See Candy’s note for more details ( edited a little bit to hide some personal information ):

HI all

I would like to share these wonderful news with you, especially for those that are not able to come to the meeting last night:

According to Mari Rutka, our school trustee, under the latest Program Revitalization:

Arbor Glen, Cliffwood and Highland Junior will remain status quo i.e. no change

The boundary for A.Y. Jackson will also remain unchanged. New programs will be reviewed for both A.Y. Jackson and George Vanier. However this will not bring any change to the boundary for both A.Y. Jackson. This means that the number of students being admitted to A.Y. Jackson from our community will be the same.

Three cheers!!!

Thanks very much for all the hard work from everyone. You have been such a wonderful team to work with. Especially for Li who’s been very diligent in maintaining the blog, being our voice to the group and coordinating with other school groups. Also Pat for her great input and advice from her expertise in the education field, sound recommendation from her passion for the teaching profession and her love for the community.

Ann, great appreciation for putting the names of the petition together, we are so glad that we don’t have to use this as our backup plan. We will surely save it for the future if school issue warrant the use of it. Thanks again and good luck to your upcoming exams. Please also express our gratitude for the enthusiastic support from your classmates and friends.

Have a wonderful summer and let’s welcome the new principal to Arbor Glen in the new school year. Her current school does have a good academic record (in EQAO). Let’s all work together to ensure that the excellent achievement we have been enjoying here at Arbor Glen will be sustained under the new leadership. All our efforts as concerned parents and closely knitted neighbourhood count.

Take good care and all the very best.

Candy

Dear Ms. Fung,

Thank you for your e-mail and keeping this office informed about the District School Boards proposed funding for schools.

Councillor Shiner appreciates receiving these updates and being made aware of the communities concerns regarding this matter.

Best Regards,

Rita Hebert for

Councillor David Shiner

416-395-6413

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

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

Hi Mari

Hope you’ve had a wonderful March break with your family.

First of all let us thank you for listening to our views. Your note of March 9^th, 2007 is the best gift for us to start our March break. We are so glad to hear that you have decided to drop Option Z which called for the closing/combining of schools in Willowdale. Big applause from all of us!

In addition, we are delighted to learn that the school council meeting at Arbor Glen is now set for March 22 (this Thursday) at 7pm. We think this will be an excellent opportunity for us to work with you on what needs to be done next.

During this agonizing waiting since we communicated, we did some research and here is the information gathered so far.

(Please correct me if the following data does not reflect the true situation as I am just quoting them from the source indicated).

As indicated in North York Mirror of March 16:

According to the new data released last Tuesday by Statistics Canada (based on information filed out by Canadians on census day on May 6, 2006), overall Toronto grew 0.9% over 2001 to 2006, while North York’s population increased 2.7%.

However according to the information from ETFO website:

While total operating funding for all school boards has increased by 11%; one board, Toronto, has seen a decrease in operating funding taken inflation and enrolment into account – Toronto in fact dropped by 3.3% from 1998 to 2006,. Is this reasonable given the increased population in Toronto , especially in North York where our Willowdale community resides?

It also talked about the gap in funding between elementary and secondary education . Funding to elementary school is substantially lower than secondary education. Foundation Grant , after adjusting for additional funding for primary class size (20 per class) and special education, elementary is $4,474 per student Vs $5,178 for secondary, a difference of $704 or 14%, despite the current emphasis on importance of early childhood education.

We understand that the tremendous strains on schools along the Yonge and Finch corridor due to rapidly increasing high rises needs to be addressed. As pointed out to David Zimmer’s office, we need more funding and a more equitable allocation per capita (students) so that increased expenditure for increased population, instead of disrupting well established areas like Willowdale and Scarborough .

Having said that, it is good news that Kathleen Wynne, our Education Minister, indicated today (Metro News) that schools get $781 million boost from Ontario government.

Would any of this fund be attributed to reduce the gap between expenditure ($120 million) and fund allocated ($20 million) as indicated in the Program Revitalization? If not, should we ask for more funding from the board, or the Provincial/Federal government?

Shall we add this to the Agenda of our school council meeting?

What we want to achieve is a more balanced budget for the TDSB so that this school closure issue won’t resurface from time to time, we need to find a long term solution that can assure reasonable funding is available for TDSB to provide quality education for our kids, without closing/combining of schools.

If more funding is the answer, how we can help to get the funding required to balance the books for TDSB. How we can work together with you to canvass more funding from Provincial/Federal government.

To be effective in our quest, we need to have information (e.g. financials/budget) to understand the extent of the shortfall/deficits. In order that we can help, we need facts and frankness from the board so that we can work together.

We sincerely hope that you agree with us that by working together, we can make a difference.

Thanks and we look forward to meeting you shortly.

Candy

Arbor Glen Community & Concerned Parents

“The plan was called “Option Z”. Parents have made it clear that they do not support this option. So we will NOT be doing it.”

Thanks for all of you who support our petition so TDSB backed down from Option Z, period.

However, she did not mention what the next option is. We should not sit back.

Please keep involved to save the high quality education for our kids and communities.

Thanks Vajira!

Hello Mari Rutka,

I am concerned about the Revitalization Program proposed by the TDSB and how it will affect my child’s future.

Good quality education to my kid is paramount important to me. We invested in housing in the neighborhood of Arbor Glen to accomplish this as we all know Arbor Glen is doing really well(Ranked No 1 twice). This is achieved through the commitment of the staff utilizing the prevailing facilities,giving a solid educational foundation to small kids to be good citizens.

It’s difficult to understand why the TDSB want to disturb smoothly run schools and implement the Revitalization program, other than for optimizing the facilities and financial constrains? If this is the case what quality and safety levels can parents expect under the the proposed project mixing different age levels and expanding school population.

I am not against changes but it should be viable in the long run but the yard stick should not only be the dollar value but also the quality of education we give to our children and the vast benefits gained through.

Thank you,

Vajira

for revitalization program. Thank Candy for her great effort !

Dear Kathleen

Revitalization Program - Arbor Glen P.S.

The reason I am writing is to voice our concerns with respect to the proposal put forward by the Revitalization Program (RP) to close Arbor Glen P.S.

Arbor Glen has consistently achieved excellent academic results – ranked as No. 1 by Fraser Institute for outstanding academic achievements during the past five years in EQAO testing. Toronto Sun recently published an article regarding ranking of over 1,000 schools in GTA, Arbor Glen is again ranked No. 1. The publication from C D Howe Institute published by Toronto Star yesterday also proves that Arbor Glen has been achieving excellent results. Arbor Glen is valued by so many through various generations and new comers in the community. The reason is very obvious – it brings out the best in our children. It is very focused on behavoral education. The team of staff is extremely dedicated to their work that we are amazed at all the wonderful activities during lunch and the after school programs that provide very good development aids for our kids.

We are not against changes. However changes have to be the right ones, which should truly reflect the essence of the RP. Arbor Glen is neither below 65% utilization (it is running at about 80% capacity, at the target level set for funding, and projected to go up) nor is it so old that it needs a lot of repair and maintenance. With Highland running at 100% capacity and situated at such a busy and accident prone intersection, long flight of stairs posing potential danger to younger children, it is definitely not the right option for consolidating Arbor Glen or Cliffwood regular English into.

The enclosed information binder contains information supporting our proposal to keep Arbor Glen. A copy of this information binder has been provided to the following individuals:

1. Mari Rutka, our school trustee, during our recent ward meeting on Feb 15, 2007.
2. David Zimmer, MPP, during our meeting on Feb 16, 2007.
3. David Shiner, Councillor on Feb 23, 2007 (by courier).

Both David Zimmer and David Shiner are very supportive of our rationale for proposing to keep Arbor Glen P.S. They both feel that we have very valid points supporting our proposal.

I understand from speaking with other parents that you have been a very strong advocate for parents regarding their school issues. I would appreciate if you could kindly help us find other alternatives that can be beneficial to the community as well as meeting the objectives of the RP.

Thank you very much for your kind attention to this matter and we look forward to hearing from you.

Sincerely,

Candy

Arbor Glen Community & Concerned Parents

Arbor Glen did excellent job. According to the report, Arbor Glen achieved 96% for Grade 3 and 99% for Grade 6.

Please go to this link to see the new school rating:
http://www.thestar.com/article/186664 (Toronto school result:
http://www3.thestar.com/static/PDF/070301_toronto_schools.pdf)

Thank Phillip for providing the links.

Candy contacted People for Education ( http://www.peopleforeducation.com/ ), an organization dedicated to the ideal of a fully publicly-funded education system in Ontario. See the following note. People for Education has forwarded Candy’s note to its members. Thanks Candy !

Dear People for Education,

I was recommended by my friend to get in touch with your organization regarding our concerns for the Revitalization Program put forward by TDSB, using Willowdale, Toronto as a pilot project.

The program includes consideration to close 10 schools in Willowdale, including Arbor Glen P.S. which is in our neighbourhood. Our residents and parents in the community are very concerned about this and during the past few weeks, about 200 of them have shown support to keep the school by signing the petition. This peition together with information binders about why this school should be kept have been forwarded to Mari Rutka, school trustee; David Zimmer, MPP and David Shiner, councillor.

Following are the responses received so far:

Mari Rutka: “I wanted you to know that staff is starting to put together other option sets based on the feedback so far. There will be many more sets, though, I anticipate, before we get to the one that works for Willowdale.”

David Zimmer: while he was sympathetic to our cause, the Provincial Government only provide the funds to the various Boards of Education and have no say on how the funds are spent. However he likes to be in the loop of the communication with Mari.

David Shiner: his office indicated that school boards now come under the Provincial Government. Although David Shiner would love to help with our cause, unfortunately it is a Provincial matter and his hands are tied. However he likes to be in the loop of the communication with Mari.

We are hoping that your organization can provide advice or support as to how we can pursue/alleviate our voices so that it can be represented to the school board and the committee that oversees this program.I would appreciate if you could let us know whether you are the appropriate contact or redirect us to the right person.

Thank you so much for your attention.

Regards,

Candy