School calls for funding increase

Finance Minister Jamie Muir is promising Nova Scotia’s budget will be made public around April 29. With revenues down, and Muir’s insistence that the budget will be balanced, parents and educators in the Tri-County Region are concerned the government may ask schools to get by on what they had last year.

Education inflation amounted to 3.5 per cent last year, according to Barton Consolidated School principal Gaylene Sabine, “And we need an additional one per cent to offset funds used in the past year to avoid teaching cuts.”

Provinces can recover from deficits, but cuts to school funding means that the quality of education suffers, she said. “Students can’t be shortchanged in the quality of education,” said Sabine.

Last year, the Tri-County Regional School Board faced the prospect of cutting 24 teaching positions and 12 positions at the board office until the province provided a last minute grant of $500,000 that enabling the board to reinstate 12 teaching positions.

If the province provides the school board with the same amount of basic funding as last year and no new funds for repairs and renovations, it will mean a $1.8 million shortfall, said Sabine. “That kind of shortfall would have a lasting impact on students. There would be fewer music and physical education programs, fewer resource teachers, and larger classes—meaning less individual attention.”

The Barton principal said parents and students will be expressing their concerns in letters to Premier Rodney Macdonald, Education Minister Judy Streatch and deputy education minister Dennis Cochrane, as well as cabinet ministers Chris d’Entremont, MLA for Argyle, and Richard Hurlburt, MLA for Yarmouth.