School Maintenance in Calgary
Recently, as has been reported in the Calgary media, many of the older schools in the city require significant maintenance to bring them back up to a level that would make the schools useable.
Minister tours schools with leaky roofs, plastic bags on windows
The Calgary Board of Education and many pundits have indicated that the problem is that the Province of Alberta hasn't provided sufficient funding for the schools.
I see this problem as evidence of why the Trustees on the CBE should be fired and the Board dissolved altogether.
The Board of Education has the responsibility to run the schools. They avoided spending money on maintenance so they could meet the demands of the teacher's union, and reduce class sizes and all those "easy to sell at the polls" ideas. But they were derelict in their duty to maintain the schools.
This is because they knew that if they ignored it, the provincial government would baili them out. This is because the Board of Education is responsible for spending money, but not for raising it. This situation will always end up with poor decision making. If the Board raised it's own taxes the board would not be so foolish because they would have to ask the people for the money. But asking the province is easy.
Therefore, since we cannot give the Board of Education taxing powers, we should get rid of the board altogether. This would leave the Provincial Government to run the schools. This is also not acceptable because the distance would make it impossible to make the school system responsive to the needs of it's customers (the parents and students).
Therefore, the correct answer is to privatize the schools and use a voucher system. Additionally, the province would set out requirements of how much money the schools must spend on maintenance - or rather set standards for maintenance and building integrity. The individual schools would have to manage their money to meet the needs of the customers. If an individual school ran into problems with maintenance, the parents who chose that school for their children could blame no one but themselves.
The market forces would ensure that such events would not happen in the future and the government wouldn't be forced to bail out a city's schools again.
Minister tours schools with leaky roofs, plastic bags on windows
The Calgary Board of Education and many pundits have indicated that the problem is that the Province of Alberta hasn't provided sufficient funding for the schools.
I see this problem as evidence of why the Trustees on the CBE should be fired and the Board dissolved altogether.
The Board of Education has the responsibility to run the schools. They avoided spending money on maintenance so they could meet the demands of the teacher's union, and reduce class sizes and all those "easy to sell at the polls" ideas. But they were derelict in their duty to maintain the schools.
This is because they knew that if they ignored it, the provincial government would baili them out. This is because the Board of Education is responsible for spending money, but not for raising it. This situation will always end up with poor decision making. If the Board raised it's own taxes the board would not be so foolish because they would have to ask the people for the money. But asking the province is easy.
Therefore, since we cannot give the Board of Education taxing powers, we should get rid of the board altogether. This would leave the Provincial Government to run the schools. This is also not acceptable because the distance would make it impossible to make the school system responsive to the needs of it's customers (the parents and students).
Therefore, the correct answer is to privatize the schools and use a voucher system. Additionally, the province would set out requirements of how much money the schools must spend on maintenance - or rather set standards for maintenance and building integrity. The individual schools would have to manage their money to meet the needs of the customers. If an individual school ran into problems with maintenance, the parents who chose that school for their children could blame no one but themselves.
The market forces would ensure that such events would not happen in the future and the government wouldn't be forced to bail out a city's schools again.
posted by Technical Bard | 11:57
1 Comments:
"since we cannot give the Board of Education taxing powers"
Don't be so sure about that. Vancouver has managed to give taxing powers to both its Park Board and its Transit Authority. Despite Calgary's admitted leftist municipal voting patterns, they're far from reaching the sort of big civic government you see out west.
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