Manitoba parents have been studying up on the proposed changes to the province’s education system and the details have left some parents raising their hands and asking questions.
Lisa Woelk has three children who have risen through the public education system.
As a parent, she is worried about what the changes may mean for students.
“It sounds like we would be gaining as a province financially, but then I wonder what costs come to gaining financially?” Woelk said. “What will we be losing in our schools, divisions, extra programming, that kind of thing?”
The Progressive Conservative government plans to eliminate all but one of Manitoba’s elected school boards, merge school divisions and set up a province-wide education authority.
Education Minister Cliff Cullen said Monday changes to kindergarten to Grade 12 schooling are aimed at cutting $40 million in administration costs and redirecting the money to the classroom.
A bill before the legislature would replace elected school boards in 37 school divisions — every one except the one that governs the French school division. The government says that would make decisions more local and more centralized.
Community councils would be set up at every school to involve parents.
Woelk says she has seen the challenges of recruiting parents to boards and is concerned about this change.
“I’ve been on parent boards when my kids were in elementary school, I was personally involved when my kids were in junior high. I could tell there were less parents to draw from that were willing to be part of the boards,” she said.
“When I was invited to our local high school’s parent board meeting a few years back, I was the only parent who showed up and there’s over 1,200 students in the school. There’s less parent engagement as kids get older.”
Read the plan here:
Another change is that instead of the school divisions, there would be 15 geographic regions that would each elect one member to a provincial advisory council.
The council would provide input to a new provincewide education authority, which would consist primarily of government appointees.
It would set many education policies and centralize collective bargaining, procurement and workforce planning.
Parent Paul Betts also has some concerns over the proposed plans.
“What makes us think that central decision making is better than local decision making?” he asked.
“There are some things I found to be hopeful beyond my initial concerns about democracy and local decision making, one of those was that the province linked one of their pillars to a poverty reduction strategy. That’s a good thing.”
Premier Brian Pallister says this new plan would help bring equality to the education system.
“Right now we have a system where rich school divisions can do way better programming and have more resources for their kids than poorer ones. We are going to deal with that and this is why is why this centralized authority in terms of educational funding and so on is going to work better for families who like the families I grew up on faced some financial challenges.”
The changes are expected to be in place by the summer of 2022, following a review that began in 2019.
— With files from The Canadian Press.
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