I can report back to the school association as a representative, I could understand and explain the direct impact on the teaching, class size and other results. But when the tools came out, there are no tools that appear to apply to the Toronto Board of Education, or at least that's the way I understand it.
Instead of tools, we now have Bill 34, which you are considering today, but in Bill 34 there's only a provision saying that the province may extract money, presumably from the Toronto Board of Education and presumably to the extent of the constraints set out in November.
On the one hand I have the perception, and the belief actually, that the system is running, but only just running along because of the shrinking tax base in Toronto and the increasing number of students year over year; on the other hand I have a process which doesn't seem to be open or clear. It isn't open or clear to me as a parent who has no special expertise in education finance matters and no professional background in this area where the cuts are going to come.
That's my presentation. Thank you.
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Mr Pettit: Thank you, Peter and Kathleen, for your presentation. I think you both made some good points. I've got a couple of quick ones here which I'll throw to either one of you. Particularly, Peter, you say in paragraph 4: "The government's stated policy is to preserve excellence in education and maintain high-quality classroom education for students. How can this policy be reconciled with budget reductions?" I guess that makes the assumption or at least you believe that every dollar in education is being spent wisely. Is it your belief that every single dollar is being spent wisely?
Mr McCreary: My belief is that if I look at it from the Oriole Park perspective, I would answer yes. I don't see any fat at Oriole Park.
Mr Pettit: You're both parents, you're both taxpayers in Toronto, and I would assume because of that you both realize the need for an accountable education system. Where, if anyplace, do you see in education where costs can be reduced while still maintaining quality programs? Are you saying to me that you see nowhere where any money can be saved in education?
Mr McCreary: No. What I would answer to that is, come and tell us. I don't think the onus should be on me as the parent in schools. I look around my school, I don't see places where I think, yes, there's waste. I'm not in government. I have no association with government. I carry no brief for the education program other than as it pertains to my two kids. So I say to you, you tell me where you think there's waste, for example, in the Toronto Board of Education at Oriole Park school and then let's consider it and let's eliminate it.
Ms Wynne: I think there's another point. There's an issue of setting a policy that says: "What does education have to be? What do we as a culture, as a society have to provide for our children?" Having done that, then we work to provide that and anything else we do is gravy. I don't believe that in education in this province that has been done.
I, like Peter, am speaking from a classroom perspective. I'm speaking from the school perspective. I don't see the fat in those classrooms and I think a lot of the policies and decisions that are being made right now are being based on ignorance of what's actually going on in the classroom.
I would support the Toronto board submission that was made last week about cooperation among boards, that there probably are cooperative activities that the boards could engage in that would save money. I don't have a lot of background information on that, but I think in terms of what's happening in the classrooms and the schools in this province, we are not dealing with an abundant system right now.
Mr Pettit: I'm not convinced personally that just throwing more money at education is going to solve any of the problems we have but, as I understand it, the average that most boards are being asked is to find between 1% and 2% in their operational budgets. Do you think that cannot be found?
Interjection.
Mr Pettit: As I understand, it's between 1% and 2% on average.
Ms Wynne: I can't give you a fully knowledgeable answer to that question. My guess would be it's going to be tough in some boards to do that. I think it's going to be very difficult because there's a whole school of thought that would argue that education funding has not kept up with other sectors in the past 20 years, let alone the last three or four years, so it may be difficult at this point.
But I would argue that we have to look at the classroom and keep that intact, which is not what is being done right now, and then look at other ways of cutting and boards are not being given that option now. What they're being asked to do is going to affect the classroom. It's going to affect the day-to-day lives of kids going to school.
Mr Skarica: Mr McCreary, I didn't know anything about education either a year ago or so because I hadn't been in it for a long time.
The Vice-Chair: You did go to school.
Mr Skarica: A long time ago. I asked the Metro Toronto people --
Interjections.
Mr Skarica: Wentworth county where I come from, which is just outside of Hamilton, has about half the administrative costs of the Metro Toronto board. As an example of the difference, the trustees in my area make $14,000, the trustees in your area make $49,500. When we asked them about that, they said the taxpayers voted for that or seemed to have no problem with that. If you had a druthers between paying $34,000 more for a trustee or $34,000 less as I do and having a school floor, can you tell me what would you rather have?
Mr McCreary: I don't look at it from that perspective, but what I'm concerned is you take a budget of $611 million, you can't really compare the education problems in the city of Toronto or in Metropolitan Toronto with any other area in the province. That's the way I look at it, speaking in a global way.
Speaking on a more narrow basis, I'm more concerned if you say 1% out of $611 million. When that was $19 million what it was going to do, they were going to have to take out education assistants, EAs as they're called. I know at Oriole Park school, we thought we were going to lose our education assistants. Put it on the table and make a specific amendment to the Education Act or whatever legislative authority you have to reduce the salaries of trustees. Put that on the table. Let us consider it that way. Don't say, "I'm taking 1%, 5% or something out of the budget on the whole, then you solve it."
If we're going to take $22 million out of the Toronto budget, what are we going to lose? We're going to lose something at Oriole Park, and it isn't going to be the salary of the trustee. That's what I'm concerned about. It's a separate issue and it's kind of a red herring to start asking whether or not the trustees earn their money in Toronto. I'm inclined to think they do, but then the other question is whether they earn their money in Wentworth or wherever else it is. I don't really know because I don't know the level of pressure and expectations and committee responsibilities and time spent. I can't compare those things.
Mr Bernard Grandmaître (Ottawa East): My question is on the funding of education as well. In your presentation are you saying that because Metro and the Ottawa board can afford to put in more dollars to the education coffers, they should or shouldn't?
Ms Wynne: I'm saying that because the needs in those urban areas are different than the needs in other areas --
Mr Grandmaître: But you're not saying they should.
Ms Wynne: No, I'm not saying they should. I'm saying we need to deliver a quality education to all the kids in the province, and that takes more money in the urban centres than it does outside the urban centres.
Mr Grandmaître: What are your thoughts on the pooling system that's been rumoured about, and also what about the Fair Tax Commission of three years ago, I guess, that recommended that education should be funded through income tax? What are your thoughts on those two formulas?
Ms Wynne: I think whatever system we use to fund education, we've got to recognize the differential needs of the different areas, so whatever formula we use, whatever pooling we use, whatever taxation base we use, there has to be some recognition that the urban centres, with diverse needs, with higher densities, different issues, more immigration, all those factors, there has to be an accommodation of all that in whatever formula we use. Whatever system we come up with, we've got to recognize those needs. I don't know, Peter, if you want to speak to that.
Mr McCreary: I just endorse that.
Mr Patten: Thank you very much for your presentation. I have just a quick comment on, when the government side says 3%, 3% sounds like a very tiny amount, but when you average that, that's throwing in Metro Toronto and Ottawa, which probably represent together 25% or a third of the whole system. Then you skew that with some small boards all around the province, for some of the boards, you must know the government had to bring in some modifying recommendations on its own legislation to limit the impact on some boards that would have been cut off at 50% of provincial grants that represent 18% of their total budget. So this 3% stuff skews drastically.
The other thing is if this level of funding is implemented, it will mean that Ontario will drop below the average of educational funding in this country. Do you think that is a standard we should be shooting for?
Ms Wynne: No. I think that's absolutely unacceptable. One of my concerns with the current situation is that we're not looking at revenue generation, we're looking at funding cuts. I don't think the education system can stand it at this point. I think there are probably refinements that can be made around service delivery and administration, that there are still some of those things that can be done, but I don't think the system can stand major cuts at this point. I think we're very short-sighted to look to that sector to provide that kind of money.
Mrs Marion Boyd (London Centre): Thank you very much for your presentation. I'm very interested in the thrust of both of your discussions around seeing education reach a lowest common denominator. I come from a part of the province that obviously is not in the same position that Metro is. We do have legislative grants, although we're one of the more prosperous parts of the province.
The question I'm curious about and I always need to ask is, is the cost of education, with all of the diversity and the social problems you identify, really somewhere between $4,000 and $6,000 more per pupil in Metro than it would be in an outlying, in the poorest school board in the province? This per-pupil issue is one that really concerns me. I hear you talking about equitability for students and knowing that funding helps to bring about equitability when there are those diversity problems, but I've always been deeply troubled by that huge discrepancy.
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Ms Wynne: There's a document that is being created at the moment that indicates it's closer to a $2,000 difference; it's not double that. I can't give you the exact number, but my understanding is that it's not that great.
Mr Peter L. Preston (Brant-Haldimand): Got to be skilful.
Mrs Boyd: Even if it were $2,000 and given that there really isn't any indication -- I think it is higher than that incidentally, and particularly depending on what you're looking at -- does it make a lot of sense in terms of equitability arguments that that's an appropriate split? I need to get where you're at with that.
Ms Wynne: I think there are good reasons that it would cost more. What the number is exactly, whether it's $2,000 or $3,000 or $1,000, whatever that number is -- say we could boil it down to $1,000; would that be the acceptable number? -- I think the issue is that it's going to cost more. Maybe somebody has to decide what the acceptable gap would be, but there's going to be a gap.
That goes along with the standards issue. I think there hasn't been a lot of good thinking that's gone into what is appropriate, what is acceptable to us as a society in terms of delivering education to children in this province. We haven't got a plan, and my feeling is that we're cutting helter-skelter because we're dealing with little kids here and nobody is going to get up and scream. One of the issues around full-time trustees in Toronto, one of the reasons Peter McCreary and I are here is because the Toronto Board of Education is accessible, does consult, spends time trying to find out what its users need, which doesn't happen in the rest of the province. That means we've got a lot of silent people in the rest of the province. That's why parent councils have to be started. The Toronto board is ahead on those things. Whatever that number is, I would argue --
Mr Preston: I certainly don't agree with that.
Mrs Janet Ecker (Durham West): No, not in my region either.
Mr Preston: Toronto's the only place that's got trustees who care?
Ms Wynne: No, no, I'm saying in terms of consultation. I'm saying in terms of official avenues of consultation, the Toronto board is set up very differently than other boards. Would that be a fair statement?
Mr Preston: No.
Mrs Boyd: I'm also interested that you put so much pressure on the younger grades, because I do too. I think that is the clue to success for students later on. I'm very interested in your comments about the Netherlands and so on. But there's also a gap between what we pay per student in the elementary school and what we pay in the secondary school. Is that appropriate?
Ms Wynne: That there be a gap between elementary and secondary?
Mrs Boyd: Yes. We did everything we could as a government to begin to narrow that gap, but there's still quite a substantial gap. In other words, we are investing far more dollars per student in the upper grades than we are in the lower grades.
Ms Wynne: Yes, and I think that probably runs contrary to good reason. We should be investing more in our early years. Just as a general principle, we should be front-end-loading the funding as opposed to investing more in secondary, which is again not to say we should we should be stripping secondary to fund elementary, but we need as a principle to look after kids in the early years.
Mrs Boyd: Then the gist of what you're saying is that everyone else in the province should be rising to the level of Toronto?
Ms Wynne: Yes.
Mrs Boyd: That then means higher provincial costs, because of course we don't have the assessment base Toronto has.
Ms Wynne: Actually, what I'm saying is that we should all be rising to a standard that is set by good policymakers with excellent education in mind, whether that's the standard set by the Toronto Board of Education or whether that's the standard set by some process that blends the best of what's in Toronto with the best of what's in other places. But we need a standard that is set and everybody rises to that standard. I'm not actually sure everything in Toronto is what we should be doing, but we sure have to have a plan and get everybody up to that plan rather than stripping away what's in the rich boards to get to what doesn't exist in other boards.
Mr Wildman: How do you, as parents and ratepayers, respond to the section of the bill that would permit or allow -- not require, but permit or allow -- the Metro Toronto Board of Education to remit some of the property tax it collects to the provincial coffers, keeping in mind that there's no guarantee that money will be used for education elsewhere?
Ms Wynne: I think it's seriously problematic. Peter, do you want to speak to that?
Mr McCreary: I'm saying the same thing I said before, which is that if we have a good education system today, if we take any more money out of the budget for the board of education, we won't have as good an education system tomorrow. That's what that means, isn't it? To me, the public education system is in danger right now and whether there be differences between Toronto or whatever factors exist, that's something that has to be recognized by the legislators so that when you make your cuts you cut carefully, you pick something that maybe can be taken out. Somebody suggested there must be something we don't need. What is it, though? The onus should be on the cutters, not the cuttees.
Mr Wildman: Thank you very much. I'm very impressed with your presentation.
The Vice-Chair: Thank you very much for your presentation to both of you.
PETER CLUTTERBUCK
The Vice-Chair: Next we have Mr Peter Clutterbuck with the Winona Drive Senior Public School education budget committee.
Mr Peter Clutterbuck: I gave the clerk a draft of what I intend to say. That was done yesterday. I went over it again today, so there will be some additions or embellishments, and even a correction or two, that I put in as I talk to you here.
I am Peter Clutterbuck. I don't appear before you as an educator or any kind of professional expert in education in Ontario, but I am an important expert to this committee in one regard since I am a parent of a child in the public school system. Like other parents I have been meeting with, I am growing increasingly concerned about the effect of Bill 34 on the quality of my child's education. Specifically, the parents we have been meeting with lately are concerned about the proposed permission to transfer property taxes under the current way of funding education here in Metro out of Metro, and therefore the city, to other uses, not even necessarily education.
My expertise is based on the everyday contact which Alix, my 13-year-old daughter, has with Winona school, which is in the Toronto Board of Education. I know something about the school system because Alix gets up almost every weekday at 6:45 am during basketball and baseball seasons to trek off to school for practice on the school teams. She likes sports. Certainly nothing else would get her up that early. It's good for her in terms of personal discipline, physical exercise and the social development of learning about fair competition and teamwork. These extracurricular sports, of course, can't happen within the confines of a classroom and they also can't happen without the extra time and effort of teachers who also make a special commitment to our children by supervising these kinds of activities well before school starting time and usually well after.
One of the things we're concerned about, as I talked with parents in my community and in wards 11 and 12, which is where my school is, is changes which affect teachers so that even perhaps those teachers who keep their jobs have their morale affected in such a way that making this kind of commitment to our kids will reduce the quality of education for those kids who still have teachers.
I know something about the school system because Alix likes music. That's why she decided to go to Winona. She's learning how to play the trombone. She gets the use of school instruments, good in-class instruction and extra practice with music teachers who give time in special instruction which, for example, will bring about 100 students from across the city for an orchestral performance at Roy Thomson Hall tomorrow evening. You can bet every parent and relative among the several thousand at Roy Thomson Hall will be proud of their children tomorrow night. This would be a good audience to ask whether music and other special school programs should be sacrificed to budget cuts next year or in future years.
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I know something about the school system also because I have met Alix's teachers. I have talked to them this year and in previous years at parent-teacher meetings and school events; Alix used to go to Palmerston school. I always marvel at how well they know my daughter and can carefully chart her progress or areas needing improvement. The detail which teachers write on report cards today goes far beyond the few kind or critical -- and hardly useful -- comments which I remember receiving when I went to grade school. I have some examples here of the kind of attention which goes into outcome-based learning for my kid. I know exactly where Alix was at Christmastime, and not just with As, Bs or Cs, but sentences and paragraphs on how she's progressing in reading, writing and arithmetic, and music and sports.
I also know that teachers have limits and that if class sizes get too big, neither will the teacher's knowledge about my daughter be sustained nor will her particular learning needs get met. That's one of the things that we as parents in our community started to talk about: What kind of class sizes are we prepared to accept? At what point will we start to sacrifice this kind of information we have about our kids and how they're doing at school if class sizes are too large?
These examples of my experience are the kinds of things which make all parents experts about the education system. These are the kinds of things they know and care about. These are some of the ways in which they measure the quality of the school and the education system.
Parents are starting to worry about what is in store for their children in the Toronto school system, especially if Bill 34 means that property taxes we pay are not used to maintain the quality of our schools.
We have started this discussion at Winona school. I am chairperson of Winona Drive Senior Public School's education budget committee. We have had several meetings with Winona parents and we have done the following things since January of this year.
We have reviewed the Toronto board's spending and budgets for the last few years. We learned that the board has decreased its budget from $623.5 million in 1992 to $608.8 million in 1996, although school enrolment has increased by 3,000 students over the same period. We noted responsible board management of this reduction in order to minimize the impact on the classroom, including actions taken: reductions in executive, managerial and administrative staff; hiring freezes for permanent positions; offer of early retirement packages to staff; administrative cost-sharing with other boards in Metro; deferring plant maintenance and improvements; and reduction of non-credit courses.
From our point of view, the Toronto Board of Education has exercised, in decreasing its budget over the last four years, real prudence in how to downsize or reduce, essentially, costs that don't directly affect the classroom. Only in the last two, when we talk about deferring plant maintenance and reduction of non-credit courses, are we talking about things that may touch our kids more directly: the quality and the safety of the physical environments our students go to school in. Certainly for those who want to learn on a non-credit basis, some sacrifice has been made there. We think there's been responsible reduction at the Toronto board.
When I talk about these things, I'm talking about things which have been talked about with parents, parents at Winona school and in the other 13 schools which make up wards 11 and 12. We as parents have begun to define what we think are the essential elements of a senior primary school. Kathleen Wynne, who was here just before, actually developed a tool called the essential schools instrument, through the parent finance education group. We have started to use that in our school and in the other schools in wards 11 and 12. We want to do this so we have some measure for ourselves about what the education system is providing to our children.
After our first meeting on this task, we know for sure -- we at Winona, that is -- that we want reasonable class sizes, no larger than 25 students, so that teachers can give the proper attention to all the children. We also know that an in-school librarian and adequate library resources are essential to our children's study and learning. We are continuing this task of developing a charter of an essential school and will share the results with parents in other schools. There is a group of parents coming together at my home this week, for example, to continue this charter for essential school development.
As parents, we began to look at the impact of increasing budget pressure on Winona as well. We've discovered already that budget adjustments for the upcoming year will increase some of our class sizes to more than 25, which is our limit. They may even get up to 27 next year. This is before we include the impact of any major budget cut which could result from a transfer of our property taxes to other jurisdictions or other government use. Severe reductions next year or beyond could well threaten our music, family studies or special-needs programs at Winona. That is the first reason I'm here: to let you know that the parents of Winona are concerned and are watching how decisions made in this place affect their children's school and learning.
Finally, we decided, as parents, to talk to other parents about their concerns. We have engaged other schools in wards 11 and 12 of the Toronto board to see if we can act together. We have joined the efforts of the parent finance education group which has also presented to this committee.
We are beginning by establishing a baseline of information on what parents feel is important about their children's schools. We know to begin with that parents want schools to have an adequate number of teachers to keep class sizes at a good learning level, and that parents value programs such as music, family studies, special-needs education and language training for our highly diverse school population in Toronto.
We sent a survey about 10 days ago to 13 schools in wards 11 and 12 to find out about the status of class sizes, number of teachers and existing programs. These four questions that we asked were actually developed by parents meeting in wards 11 and 12, talking about what they wanted in their school system, talking about what they valued and what was felt important. That's how these questions on the survey ended up being created. Almost half -- I was hoping all of them would be back by now -- have responded to date, so a full report is not possible. I can report from these preliminary results though, and I will send you the full report when we have them all back.
First of all, from preliminary results, the number of regular full-time teachers has declined by almost 2% over the last two years. The number of special education teachers in these schools has increased from 15.5 to 17 in the last two years, although the number of children with special education needs in the responding schools has also increased by more than 25%.
Class sizes have increased overall since 1994 in the schools responding to date. The highest class sizes in these schools range from 25 up to 32 students, well over our 25 maximum at Winona. Average class sizes range from 22 to 26. Again, this is a baseline, before any other loss of budget to our school and the other schools in wards 11 and 12.
When complete, this information will be helpful to the parents of the children in the 13 schools of wards 11 and 12. It will give them a baseline of information from which to assess any proposed changes in the financing of our school system. If they know in 1996 what their property taxes pay for, will they accept in 1997 or beyond severe budget reductions which will surely increase class sizes up to 30 and higher, reduce the number of qualified teachers and affect the morale of those who remain, and eliminate programs such as music and special education?
Our intention is to begin with getting this information into the hands of parents in Winona, which we've begun, and the parents in the other 12 schools of wards 11 and 12, and then throughout the city if necessary. We will alert our parents to the impact of a possible major transfer of our property taxes out of our school system in terms of all the things which we think are important to preserve. If necessary, we will actually measure this impact again next year so that any deterioration in the quality of our children's education can be directly linked to any action taken under Bill 34.
I appeal to the members of this committee, from whatever perspectives you hold about education in this province, do not pass any measures which will harm our children's learning and futures.
If you see public education as just another marketplace, and parents and teachers as customers, which I don't, but if you do, then at least recognize that we are concerned about the quality of the service being provided for the taxes we pay and believe that Bill 34 endangers that quality.
If you see public education as an investment, then don't reduce the value of that investment when the social and economic health of Ontario will depend on the future returns which a soundly educated population will bring.
If you see public education as a critical component of the social and cultural development of our society, then do not take action which will impede our children from becoming competent and contributing citizens to that society.
Thank you for this opportunity. Parents at Winona and wards 11 and 12 and across the city are going to take great interest in the decisions which you make on Bill 34.
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Mr Patten: Thank you very much for your efforts and your work. It's good to see the deep involvement of a parent. I gather you represent other parents who are not only doing your job at your school, but with your board, with other boards, and keeping an eye on what's coming down the track at the same time.
You've spent a fair amount of time. I gather you respect highly not just what's in the classroom, the class size, but also, by virtue of your daughter's participation in music, that this is an important aspect of her education. I would like to ask you, anticipating a sort of worst-case scenario or what's proposed in Bill 34 and the impact on teachers, how you feel that might affect some of the extracurricular activities in terms of teachers' response to being pressured or losing jobs or whatever it might be.
Mr Clutterbuck: We've had this discussion in looking at where our situation was in Winona at this time and that right now there was a little bit of room in terms of loss of some teachers -- we're losing three for next year -- so that our class sizes get up, like I say, to 25 or 27. There is concern among our parents that the first indication of a sliding quality of education is larger class sizes where teachers don't know our students well enough.
The next thing that will happen, we anticipate -- and that's why we're also documenting all the programs which are now provided in our school and in other schools -- is that programs will be sacrificed. You either lose three teachers or lose whole programs. We're concerned about losing some of our programs at Winona, so we think increasing class sizes is the first sign, and the next will be the loss of whole programs or the cutting back of programs or the limiting of the number of students who can participate in certain programs. That's the nature of the discussion that parents are having right now in Winona and wards 11 and 12.
Mr Patten: Just to clarify, you're not talking about developing a charter school; you're talking about developing a charter for a school which would --
Mr Clutterbuck: No, that's right; a bad choice of words. It's more a statement of principles and values that we think are important for our schools. In fact, at Winona, parents are very much concerned about their own kids. One of our proposals was a principle around junior kindergarten, which other schools have certainly identified. It's funny; we're known as a senior school, grades 7 and 8. Our parents are starting to get concerned about where they're going after 7 and 8 with secondary school reform, for example, and they're giving higher priority to what will happen when our kids get into secondary school and essentially will be graduating four or five years from now with double the number of graduates and a lot fewer jobs. So our parents are giving serious study to things that definitely affect their kids, now and in the future.
Mr Patten: I note in your paper that you had a very dramatic statistic, and that was that while there was a rather modest increase in special education teachers, the number of children who had special education needs had increased by more than 25%. That's an incredible growth rate. How do you feel that is being dealt with, and the impact on the general program?
Mr Clutterbuck: I concede right now that we're dealing with about seven out of our total of 14 schools, so it will be interesting to see when the other -- and I understand a few more have come back today that I haven't received yet.
At one time, I worked in the field of developmental handicap, and I worked in areas around the integration of people with handicaps into the regular school system. I'm starting to get concerned whether perhaps some of the kids with special needs are being congregated in certain places because of the lack of special education teachers within the regular school system to work with kids in regular classes. Now, I can't say that is for sure what is happening, and I only got these data over the weekend, so I will investigate whether that is happening and would be somewhat concerned about it, because that is not a way in which to essentially help people with disabilities to become part of the mainstream society. But that's not definitive right now.
Mr Tony Silipo (Dovercourt): Thank you, Mr Clutterbuck, for your presentation. I appreciated particularly in the presentation, knowing Winona public school as I do, the reflection of what you see as being the contribution that teachers make to the after-school programs as being a vital part of your child's education and that of other children's. I also found particularly useful your reflecting some of the statistics here that help to give a picture of what the Toronto school system is a little bit about in terms of the fact that it's also been coping and dealing with reduced budgets at the same time that enrolment has been going up.
There is a sense that I think we saw reflected a little bit earlier perhaps, and I know I've certainly heard from government members as they look at Toronto and view it as a place where there's a lot of fat that can still be trimmed, despite the fact that there have been cuts over the last number of years in administration and other areas of the budget, and sometimes even a kind of poking fun at the degree to which parents have actually become involved in the system. When I point out to people that parents and teachers have been involved in the selection of principals for over 20 years, that still startles some folks around here.
I guess my question to you is to just ask you to talk a little bit more about what your sense, from the perspective of Winona or the other schools, would be if we now get to the point, as this bill contemplates, where we will see property tax dollars being taken out of Metropolitan Toronto and channelled back to the provincial coffers for them to use in whatever way they wish. What is that going to do to the kind of involvement that you talked about, the kind of quality of education that's being provided now at Winona and the other schools in the area?
Mr Clutterbuck: I think I showed from our look at the Toronto Board of Education's budget, 1995-96, looking back to 1992, that a reduction of somewhere in the order of $15 million has already occurred. There are a variety of strategies that the board has used to try to minimize impact on the classroom in making those savings.
No figures are certain, but it seems to us that the proposed possible transfer is in the order of $30 million, that Toronto might experience $20 million or $22 million of any transfer if it is effected. There's no question, when you look at the kind of strategies being employed to save the amount of money that's been saved so far, that kind of hit is definitely going to impact the classroom.
There's a lot of discussion about classroom-based budgeting, but it is like talking about bus budgeting for the transit system. You can have a driver in a bus or you can have the roads and the maintenance and all the necessary support, the route making and the tracking of the ways in which people need to get from here to there that make up the total bus system. Actually, in the Toronto Board of Education I think it would be better to talk about school-based budgeting. Some 85% of the Toronto budget goes into schools and the other is support to those schools.
I think it's a more direct indication of our investment to look at schools, because kids don't spend all their time in the classroom. They spend their time in the hallways and in the cafeterias and in the playgrounds and with teachers before and after school. We just can't imagine what a $22-million cut would be. We would be down to perhaps teachers and books and classrooms, and that's it, but we wouldn't be into an awful lot of learning.
Mr Silipo: I was just interested in a quick comparison, because the current Minister of Education and Training likes to continue saying that only about 47% of the funding in the school system is spent in the classroom. Yet we know the reality --
Interjection.
Mr Silipo: Yes, 47% is outside; 52% is spent inside the classroom. Yet we know the reality, certainly as I recall -- I don't think it's changed substantially in the Toronto system in the last five years -- is very different. I know it's different throughout the province. Do you want to comment on that?
Mr Clutterbuck: I think it is different, and I don't know the figures for the other provinces, while I've seen some of these numbers. The number that impressed me was 85% of the resources going to schools, because classrooms are in systems, and schools are the first important kind of unit of that system in which there are all kinds of resources made available to our student.
A more realistic way to look at it and something that means more to parents is, how much is coming into our community, into our schools, paying for teachers, paying for the support that teachers need, paying for the materials and the educational resources they need in the school, and also paying for the caretakers and the maintenance of the physical infrastructure? There are whole parent committees around safety and physical quality of the school environment.
I think we should look at, if we're talking about real local involvement in education, what comes into the school and how that school is used also for other community purposes that make it a real resource to that community. I'm more impressed with the 85% part of the budget which is allocated and dedicated to schools. I think that's a more meaningful number.
Mr Pettit: Thank you, Mr Clutterbuck. First of all, as a parent of two young children who are in the school system and as a member who actively encourages all of my constituents to participate in any area that they have concerns with, I would take exception to Mr Silipo's statement that we poke fun at parents who get involved. I would encourage all parents to get involved.
But surely you must be facetious when you say in your brief that all parents are experts about the education system. I would suggest maybe in their own minds, but surely you don't believe that.
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Mr Clutterbuck: I think, for example, if you believe that we're the customers, the customer is always right, and certainly in terms of what we know we want for our kids. When you meet with parents and they start to talk about what's important to them, you could recognize that they see themselves as experts. We know our kids. We know what our kids learn at school. When they don't learn something and when they're not learning, we express ourselves. We get involved to look at what they're actually getting out of the school system, so certainly we are the prime experts of the school system because we, our kids and our families, are the end users of that school system. We know if we get good quality and if we get bad quality. The rest of it is a way in which to deliver good quality to parents.
Mr Pettit: How many students attend your school?
Mr Clutterbuck: There are just over 400 students now at Winona.
Mr Pettit: How many parents actually participate on the education budget committee and/or the home and school association?
Mr Clutterbuck: On the education budget committee at the last meeting we brought out about 15 parents, of whom about seven are coming to complete the task this week. Our commitment is not just to do it among a group of seven to 15 parents; it is first of all to take what we learn and bring it back to the regular parent assembly meeting, of which the first one last September had well over 100 parents there.
Not only that, but we are going to work with the other schools in wards 11 and 12 to build parent understanding. I've been seeing parents come out to meetings -- Mr Shea was at one of them -- in large numbers to express their concerns about the education system. There are working groups and there are ways in which to ask the larger membership to endorse the proposals or to change them.
Mr Preston: How many special-ed kids do you have?
Mr Clutterbuck: At Winona, I can't remember how many special-ed kids.
Mr Preston: Roughly, when you say special education in those schools.
Mr Clutterbuck: In the six schools that reported I think the number went up from something like 25 to 39; I can't remember. I have it here, though, if you wish it. I'm talking about six schools that reported out of the 13, and two more reported today.
Mr Preston: It went from 25 to 39?
Mr Clutterbuck: It was a 25% increase, whatever it was.
Mr Preston: The numbers -- 25 to 39 in six schools? Let's double it. It went from 50 to 78. All right, so that's 28 more kids, and you've got one and a half more teachers. That's less than 25 to a class.
Mr Wildman: Yes, but they're special-ed teachers.
Mr Clutterbuck: They're special-ed teachers. Special-ed classes usually have smaller class sizes, which is one of the reasons --
Mr Preston: I buy that.
Mr Clutterbuck: -- from our point of view, that they're useful to have. I can't say this for all the Winona parents, but from my previous work I know it would be better for kids, and as much as possible this is happening, to be in regular classes and receive outside special-ed instruction, or kids being taken out of the class periodically for special attention. But it is true that class sizes reported for special-ed kids are smaller when they're congregated.
Mr Skarica: We heard from Donna Cansfield that she conceded there are always savings that can be found, and you've been making a survey of your school and other schools. Can you give us some suggestions as to where there could be savings found in the school system as you see it right now?
Mr Clutterbuck: Right now we are focusing on the parents at Winona in wards 11 and 12 and what we want from the school system, how much it costs, and if what we propose is needed and is important costs less, there will be savings, but we're not going to start the debate from the point of view of how do we make the savings. The fact is, this is our kids' education; it's too important. We should be investing in it, we should be looking at the best result for the money that we put in, but we don't start by saying, "How little should we spend, or where shall we find the savings?" We start with, "What do we want to get?" That's where we're starting and that's where parents are starting, and they're going to start across this province to make that very clear.
Mr Skarica: That's fine.
Mr Clutterbuck: Frankly, I have no problem with paying for good public services. I think that parents and families right across this province are going to find out exactly what they took for granted before as we see public services erode.
Mr Skarica: I wonder from a parent where you think there can be savings. I have some ideas but I'd like to hear it from you.
Mr Clutterbuck: When I look at what the Toronto Board of Education has done, I see those are good strategies for the reductions they've been able to make since 1992. I'm concentrating on quality, service delivered, outcome and the best chance for my kid when she leaves school and goes into the work world.
The Vice-Chair: Thank you very much, Mr Clutterbuck.
MARTHA HARRON
The Vice-Chair: Next we have Martha Harron. Welcome to our meeting. You have 30 minutes to make your presentation. That includes any questions and answers there may be.
Ms Martha Harron: I was told to save half the time for questions, so that's what I planned for. Thank you for the opportunity to speak to you today as a parent. I will try to be brief.
The purpose of Bill 34, as I understand it, is to provide school boards with a toolkit to trim their budgets. Trimming is definitely needed, but you have to be careful about handing tools to the very people who most need to be trimmed.
The two biggest drains on the school system, it seems to me, are administration and transportation. Reducing busing will be a long and difficult business because the school system as presently constituted relies on it. Administration is another matter. Should we be targeting junior kindergarten, adult secondary education and teachers' sick leave entitlements when whole departments at school boards could be shut down tomorrow without causing any disruption in the classroom? The result would probably be an improvement.
Making junior kindergarten optional for boards makes sense only in the context of present modes of delivery, with overcentralized elementary schools and specialized programs which require busing. Long bus rides are inappropriate for small children, and schools may be filled to capacity. Meanwhile, adequately equipped day care facilities, church basements and community centres are already available in most neighbourhoods. It makes a lot more sense to send an early childhood education specialist into a day care than to transport busloads of tiny children to a school and back again. What we need is the flexibility to work out cooperative arrangements with these facilities, and I hope some of these other amendments will facilitate that.
Before you make JK optional, consider carefully what you intend to replace it with. I won't take up time trying to convince you of the importance of early childhood education, particularly for disadvantaged children. I'm sure you've read what the Royal Commission on Learning had to say on the subject, and you know about studies like the Perry project, which demonstrated the enormous long-term cost savings as well as social benefits to be derived from even just a few hours a week of such a program for multiple-risk, three- to six-year-olds, and you must have heard from more qualified speakers than me about recent research into the human brain which shows there are limited windows of opportunity in a young child's development. Why not dispel the public perception that you're indifferent to the needs of young children by extending the option for early childhood education to three-year-olds as well, as recommended by the royal commission?
I believe that universal access to these programs would avoid conflict and complications. First, regional restrictions create conflict. Is there anywhere in this province where there is no demand for JK? What happens when families on one side of the road have it but the others don't? Do we want school boards spying on parents like in Philadelphia? You may recall the recent case where a couple was caught smuggling their child into a relative's home in a laundry basket. Economic restrictions also create conflict. Where do we draw the line? It isn't only poor children who benefit from preschool classes. Do we want to discriminate against economically self-sufficient parents and turn early childhood education programs into ghettos for the disadvantaged, or do we want to encourage all the children in the neighbourhood to learn and grow together?
The other aspect of this bill which causes me grave concern is the proposal to eliminate sick leave entitlements as a statutory benefit. If you went after the gratuity, you might actually save some money, but allowing sick leave to be determined locally through collective bargaining will end up costing the system as a whole and have other negative consequences. First, it will mean hundreds of sets of negotiations instead of one. Second, it will further reduce the mobility of teachers. From the students' point of view, it would be far better if all negotiations were conducted provincially so qualified teachers could go anywhere in the province without risk to benefits or security. Third, any attempt by school boards to take away the teachers' right to space-bank their sick leave is bound to backfire.
At the moment, teachers take fewer sick days than average employees. Many will drag themselves into school rather than fall behind in their courses. If you take away their right to save these sick days, they'll spend them. This will mean a large increase in demand for substitute teachers. Not only will this cost a lot of money, it will seriously impede our students' progress, because by and large substitute teachers are just highly paid babysitters.
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Please do not give school boards tools with which to harass our teachers. As parents, we do not want our children spending six hours a day with people who are bitter and frustrated. We don't want work-to-rule campaigns and strikes in our schools. Classroom teachers are not the problem; even trustees are not the problem, ineffectual though they may be. The problem is the hordes of ex-teachers who dominate the ministry and school boards. Unfortunately, we have no revolving door policy for those who tell teachers how to teach. Those who make the decisions have lost touch with reality because they never have to face a real classroom and they never have to face the electorate. That's why they make a lot more money than you do. Can you imagine what would happen if superintendents had to knock on doors every few years to ask for their jobs back?
I urge you not to require boards to report on their cooperative efforts to the minister unless you set strict limits on the form and amount of reporting. Drowning people in paper is what school boards do best. In any case, it will only tell you their version of the story. What is required, and at some boards desperately needed, is an independent audit of all their activities at least to determine what percentage of the taxpayer's dollar is actually making it into the classroom. Charities are required by law to spend no more than 25% of their budgets on administration, and school boards need similar restrictions.
To be meaningful, the definition of what constitutes an administrative expense and what constitutes a school program has to be very specific. Some boards spend so much money on curriculum development there is no money left over for learning materials to implement it with. They spend so much money on so-called professional development that one principal said to me: "You know, if I accepted every invitation I receive to go down to the board, I would never be in my school. I don't know what they think I do all day, but they obviously don't think it's very important."
I realize that all school boards are not the same. There are school boards in this province which are models of efficiency, mostly tiny boards, and others which are out of control. At the Toronto board, the finance committee met only four times between April 20, 1995, and February 1, 1996, one hour for every $50 million in the budget. We keep calling for independent value-for-dollar audits -- in fact, I have a petition right here in my bag -- but we never seem to get anywhere. If the Provincial Auditor does not have the power to conduct these, please put it in his toolkit.
A tool in the wrong hands is a weapon. As a parent who has been active in our schools for a long time, I can tell you that every time my board, the city of Toronto board, has responded to our demands for clarity and accountability, it has complied with a vengeance, making the whole exercise far more trouble than it was worth. Parental involvement, the new curriculum and the new report card are prime examples. I would be happy to discuss these in detail, if you wish. Suffice it to say that the senior bureaucrats at the ministry, the school boards and the teachers' federations all have a stake in making things as complicated as possible. On the other side politicians, parents and classroom teachers have a stake in making things as simple as possible. We have to focus on this and stick together.
What worries me most about this bill is that you are counting on school boards to do the right thing, and it is painfully obvious that most boards cannot be counted on to do the right thing. School boards were told last year to cut their budgets without cutting school programs, yet programs are being cut blatantly left, right and centre.
We shouldn't be surprised at this, not because bureaucrats are evil people but because self-preservation is the most basic human instinct. The consultants, advisers, coordinators, assistant coordinators, superintendents and senior administrators who sit in cosy offices at the so-called education centres take themselves and what they do very seriously, and given the choice, they will cut everyone and everything below them before they will cut themselves.
Giving someone the opportunity to eliminate himself or herself may be the honourable thing to do, but the tradition, wisely, is not to hand them a loaded weapon in a roomful of people.
The Vice-Chair: You've certainly given us an awful lot to think about. Your presentation is different from most, let me just say that. We have a little bit more than five minutes for each caucus and we start this time with the New Democratic Party.
Mr Wildman: I find it rather interesting that when I was asked about the toolkit -- it came out just at the time, you may recall, there was a publication of all the individuals in the province who make over $100,000 from the public purse -- a reporter asked me, did I think that this publication of these individuals' names would produce a backlash in the public and people would demand less money be put into public services like education? That could happen -- I don't know -- but the problem is that it's the people who make $100,000 or more who will be deciding where the cuts will be, and they probably won't cut themselves. I agree with you completely in that regard.
If I could ask, though, a specific question related to the definition of out-of-classroom expenditure, because this is central to the debate that is happening right now, some boards have come before us and said it is somewhere between 5% and 15%. Mr Sweeney and the task force said it was about 47%. I understand Mr Sweeney included all the custodial services and prep time for teachers, and principals and vice-principals, in that figure of out-of-classroom.
Ms Harron: As administration?
Mr Wildman: To be fair, out-of-classroom expenditures. Obviously that definition is very crucial to determining how we protect the classroom and education for the kids. In your efforts -- obviously you've been making significant efforts over a period of time -- have you been able to get accurate figures in some way to develop a definition which is adequate for you to know how much is being spent on classroom education in the Toronto board as opposed to out-of-classroom expenditures?
Ms Harron: As I mentioned, we've been trying to get straight answers for a long time. As the previous speaker was saying, he believes the Toronto board puts 85% of every taxpayer dollar into the classroom.
Mr Wildman: No, into schools.
Ms Harron: Into the schools, sorry. But all I know is that as president of the parents' association at my high school, every year I would receive a stack of memoranda, policy directives, guidelines, on and on -- and no money for textbooks. To me, materials which are produced by the board for teachers are not classroom material. Texts which are actually used with the children are classroom material.
Mr Wildman: Whether they're inside a classroom or not.
Ms Harron: You can take all these memoranda and policy directives into the classroom, but that doesn't make them learning materials.
Mr Wildman: No, I meant the other way: The school materials might be used by teachers and students outside the walls of a classroom.
Ms Harron: Yes, if they're being used by students.
Mrs Boyd: I understand your frustration about what you see as an administration-heavy kind of system. One of the problems that the committee has, and indeed that legislators have, is that the situation in the city of Toronto is quite different from what it is in many other boards --
Ms Harron: I'm aware of that.
Mrs Boyd: -- where there has been a very strong effort over the many years to try and cut some of that administrative structure away, so that if you look at some of the poorer boards, you see there are very few consultants, very few of these layers you describe. One of the things that worries me, given these hearings are so predominantly in Toronto, is that we might lose sight of the fact that while that may be an experience you have, the committee is likely to hear a very different thing in some other areas.
Ms Harron: I did mention that in my presentation. For instance, if you look at Burkevale school in Penetanguishene, it's only by historical anomaly that it managed to avoid the big amalgamation of the 1960s that produced mega-boards which were less responsive to their communities and experienced these huge overgrowths of administration. The school board has one school in it. That might sound like a very inefficient way to run things, but the trustees on that board make $200 a month and have one school to look after. The trustees in Toronto make over $2,000 a month and have over 10 schools to look after. I think you get much better service from the one-school board.
I would be very worried about setting up school councils, which are supposed to have some kind of authority, and leave school boards in place, because I think you're just going to be adding another layer of administration. On the other hand, if schools could apply to the ministry for independent board status, not as different schools from public schools -- I'm not talking about separate religious schools; I'm just talking about being able to receive your funding directly from the province. Bigger is not better. I think we are learning that.
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Mrs Boyd: It's not necessarily a very equitable proposition that you're making, though, is it? Because it really depends entirely upon the ability of parents to spend the time they would have to spend in that kind of parent-run school you're talking about.
Ms Harron: I'm not aware that Burkevale, for instance, is in a high-income area.
Mrs Boyd: I'm not talking about high income, and it is under the public system.
Ms Harron: It's a Protestant separate school.
Mrs Boyd: But publicly funded.
Ms Harron: Yes.
Mrs Boyd: What you're talking about is essentially a variation on the charter school theme. It is the thin edge of the wedge, in many people's minds, to inequitable education.
Ms Harron: If one school board has to follow the same guidelines as everybody else -- it may sound like a charter school, but I don't think it is.
Mrs Boyd: No, but you were saying other people should be able to pull out of boards. That is a one-school board simply because of the population within a jurisdiction.
Ms Harron: Or maybe we should be going in the opposite direction from the way we went in the 1960s. We had 1,500 or 1,800 boards and reduced them to 167 or something. Maybe it's time to start to looking at going the other way. Let's determine board by board which ones are working and which ones need a drastic overhaul.
Mrs Boyd: Some would see it as a difference of opinion.
Mr Skarica: I'd like to thank you for a very entertaining and informative presentation. I'm going to ask you a couple of questions about your comments that some boards are out of control and about audits. Last week, we heard from some witnesses that you can't take any money out of education because some boards or most boards or many boards have already cut to the bone. Then after that evidence on Thursday, I saw an article in the Toronto Sun which I'd like to read to you. I'd like to have your comments. It's under the title, "Auditor's Report Scathing: Catholic Board's Finances a Mess." It indicates that an audit was done, a 24-page audit. According to the paper:
"Bureaucrats at the cash-strapped board don't monitor the $709-million budget month to month, one department doesn't know what the other is doing, and there's pressure `to understate projected expenditures...to produce an acceptable budget.'
"The report says bureaucrats don't check overspending unless it's `significant or unusual' and often have no idea they're in the hole until too late.
"Some $5.8 million was frittered away, the report says, because the board didn't keep a close eye on the number of teaching positions they were supposed to chop under the social contract. The bureaucrats didn't realize they were short until February, one month after they hired 90 new teachers."
One of the trustees said, according to the paper, that "she's `flabbergasted' with the report, which states in `black and white' the board is in a mess, something she suspected for a long time. `I would like to hold someone accountable.'
"Her colleague Dave Hogg -- noting the deficit clearly `could have been avoided' -- said 149 of the 499 employees handed pink slips last month are being cut to deal with the errors."
That's obviously a terrible situation. You say there should be an audit. Well, there's an audit done. What would you do with this type of situation?
Ms Harron: Parkinson's law says that once administration has grown beyond a certain point, it really can't be fixed. I'm afraid there may be some boards which are beyond repair. I'm not saying that as a certainty, but certainly it doesn't surprise me that an audit would reveal such chaos.
Mrs Ecker: Thank you very much for a very excellent and insightful presentation. I enjoyed it very much. One of the questions I'd like to direct to you is that the frustration many of us have when we're -- I mean, we're wrestling with our own budget pressures. Ottawa's cutting us back and we're having to wrestle with the deficit and everything and are trying to make decisions about priorities and saving here and reinvesting there. It's sometimes frustrating when we watch some of the boards, not all of them but some boards, that seem unable to do the same kind of thing. I hear a lot of comments from parents who were quite outraged about some of the decisions that have been made. What, in your view, would be the best way for the province to try to be more directive? If it is possible to be more directive, since school board trustees are duly elected officials in their own right.
Ms Harron: My experience with trustees is that they have trouble getting straight answers out of their boards. They go down to these big boards with good intentions, but they're surrounded by huge bureaucracies that have been at it a lot longer than they have and most of the time just run rings around them, in my experience.
Mr Skarica: We all know that.
Interjection.
Ms Harron: Yes, Minister. I always tell other parents who are confused and intimidated by the school system, as opposed to those who are merely infuriated, that you only have to read three books to understand how the education system works: Parkinson's Law, The Peter Principle and Yes, Minister.
Mrs Munro: Thank you very much for your presentation. It certainly gives us a lot of interesting ideas here. I have two quick questions. I go back to page 2 of your comments where you talk about the fewer sick days, that "teachers take fewer sick days," and then you state: "Many will drag themselves into school rather than fall behind in their courses. If you take away their right to save sick days, they'll spend them."
Ms Harron: I'm not saying all teachers would do that.
Mrs Munro: I have trouble with that in the sense that to me it suggests somehow there's a lack of professionalism. If you take away the days, they're going to spend them, but they don't --
Ms Harron: I'm not saying they'll pretend to be sick. I'm saying when it's one of those borderline cases where you feel just dreadful and you think -- it's different when you don't give someone a right, but when you take something away they feel resentful. Maybe they're not going to be prepared to go that extra mile under the circumstances. I don't see that there's anything to be gained by giving boards the opportunity to tamper with this.
Mrs Munro: The second question I have is further down on that page, where you make reference to the boards that "spend so much money on curriculum development." I wondered if you could tell us where you think that curriculum development should be done.
Ms Harron: Certainly not both at the provincial level and at the school board level. I think this is a terrible duplication of services when you look at the piles and piles of curriculum that came out of the ministry; for instance, in Toronto last spring teachers were handed a three-inch-thick new curriculum to implement and then in September they were told to take it out of the binder and throw it away because they had a new, revised version.
It reminds me of the Benchmarks Project. The only people who had time to read all the stuff and watch all those videos were the people who didn't have any classes to teach. This is why I talk about losing contact with reality. They get so involved in theories of education and methods of implementation that they lose sight of the basic reality of teaching kids in the classroom, giving them a textbook each.
At my daughter's school -- and this is not unusual at all -- the English teachers, the home room teachers have to coordinate their schedules very carefully because we have to pool tattered paperbacks from every grade 7 and 8 classroom, plus the library copies, in order to assemble one full set of textbooks so that they can study the book. This is ridiculous.
Mrs Munro: Are you suggesting then that there could be efficiencies in the area if we were to look at a more central distribution of curriculum support items?
Ms Harron: For instance, now that we have the Internet and the World Wide Web, the actual teachers with recent classroom experience can get together over the net and produce far better curriculum than often is produced, at vast expense, by people who haven't taught in a long time.
Mr Patten: Thank you for your presentation. I enjoyed it. You have a good sense of humour as well as a decisive mind.
I have a couple of questions. You mentioned that the school board itself could be in a position to release whole departments that could be shut down tomorrow without causing disruptions in the classroom. Would you care to identify what some of those departments might be?
Ms Harron: Certainly the departments in charge of curriculum development and professional development. In Toronto we have enough curriculum to last us for -- you know, they could certainly skate for a few years on what they've produced already. We need transportation. We need maintenance. We need a personnel department. We need a special services department. I don't think we need curriculum departments, I don't think we need all this professional development. I don't think we need 50-page parent volunteer manuals and all that stuff.
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Mr Patten: With the province moving towards centralizing curriculum province-wide under the ministry, this would enable the Toronto board to do some cutbacks. Is that what you're suggesting?
Ms Harron: Yes. Not that I'm thrilled with the kind of curriculum we get from the ministry, I think we really need to involve the College of Teachers. Let's involve teachers in this process, please.
Mr Patten: I agree. I like your thinking related to early childhood education specialists. Rather than trying to fit them all into schools where in some contexts this might be very awkward and might be highly expensive, it would perhaps be far more economical and far wiser to have your early childhood education specialists actually go outside the school to a day care centre or whatever it may be.
Ms Harron: Which is easier to transport, one adult or 30 tiny children?
Mr Patten: Yes, which to me makes a great deal of sense. I think that's a good suggestion, but that kind of presupposes flexibility. Now this bill identifies quite specifically the areas in which school boards shall make their cuts rather than providing the boards themselves with identifying the amount that needs to be found to fund this tax break, because it's all going out of education totally. I always say that because it's important. This is not staying in education. All this money found is going right out of education. But at least the flexibility you believe should stay with the boards and the schools to work out for themselves what their target is.
Ms Harron: I think we have to get back to a more community-based education system, certainly at the elementary and preschool levels.
Mr Patten: Okay. By the way, I agree with you in terms of not providing incentives or taking away incentives for teachers when others might say, "If I don't go to work, it really doesn't matter," because they don't have to have a substitute. You can appear to be quite frugal and demand a high standard of accountability, but you take away an incentive for some teachers to say, "What the hell, I'm sick," if there isn't going to be some acknowledgement that I'm making an effort and some reward for not costing the system more money. You're trading off quality with additional expense, and that's not what you want. But you talk about you should visit the gratuity itself. Could you elaborate on that?
Ms Harron: I believe it's about 70% and maybe you could reduce it to 65%, the amount of pay you get for sick pay. I'm just saying that that might actually save money, whereas I don't think this amendment is going to save any money. I think it'll cost money overall.
Mr Patten: All right. That's fine. I did have one last one and that was, you said that you'd be happy to discuss a few details in the examples of parent involvement, new curriculum, new reports when parents ask this of the school board administration. Could you give another example where you think the response is either an overreaction or an undue reaction or not an appropriate reaction when you're asking for some sort of response?
Ms Harron: You mean apart from report cards?
Mr Patten: Yes.
Ms Harron: I've referred to the amount of trees that are destroyed to produce guidelines and policy papers. Being concise is valuable. I was always taught never to say in a paragraph what I could say in a sentence, and I believe they tend to go in the opposite direction. I don't think homophobia is a good thing but I don't think we need to go on about it for 267 pages when we have no money for textbooks, that kind of thing.
First of all, the consultation process with parents was a huge joke and then when they brought the report card out, it took so long to fill out. It was a computerized report card disguised as a customized report card. Teachers had to handwrite comments from the set menu in the book they were given, and if they didn't use the exact wording in the book, they had to rehandwrite it from scratch. It took so much time to produce this document that our children had to have an extra period of pool or gym every day for two weeks so the teachers could fill out the forms. A process of assessment which is so complex that it takes away from classroom instruction is counterproductive.
The Vice-Chair: Thank you very much, Ms Harron, for your presentation.
SUSANNE EDEN
The Vice-Chair: Could we have Susanne Eden of the faculty of education of York University come forward, please. I don't believe there's a written presentation. You have 30 minutes for your presentation. That will include any questions the committee members may have. Go ahead, ma'am.
Dr Susanne Eden: My presentation this afternoon will be somewhat informal. With one week's invitation to present here today, I did not have an opportunity to prepare a written piece for you and I apologize for that, because I think when you are dealing with so much information across a broad spectrum of topics, it makes it difficult. None the less, I did not want to pass up the opportunity to speak with you this afternoon on a specific aspect of Bill 34, and that is junior kindergarten.
This afternoon what I'd like to do, in the bit of time that we have, is share some thoughts with you and then invite your questions. I would like to begin by giving you a little bit of background about myself into which you can frame my comments.
I'm a teacher of 35 years with an Ontario teaching certificate here in our province as well as having taught out west. During that time I have worked at all levels, from preschool through to the university level. I have 22 years of direct experience in working with junior kindergarten, and it's from that vantage point that I will share with you my thoughts this afternoon.
I have my doctor of education in curriculum from OISE, and when I came to do my doctoral studies, as I like to say, as a rather old lady a few years ago, having done many things in education, it was to early education that I turned my thoughts and my studies, because I have come to believe, and each year I'm in this business I believe more passionately, that the real difference in education is in the beginnings, not at the end of things.
I deal a great deal in my capacity as director of the consecutive program at York and for a short stint at the moment as associate dean, with adults in crisis, if you will -- teachers who are in our program who are undergoing difficulties. I realize increasingly that so very many of the things that become barriers in our later life don't occur when we're 30 or 35; they begin in those early years. So my commitment to early education does not waver, although at the moment probably most of my time is spent in issues related to post-secondary restructuring. I'm very much involved in both the colleges and the universities. I want you to know that because I come here with that kind of perspective.
Twenty-two years ago, as coordinator of programs in the York region Catholic school board in Richmond Hill, we were the first board outside of Metro Toronto to begin junior kindergarten, and we did not do that lightly. We did that based on our own commitment to the value of early education and to the needs of children and families moving into our region.
When we started our programs I can very clearly remember many of the discussions that went on with the trustees, with parent groups, with teachers, where certainly for us the bottom line was, what will make a difference for children and ultimately for the wellbeing of families? It wasn't a question of simply being popular and trying to get more moneys into the system so much as it was an issue of how we could address quality education for young children.
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We did a lot of looking at the Head Start literature from the United States. Some of it was quite poorly done; other pieces had a good deal of merit and spoke to the issues we were concerned about. I would say that the bottom line still ought to be that issue of what will make a difference in terms of the quality of the educational experiences for young children and the commitment that it does matter what we do with four-year-olds. They aren't an expendable commodity. It is not simply somebody looking after them so they don't run out in the street and get run over; it is a matter of setting a foundation that will have lasting repercussions for that child's life in many, many different ways, some of which of course we can't know in those earliest experiences.
One of the things that began to emerge as we observed and analysed and tracked the children who came through those early junior kindergarten programs was that they were significantly better prepared for grade 1. I can remember, for example, the first year we had children coming out of senior kindergarten into grade 1 who had been in junior kindergarten, a flood of phone calls from grade 1 teachers saying, "You have to help me figure out how to change my reading program," for example, "because these children are coming into the grade 1 program with far more skill."
There was a lot of evidence at that time of children being able to -- for want of a better word I'll use the phrase -- play the school game better once they got into grade 1. By that I mean that they were better able to cope with the culture of the school with being a more didactic and demanding setting of a grade 1 classroom. There were a number of things we saw in those early years that continued to hold up over the years when I was involved with the teachers and children in junior kindergarten.
As other jurisdictions began to move into junior kindergarten, I was in a position, partly because of my professional reputation and partly because I had done it, and also because of my studies, where I was invited to many other boards across this province as well as across the country to work with other jurisdictions in implementing junior kindergarten. I had an opportunity to see whether this was something we had been doing or whether this was something that seemed to be much more broad-based, and in fact that is the case.
One of the things, for example, that is a spinoff of this that I think is a very, very important aspect of both junior and senior kindergarten -- and when I speak of junior kindergarten, I'm really talking about programs for young children. It's a very arbitrary thing to label a four-year-old one thing and a five-year-old something else and a six-year-old. I don't take easily to that, but none the less the issue is JK. But when we think about the early school years -- and that's a term that perhaps sits better with me -- one of the things I observed, and I think having two years in that kindergarten milieu contributes significantly to this, is that families have access to resources and to services much earlier than they would.
For example, something that used to surface rather often was in the areas of speech and hearing. It's an interesting thing that -- if any of you have lived this, you will understand it -- if you have a child in your own home who has either vision or hearing problems, you may be the last person to recognize that because you become accustomed to how the child functions.
Many times over the years, because I was very much involved with not special ed so much as appropriate programming for these children, we would see children who seemed to be slow learners, or whatever the label would be put on them at that time, children who had severe behaviour problems who when they were observed by someone, that is, the teacher who really had the background to interpret these things, that teacher was able to identify that there was something else going on.
We saw a very strong link between physical wellbeing and both behaviour and learning, and that was something that wasn't expected for us. Again, people with a background in special education -- we'd share this with you -- often jump to conclusions when in fact there are other reasons. The junior kindergarten year was a year that made a big difference to us and to our children in that, because we were able to identify them much earlier, particularly if you think about speech and hearing where a year lost is a very, very big, significant chunk out of their development.
There were also issues around social development. When I talk to parent groups about social development, I've often had parents say things like, "I don't care about whether he gets along, I just want to make sure he's going to learn to read and get to the right university and all those things." When we talk about social development we're not just talking about somebody who's great to have at our party, we're talking about somebody who really can thrive within a social context, someone who can both contribute to a social context and to society and who can benefit from social contact. We often see people who are very, very bright, who are academically stellar, who cannot thrive because they don't have those social skills, and that is not to be taken lightly.
We know from all of the research for almost this entire century now in psychology on social development and sociology that the foundations of all of that behaviour is in those early years, so that extra year does seem to make a difference in terms of the kinds and qualities of experiences that contribute to healthy social as well as intellectual development.
Also it seemed to me, as I reflected back on what I had learned from my observations in working with children, one of the other places that junior kindergarten made a very significant difference in this province was around all of the issue of special education.
Some of you may not be aware of the legislation in 1979 around early identification. When we first began to look at those issues of early intervention and positive ways of supporting young children with special needs, junior kindergarten became a very important dimension of that, as it was through the early 1980s when the special education, inclusive-ed bill was introduced. It seems to me that the modest successes we've had in this province with respect to special education, with respect to special-needs children, have been successful in large measure because of our very strong programs in early education in this province.
The climate of those early years, the junior and senior kindergarten, is quite different from the rest of the schooling for a number of reasons; partly because of the play dimension, that children are allowed to be players, are allowed to learn through play, and play is respected as a vehicle for learning. The special-needs children do find a place in which they can thrive and there are very important skills that they can develop.
The consequences of quality early education have been well-documented. I went back and read over the Hansard reports from about last November, any of the ones I could find that referred to junior kindergarten, and I know that you've had a number of petitions and requests and pleas on behalf of it. I don't want this evening in the bit of time we have to get into a debate on the benefits of early education. I think that is clearly documented so very many places. We know it makes a difference to all these areas of development.
One that isn't mentioned very often is moral development, and I think it's time we looked at some of those issues, particularly if we think of grounding children in a respect for life, in a respect for one another that may address some of the issues of violence and so on that we face.
In one of the Hansard reports from I think last November a comment was made -- I'm sorry I don't know and it may be one of you who made it -- that the gap is widening between children who arrive at school emotionally, physically and intellectually stable and those who already are victims of malnutrition, abuse and uncertainty. In my role at York as director of the pre-service program, I don't do a lot of supervision at the moment, but I have done in the last few years, particularly in the large Metro areas, and many a day after I would be in a classroom, I would go home and say to my husband: "You know, I'm living on a different planet. I was not aware of what was going on in the lives of some of these children."
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I can remember, for example, going to see one of my students in a school in Scarborough. There was a little grade 1 child sitting there and she was chatting away with me and she said, "You know, I'm tired today." I said, "Are you?" And she said, "Yes, because the police came in the night and we had to go to the motel." I thought, "What is this about?" Some of you may have seen the program last week on CBC about all these little children who are being housed in motels in Scarborough. I couldn't imagine a little six-year-old being wakened in the night, although I suppose she probably wasn't even asleep, but living in this apartment with many, many people.
I find that it's very easy to say: "Well, if families would just organize themselves better, they wouldn't need these programs. If schools would just be a little more efficient, we wouldn't have to worry about junior kindergartens." I think there are a lot of things happening in the lives of children and families that can at least in some small measure be addressed through junior kindergarten.
I have a lot of concern about the proposal and the comments made by Mr Snobelen in talking about seeing this as an issue of making JK optional, as a choice. He has every confidence, according to his comments, that the directors of education and the trustees and so on will see the value of early education, but it really does come down to dollars and cents. I find it hard to know how we could equate attempting to develop quality education in this province with decimating one of the programs that has been so very successful, one of the programs for which there is a need and which can make a difference all the way through the child's academic and social development.
Some of you may look at my presentation in terms of someone who comes with a vested interest because I have spent so much of my life in this area. I don't have a vested interest. I'm coming perilously close to the end of my career. I really don't do a lot of work in early ed any more. But I think I would be remiss in not taking the opportunity to make a plea for you to consider very, very carefully what many of us in the field consider to be a very regressive step, that of taking junior kindergarten simply as an option.
Rather, I'd like to suggest several things by way of recommendation, that we examine the documents that have been produced. When the speaker before me, Ms Harron, spoke about duplication and waste, I cannot tell you how demoralizing it is to educators in this province to have lived through yet another royal commission only to see it thrown out as if it were nothing. The people on that, no matter what their partisan background, were very respected educators. The history of early education has very much been tied to your own party. To Herald a Child was one of the finest documents produced in the field of early education. It came out in 1979 and was commissioned by a Conservative government.
In the mid-1980s we had the early primary education project. Again, these were documents that I can tell you were looked at by people all over the world, not just in our own country, and we should be looking at that and building on that, not discarding it as if they counted for nothing. I think many of the issues facing you would be served much better if the educational community would get a sense that you are listening, that you do have a vision of what education can be, and that reform isn't -- when I say that word, I think of the Air Farce, the Reform Party, but educational reform needs to be educational transformation, and there's a very big difference, if we are really going to make some gains in terms of what we do with children.
I'd like to recommend that you look at some of the documents and the genesis of that information, that instead of making something that is so obviously of benefit optional, we look at ways of extending and improving. We have a long, long way to go in bridging child care, for example, and early education. That's an issue I'm quite involved in. We need to be looking at committing resources to improving education for these young children and for the education of those who are charged with both the care and the education of our youngest citizens. Ontario has been a leader in early education. It will be a sad day if we are looked upon with the regressive step of decimating our programs for young children.
The other thing I'd like to say is a caution, having listened a little bit to the end of Ms Harron's comments, that you don't base your discussions on Bill 34 only on generalizations based on the Toronto board. There are a lot of boards out there that don't have that documentation, let me tell you.
The Vice-Chair: Thank you very much for your interesting presentation. We have two minutes left for each caucus, and we start with the government side.
Mrs Munro: I certainly appreciate the comments you've made. Since we have a couple of minutes, my first question is if you can tell me if you're familiar with the intervention model that was done as a pilot project in Brockville a few years ago.
Dr Eden: I should know it and I don't. Can you tell me anything about it?
Mrs Munro: It was a zero-to-six model that looked at identifying high-risk children, and I just wondered if you were familiar with that.
The second question that sort of dovetailed on that is -- obviously, I suppose, the people in this room didn't have the benefit of JK. My question is, if you have children who have adequate health, stability and all those things, what kinds of differences are apparent between children who have JK and those who don't? I'm not talking about children who are identified as learning-disabled or any of those, but if I can use the term "normal." As I say, I look around the room and I'm assuming that none of us had the benefit of JK.
Mr Preston: There's not anybody normal either.
Interjection: A few exceptions.
Mrs Munro: My question then is in terms of the studies that would support this.
Dr Eden: One of the difficulties we're up against -- I'm sure you all know the work of Fraser Mustard; he's been trying to gather things, as have other people -- is that we have been very negligent in Canada on addressing those issues. We know them, we observe them, and you cannot be with children and not observe them, especially if you're in the intensive kinds of roles that some of us have been in.
There are several things there. One is that the times were very different when we were growing up, all of us. If you think even of an issue like children today -- I remember when Raffi gave up singing for children, he made the comment, "There's no point any more to teach children to sing when we can no longer guarantee them a safe playground in which to sing." The whole decimation of childhood, all of those issues are imbedded. So it isn't as simple as saying --
Interjection.
Dr Eden: Yes. But that whole issue of the changing culture and nature of childhood is vastly different. There are studies and there have been pieces of research, certainly a lot in the United States, that have looked at it. But we don't have very much here in Canada, and we should. It's just a matter that we don't fund those kinds of studies.
We have a recent one that we just did on play and conflict with a mixed group of three-, four- and five-year-olds. We had some studies done. There were some done through child study in the early 1980s, one Project Thrive, which looked at children coming into JK, and they tracked them on a longitudinal basis to see what happened.
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The Vice-Chair: Okay, Mr Preston, you're eager to go.
Mr Preston: Yes, very fast. First of all, I've got to congratulate you for reading Hansard from last November. I mean, it's boring enough for people here that are participating.
Interjection: I find it fascinating.
Mr Preston: You're concerned with, in JK, learning, social development and early detection of problems, which is exactly what it should be. But our first presenter said alternative staffing. Do you agree with alternative staffing for JK?
Dr Eden: I think there are some ways of doing it. I spoke to the standing committee in 1990 which was looking at certification. One of the things that I said then and I would say now is that we have to be careful we don't have a two-tiered system, as they've done in New Brunswick and some other provinces, where you put the cheap labour with the little kids and the real expensive labour with the high school. That was very much the message in 1990, and we worry about that.
Mr Preston: All right. Qualified alternative staffing. Fine.
Dr Eden: What I think we should be able to do is find some innovative ways of doing this. You don't have to have everybody with a master's degree in education; I wholly agree.
Mr Preston: All right then, alternative sites; we could have qualified alternative staffing in alternative sites.
Dr Eden: Yes, we could have.
Mr Preston: Day care.
Dr Eden: One of the places that I'm doing a lot of work right now is the Seneca lab school, and they are offering a kindergarten there which is an alternative site. But they are all qualified teachers.
Mr Patten: Dr Eden, it is a delight to receive your testimony today. I'd like to ask you, given your professional standing and interest in this area, whether you would send a list to this committee of the research that you believe is the most germane to the importance of early childhood education. I understand your definition is broader than just junior kindergarten, but that is the issue.
It would seem to me, given what you have said, that if you had a choice -- and I don't want to put words in your mouth, but these would be mine, because I've heard a lot of people talk about it. If we had a choice to make something an option, based on what I've heard, I'd make grade 12 an option now rather than junior kindergarten, given the physiological, the response of the brain, the importance of the growth patterns of the early child. What would be your reaction to that?
Dr Eden: I don't like playing one thing against another, but certainly I think the priorities have to be looked at. Without being facetious and saying, "We'll just chop off another one at that end and leave one here," we have to be looking at this as one of a piece.
If I can give an example, I have been working with the community colleges from the vantage point of the university for five years now, and we've developed a new teacher ed program at York which is quite unique in the country. It's our foot-in-the-door model, but what we did with that was recognize, for example, professional credits from the college against both the undergraduate and the faculty of ed, which takes an entire year off of their studies. That's a significant saving, it seems to me. I think there are places in education where we can be doing that without us playing one against the other in looking at programs like that.
Mr Wildman: Very quickly, actually, at the risk of convincing those who think that JK should not be compulsory, both Mr Patten and I, I think, attended JK in Ottawa.
Mr Preston: I still stand by my statement.
Mr Wildman: That was before I then moved to the country and attended the rest of my elementary schooling in a one-room school.
Isn't it important to recognize what is actually happening out there right now? I have two questions, really. The first is, what's actually happening right now is there was the previous government, right or wrong, made a choice and said, "Okay, we're going to get rid of the fifth year in the secondary level," the assumption being that this would free up resources to put more in at the early childhood end. You can make arguments about whether or not that was the right thing to decide, but that was what was decided. But what's happening now is we are in fact cutting off at the top end but we're making it optional and cutting funding at the other end as well, so that we're cutting at both ends of the system.
My question is, it's been said by a lot of people, including Mr Snobelen, that they don't argue that early childhood education is of value to disadvantaged children, and there are many studies that indicate that. But wouldn't you agree that it is probably better for all students, whether they come from so-called disadvantaged backgrounds or not, to have the opportunity to develop at an earlier stage and have the skills required later on to do well academically and in terms of life skills generally?
Dr Eden: I think the word "disadvantaged" has many interpretations. If you look at the statistics even on street kids, a lot of those children are not from poor homes; they're from very affluent families. We haven't got a lot of time, but I can tell you, working in some extremely affluent areas in my career in working with parents, I remember saying to parents who were trying to have the child identified as gifted before he came into JK because he'd had the nanny who had forced -- what David Elkind says, force-feeding the tomato, and the plant grows with no roots. These children sometimes are like that.
So I think we have to be very careful, first of all, saying, "Oh, well, if you are poor, if your parents are poor, you're automatically disadvantaged," because you can have some children who obviously are not. Those issues, I think, have to be put to rest. I think all children benefit. My own studies of children's play certainly show that economic resources are not the telling feature in success. They are not in any sense the telling feature.
Mr Wildman: I don't think, to be fair to Mr Snobelen or others, when they say "disadvantaged," they necessarily just mean economically. It could be a person who has suffered from neglect or abuse or something, even if they are well off financially, the family. But in a sense, all children benefit from the ability to socialize with one another, and that then helps them in the later stages of education and in life later on as well, surely.
Dr Eden: That's right.
The Vice-Chair: And with that, thank you very much, Dr Eden, for your presentation. Dr Eden: If any of you wish to talk to me further, I would be more than happy to. I can be reached at York University at 736-5009.
The Vice-Chair: Thank you very much for that offer.
Mr Preston: I've got a question for you all, off the record.
The Vice-Chair: No, no, just a minute now.
Mr Preston: After 150 years, why do we still have eight grades of elementary school? Think about it.
The Vice-Chair: All right, and we'll deal with that tomorrow starting at 3:30. We're adjourned.
The committee adjourned at 1808.