Save Arbor Glen

After carefully reading and understanding the TDSB’s funding information, Candy followed up with a note to Mari by some observations and suggestions. Here is Mari’s reply ( blue text )  on Apr 19.

Dear Candy,

Thank you for taking the time to reach this deep level of understanding. Unfortunately, while the school board knows and has repeatedly explained the numerous discrepancies and misalignments of funding you outline below, we have had difficulty having some of these problems addressed. I am copying your analysis to some of the people in our board and in the ministry of education as I think they might also find it of interest. They may also have comments for you that they’d wish to share with us. See my further comments below.

Mari

 

---

Candy’s note:

Hi Mari

After studying the information you forwarded earlier, we have the following observation: While enolment declines, costs don’t decline at the same rate - Although there is decline in the no of students, you still have to pay the same expenses for maintaining the school.

Fixed costs (costs that do not change when the volume of activities or enrolment changed).

e.g. you still need the school being maintained though no. of students declines. Airconditioning, heating, maintenance and repair won’t change though you may have less people.

This is absolutely true! And it is an ongoing problem. Our difficulty, as with the step costs you site next, is in determining where to draw the line. When is the decline in a specific school’s population enough that it no longer makes sense to continue supporting the cost of keeping a whole building open? What other factors, such as proximity to other schools, need and cost of using busses, physical state of the building, availability of community use space, availability of community greenspace, affect where the line is drawn? But it is more complex than that. See next answer.

Step costs (these costs tend to stay at the same level until the next level of change is reached)

No. of teachers/salaries – these tend to stay at the same level until the no. of students is reduced by say 20 to 25 per class, even when you have 18 students, you still have to pay for one teacher. This is a good example for step costs.

This is a good example and, in fact, some have pointed out that the decline in overall student population that we have experienced over the last 5 years works out to about 2 or less students per class – so how can we possibly reduce the number of classes? Unfortunately, the reality is that, in the aggregate, we have still lost more students than most school boards in this province have in total. In five years time, we anticipate that 25% of our school space will be empty. If students were widgets (which of course they aren’t) and we could fill up each school to 100% capacity (which is the direction the provincial government would like us to move towards), this would mean we would not need and could close one in four schools in this city. But, again, reality is not so neat and tidy. As I know you know, there are all kinds of problems with this ranging from different levels of population growth and decline in different neighbourhoods, to unpredictable elements in future population projections, loss of greenspace and loss of community use. See square footage discussion in your proposed funding base below for further difficulties.

Variable/Semi variable costs (costs that change according to the volume of activities or enrolment)

e.g. for supplies and stationeries, fewer students mean lower consumption of supplies.

This at least is something that we can deal with quite well! Unfortunately, because funding is given per student, fewer students also means less funding, so it is not as if there are any savings to be made here that we could use anywhere else.

ESL

Again our question is who’s subsidizing who? School or the program.

At this point, the amount of funding that we are given for ESL is most definitely subsidizing many other unfunded or underfunded cost pressures. But there is a bit of what might be seen as a shell game going on here. The amount of funding given here, some say, is deliberately more than would otherwise be given for ESL precisely so we can use the funding for other things. I have been told, in fact, that the rate at which this funding is given is based on old population statistics that are higher than our current reality and that this is done to give us extra money. It’s a bit frustrating, though, to have this funding labelled as ESL. It allows the provincial government to say, on the one hand, that they give us plenty of money for ESL and then, on the other hand say they don’t need to give us money for energy costs or other things because we can use the money from ESL.

Learning Opportunities Grant

Reduced by 23% since 2005. Over $100 million from the grant were used to help cover gap in funding for teachers’ salaries.

The situation here has much in common with ESL above.

This also adds to the fact that declining in enrolment do not necessarily result in reduction in salaries. That’s why salaries need to be subsidized from other programs/grants.

In fact, declining enrolment has nothing and everything to do with reductions in salaries.

With respect to individual employees, having less funding has nothing to do with how much each employee is paid. This is determined through collective agreements. As I think I’ve mentioned before, many of our employees make more than people in similar jobs in other parts of the province, in part to compensate for the costs of living in a large city.

With respect to teachers, they are funded in the variable cost way you describe above. Fewer students means less funding for teachers. On the other hand, the province has given us more funding in the last 2 years for certain kinds of teachers, such as those for the class cap of primary elementary grades. On a per teacher basis, though, the school board still comes up short by about 2% (which, considering the tens of thousands of teachers we have, adds up to about $3.5 million) because of our higher than average individual teacher salaries. So, overall, we certainly don’t make money and, in fact, lose some money here.

Proposed funding basis

1. Certain expenditure should be funded per sq ft e.g. energy, repair/maintenance. (p 13 of 2006-7 TDSB final budget – downloaded from the TDSB website). Square footage: elementary school remain same at 2,320,252 from 2005-6 to 2006-7 , whereas secondary schools edged up from 1,585,773 to 1,608,878 Therefore expenses relating to energy, repair/maintenance should increase.

Such expenditures are funded per square foot. Our problem is that the rate was set back in the mid 1990s and has barely budged since then. Interestingly, the provincial government allows more for energy and maintenance per square foot for their own buildings than they allow us. Queen’s Park can afford to be kept up and shiny, but schools can’t. (MPPs have also raised their salaries to four times or more what trustees are paid and, like councillors, have several staff members to assist them, benefits and large expense accounts. TDSB trustees make the most of any in the province at about $25,000 a year with no funding for staff assistance, no benefits and very small expense accounts. Not that I’m complaining. . . . .)

1. Caretakers, principal, specialty teachers, librarian – these cost should not change based on decline in enrolment.

Of course every school needs these people, and, in fairness, the government has given us some money towards making sure they are there. The problem (if it is a problem), again, is that this is tied to the number of students. So, if we keep a lot of buildings open with few students in each, we don’t have enough of these people to go around (or we need to take money from ESL and LOI etc. in order to pay for the extra people to staff each building – see ESL/LOI above).

1. No of teachers/salaries – decline should reach a certain level before teachers salaries can be reduced i.e. decline in enrolment has to reach 20 to 25 students per school before the no of teacher can reduce by one.

That is, in fact, what happens. With a “class-worth’s” drop in enrolment, a school loses a teacher. But we also lose a teacher’s worth of funding. So it doesn’t help.

Above points 2 and 3 are further proven by the fact that despite decline in enrolment from 257,280 in 2004-5 to 249,658 in 2006-7 i.e. 3% (p 9 of 2006-7 TDSB final budget) , number of teachers and school based staff remain rather static (“TDSB School Staff and Enrolment” p13 of TDSB’s Environment over the next 4 years – Presentation to Trustees Nov 25, 2006), before accounting for primary class size. In addition teachers salaries/benefits increased by $56 million or 3.7% from $1,522M in ‘05/06 to $1,579M in ‘06/07 (p 119 of 2006-7 TDSB final budget), probably reflecting adjustments for inflation, additional incentive to cover higher cost of living in the city to attract good teachers, and also partly due to primary class size (JK to grade 3 – 20 students per teacher by 2008?)

Teachers salaries/benefits account for about 70% of the total TDSB budget of $2,255 million. 3% decline in enrolment will translate into $67 million reduction in funding as funding is based on enrolment ($2,255M x 3%) i.e. $47 million for teachers salaries/benefits ($67M x 70%) reduction in funding. As indicated above, teachers salaries/benefits in fact projected to increase by $56 million, the gap is further widen by $103 million ($47M + $56M), before factoring in the primary class size funding allocation. In our recent school council meeting at Arbor Glen on March 22, you mentioned that your ‘06/07 budget deficit is $90 to 110 million. This apparently is the majority of it. True! But there is also a substantial amount from our underfunded energy and maintenance costs and an amount that stems from Toronto items, such as pools, for which we get no provincial funding. In addition, what is not reflected in our annual budget dilemma, but looms terribly over us, is the enormous backlog of repairs and maintenance – over $1 billion – that has been repeatedly neglected year after year in order to keep school programs strong.

We have also copied in our MPP David Zimmer, Councillor David Shiner and Education Minister Kathleen Wynne on this note so that we can have their inputs as well. Councillor David Shiner mentioned in his letter of April 12, 2007 that “a thorough review of the projected funding needs is required, as well as a review of the current funding“. (Thanks a lot David for your letter).

We believe this is what we need to address in order to reformulate a more equitable and realistic funding allocation other than just enrolment i.e. % of fixed, step costs and variable/semi variable costs as explained above.

Please let me know if the above makes sense. It makes sense to me! Thanks, Candy, for working on this and for helping to bring it to the attention of others. – Mari

Thanks!

Candy Fung

Arbor Glen Community and Concerned Parents