Editorial on school closures was timely

David King

I believe that public school boards are a legitimate body of local general government ("Closure of a different kind," editorial, ATA News, March 15, 2005).

Until 1994, school boards had a means of raising money for purposes that were not directly related to the program of studies and the curriculum, but were nevertheless valid and valued in/by the local community. For example, if the people of Empress wanted to keep the local school open, they could let the trustees know, and the trustees could bear the community’s desires in mind and raise money to make continued operation happen, without having to ask permission of the provincial government. Leaving aside the more often discussed issue—the merit (or otherwise) of the government’s takeover of all responsibility for funding in 1994—one unanticipated outcome was that school boards lost the means of funding decisions that used the school to represent community development, or recreational development, or economic development, or social development. Alberta Learning had no mandate to provide funds for anything other than fulfilling its own mandate (attend to the program of studies and the curriculum). Alberta Learning didn’t understand the other issues and it didn’t care to get involved. Frankly, when one considers the perspective of the department, one has to be sympathetic to its conclusion: it was wrong to have forced involvement on them. To put it another way, one should not be surprised that the department that terminated the Designated Community School Program would approach the broader question of school facilities and see no connection between strong communities and the presence of attractive and much used school buildings (another argument for reasonable local autonomy, by the way).

The key problem is that when the legislature took away from school boards the right to raise money for worthwhile general purposes, it did not compensate by providing unconditional provincial funds—from other government departments—to support these general purposes.

David King is the executive director of the Public School Boards’ Association of Alberta and a former minister of education.