Personal faculties will accumulate almost half a billion {dollars} in public funding from the B.C. authorities throughout this college yr. That is along with different public subsidies to personal faculties — together with elite prep faculties — like tax exemptions.
The funding — $491 million — is greater than double the quantity offered in 2000, even adjusting for inflation. This far outstrips the expansion in funding to public Ok-12 training over the identical interval.
In distinction, half the provinces in Canada, sensibly sufficient, don’t present this kind of public funding to personal faculties in any respect.
The majority of the non-public college subsidies in B.C. stream to 2 main classes: initially, spiritual faculties, and, second, high-tuition elite prep faculties.
The general public subsidy is allotted utilizing a formulation that gives funding at a charge of both 50 per cent or 35 per cent of per-student funding within the public college system. Faculties that cost extra in tuition charges and spend extra per scholar get the decrease stage of funding.
Extra types of public subsidy for personal faculties embody property tax exemptions, tax breaks on donations and tuition and even a toddler care tax credit score on a portion of tuition attributed to recess and lunch, a tax benefit that prep faculties like Vancouver’s St. George’s Faculty have promoted to their clientele.
Do most British Columbians need public assets directed to the non-public college system? The reply, maybe not surprisingly, isn’t any.
Repeated public opinion polls have discovered that about two-thirds of British Columbians oppose public funding for personal faculties, with this quantity rising to 4 in 5 opposed within the case of elite prep faculties.
At the same time as subsidies stream to personal faculties, funding for public faculties has did not sustain with wants.
Insufficient funding for college kids with particular instructional wants is without doubt one of the most evident gaps. An evaluation from the BC Lecturers’ Federation discovered particular training funding from the province solely covers about two-thirds of faculty districts’ precise particular training spending, a shortfall that “creates austerity pressures to ration particular training providers on the district stage and ends in the redirection of funds from different areas with their very own urgent wants.”
For no less than twenty years public faculties have endured continual underfunding, unlawful ripping up of lecturers’ contracts, college closures and growth of sophistication sizes beneath the earlier BC Liberal provincial authorities. Instructor shortages and recruitment challenges are one other long-standing drawback that has solely been worsened by the pandemic. On condition that B.C. has among the many lowest beginning salaries for lecturers within the nation, about $8,000 decrease than in Alberta, that is no shock.
B.C.’s educators have completed a exceptional quantity beneath these circumstances. However there’s a value to pay for underfunding. There may be an pressing have to put money into our public faculties and repair the damaged provincial funding formulation, particularly because it pertains to particular instructional wants. Few issues are extra vital to a society’s long-term success than a powerful and inclusive public training system.
B.C. has greater than sufficient capability to make that reinvestment. We’re an especially wealthy province, however an more and more unequal one.
Taking virtually $500 million in taxpayer funding from non-public faculties and redirecting it to the general public system is one measure that might assist.
That easy change to funding laws would supply a seven-per-cent enhance in public college funding to handle the wants of scholars.
Personal college backers say that if subsidies cease, some college students will transfer again into the general public system, growing prices.
That could be so. Nevertheless there isn’t any easy relationship between non-public college enrolments and public subsidy ranges. For instance, Alberta has larger non-public college subsidy charges than B.C. however decrease enrolment ranges.
Regardless, if there was a development of personal college college students returning to public school rooms after the withdrawal of subsidies, that’s all to the great. A powerful common public training system could be one of many nice equalizers in our society.
One apparent place to begin is phasing out public funding to the elite, costly prep faculties labeled as “Group 2” beneath the province’s funding rubric. These faculties, with excessive tuition charges, obtain greater than 10 per cent of publicly funded subsidies to personal faculties.
The group consists largely of elite faculties like Vancouver’s St. George’s, which prices tuition charges of $29,600 per yr for “day college” college students (rising to over $60,000 per yr for boarding college students).
It’s simply certainly one of greater than two dozen publicly sponsored non-public prep faculties, amongst them Crofton Home Faculty, with $27,200 tuition, West Level Gray Academy ($26,860), Stratford Corridor ($28,670), York Home Faculty ($26,250) and Shawnigan Lake Faculty ($33,205).
All topped up with taxpayer funding.
Public faculties have been underfunded for a lot too lengthy on this province and college students, together with these with particular instructional wants, will not be receiving the assets they want.
The excellent news is B.C. has each capability to shut the funding hole and reinvest in public training. Reasonably than persevering with to massively subsidize non-public faculties, these assets ought to be redirected to constructing stronger public faculties for all. ![[Tyee]](https://thetyee.ca/design-article.thetyee.ca/ui/img/yellowblob.png){kind=small}