EDUCATION AMENDMENT ACT, 1996 / LOI DE 1996 MODIFIANT LA LOI SUR L'ÉDUCATION
CONTENTS
Tuesday 14 May 1996
Education Amendment Act, 1996, Bill 34, Mr Snobelen / Loi de 1996
modifiant la Loi sur l'éducation, projet de loi 34, M. Snobelen
People for Education
Annie Kidder, member
Jack Garner
Paul Steinhauer
Ward 2 Parents' Council
Sudhatri Murthy
Abby Bushby
Ontario Taxpayers Federation
Paul Pagnuelo, executive director
STANDING COMMITTEE ON SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT
Chair / Président: Patten, Richard (Ottawa Centre / -Centre L)
Vice-Chair / Vice-Président: Gerretsen, John
(Kingston and The Islands / Kingston et Les Îles L)
Agostino, Dominic (Hamilton East / -Est L)
*Ecker, Janet (Durham West / -Ouest PC)
*Gerretsen, John (Kingston and The Islands / Kingston et Les Îles L)
*Gravelle, Michael (Port Arthur L)
*Johns, Helen (Huron PC)
Jordan, Leo (Lanark-Renfrew PC)
*Laughren, Floyd (Nickel Belt ND)
*Munro, Julia (Durham-York PC)
Newman, Dan (Scarborough Centre / -Centre PC)
*Patten, Richard (Ottawa Centre / -Centre L)
Pettit, Trevor (Hamilton Mountain PC)
*Preston, Peter L. (Brant-Haldimand PC)
*Smith, Bruce (Middlesex PC)
Wildman, Bud (Algoma ND)
*In attendance / présents
Substitutions present / Membres remplaçants présents:
O'Toole, John (Durham East / -Est PC) for Mr Pettit
Skarica, Toni (Wentworth North / -Nord PC) for Mr Jordan
Also taking part / Autre participants et participantes:
Young, Terence (Halton Centre / -Centre PC)
Martin, Tony (Sault Ste Marie ND)
Clerk / Greffière: Lynn Mellor
Staff / Personnel: Ted Glenn, research officer, Legislative Research Service
The committee met at 1534 in room 151.
EDUCATION AMENDMENT ACT, 1996 / LOI DE 1996 MODIFIANT LA LOI SUR L'ÉDUCATION
Consideration of Bill 34, An Act to amend the Education Act / Projet de loi 34, Loi modifiant la Loi sur l'éducation.
PEOPLE FOR EDUCATION
The Vice-Chair (Mr John Gerretsen): I see a quorum, so we'll start our meeting.
Our first presenter today is Annie Kidder with the People for Education organization. Welcome to our meeting. You have 30 minutes for your presentation, and that includes any questions and comments that there may be from the committee members.
Ms Annie Kidder: I'm sure I won't take 30 minutes.
The Vice-Chair: Okay. Go ahead then.
Ms Kidder: There are hardly any people here.
The Vice-Chair: They'll be drifting in in the next couple of minutes.
Ms Kidder: How nice.
Mr Peter L. Preston (Brant-Haldimand): They're in the middle of other meetings too.
Ms Kidder: All right, as long as I have a sense that somebody is listening.
The Vice-Chair: Oh, we're listening.
Ms Kidder: When I first thought about coming here to make this submission, I worried that I would have to sound like an expert. Should I start by studying up on taxation issues? Did I need to answer to the proposed legislation point by point, subsection by subsection? Then I realized that no, I had to come simply as a parent, a parent representing a group of parents. I realized that there must be room in this whole complex system for common sense. Then when I wrote the words "common sense," I thought how ironic it was that they have come to mean something so different.
I am here to represent a group called People for Education. People for Education is a coalition of parents, parent groups and others who believe in fully publicly funded education. I just want to explain where we start so you understand where we're coming from.
We started as a small group of parents in the Palmerston Home and School Association at Palmerston Junior Public School, which is a school in downtown Toronto. Our principal came to us at the beginning of this year with a request for money to pay for things that we had in the past always considered to be basics, things that in the past had been automatically paid for by boards of education.
Because of the huge cuts that have already happened over the last few years here in Toronto, principals seemed to be having to make very difficult choices: "Do I get new math books this year or do I get globes? Do I cut back on enrichment programs so that we can have more science equipment, or do I keep the artists in the schools and worry about science next year?"
Not only did it worry us that our principal was having to make these kinds of choices, but it worried us that parents were being relied upon to support the school in these ways. We were no longer being asked to fund-raise for extras, for team sweaters and graduation teas. We were being asked to fund-raise for essentials, for books, maps and microscopes.
We became very concerned about what this reliance on parent fund-raising leads to. What happens in the communities where the parents don't have extra money for these things? What happens at the schools where they can only raise a few hundred dollars a year? What happens to the notion of equality among schools? Most important, what happens to the basic premise of a public education system; that is, the notion that all children have a right to a high-quality, fully and equitably funded education?
Because our children are in the system and we felt we had no choice, we decided we would try and raise the money, but that we would spend the same amount of energy finding ways to voice our concerns about the changes that were happening. We formed a social action committee.
By December of last year, the social action committee had grown to include a few neighbouring schools. As the provincial government's policies on education became clearer, the committee grew to be something much more than a committee of parents from a few schools in downtown Toronto. We now include parents from schools in and outside Toronto, from both the separate and public boards and other people concerned about the cuts to education.
We called ourselves People for Education in the hope that the government cannot dismiss us as only a special-interest group, unless people are a special-interest group worthy of dismissal, in which case we're in real trouble. We called ourselves People for Education because education is a thing that affects everyone, not just those directly involved but the whole of society.
Our group includes parents from across the political spectrum, even ones who voted for Mr Harris. We are from all sorts of ethnic and economic backgrounds, but we have one thing in common: our belief in the importance of our children. We all believe that as children represent society's future, we must be very careful to take the best possible care of them.
We all believe in the importance of a strong education system. We all believe that education is different from business and that when it comes to our schools, the financial bottom line is not the important thing. We all believe that we need to agree upon what is essential in our schools before we start cutting arbitrarily. None of us believes that the massive cuts planned by the provincial government can be done without affecting the classroom. We all believe that if you want to think about this in a purely financial sense, children and education are one of the most important investments we can make, that investing in our children and their education makes good economic sense.
I know I'm supposed to be here to talk about this specific bill, about what it means to essentially cut junior kindergarten for most boards, to cut adult education, to take money that the citizens of a municipality have paid in taxes specifically for education and add them to the general revenue of the province, but I think others before me have addressed these issues very well. People for Education wanted me to come here to talk about this bill more generally, about the philosophy behind it and about what we are afraid this philosophy will mean for our schools and our children.
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The makers of this bill keep saying that what it will do is enable boards to cut massive amounts of money without affecting the classroom. I guess first, then, we need to define what we mean by "classroom." Mr Snobelen keeps saying that 50% of the money spent on education is not spent in the classroom, implying it's spent on sort of frivolous extras. But Mr Snobelen's 50% doesn't include principals or vice-principals; it doesn't include teaching assistants; it doesn't include school counsellors; it doesn't include any kind of consultants; it doesn't include specialty teachers or librarians; it doesn't include anyone from the school boards; and it doesn't include the buildings. It's as if Mr Snobelen's classrooms existed in a field, just the teacher and his or her students out there in space with no support system.
If by "the classroom," Mr Snobelen means the students in that classroom, then we, as parents, can tell him from firsthand experience that these kinds of cuts do affect the classroom. Removing the support system affects the classroom, and leaving boards with no choice but to lay off teachers certainly affects the classroom.
Right now at many of the schools in Ontario, the staffing committees have just finished doing their jobs. Parents and teachers and administrations have worked together for weeks to come up with staffing models for their schools. This year this has meant having to make some very hard choices: Is it better to keep the half-time music teacher even if that means the classes will all be bigger? Which do parents and staff value more, having a teacher librarian or having smaller classes?
I just got a copy of the staffing model at my child's school. My child's class next year will have 32 students in it. She's going to be in grade 4. Study after study has shown that children learn better in smaller classes, and yet this government continues to make changes that will cause class sizes to grow.
The government likes to talk about cutting 10% of teachers' time, which is a wonderful euphemism, kind of like collateral damage. When you cut 10% of the teachers' time, you cut 10% of the teachers, and when you cut 10% of the teachers, there are fewer teachers to teach our children and the classes are bigger. It's very simple. Again -- ask any parent -- these cuts do affect the classroom.
By proposing this bill, its authors imply that with just a little more efficiency and a few tiny nips and tucks, we can remove a billion dollars from our provincial education budget. Leaving aside for a moment that the nips and tucks include our much appreciated and effective junior kindergarten and adult education programs, let's just think about the efficiency aspect of the bill. I don't think even this government believes that school boards can save a billion dollars by simply sharing a few bus services. No one is arguing that sharing services won't help save money, but there is no way that it's going to save a billion dollars. Thus, there is no way you can take a billion dollars out of our education system without affecting the classroom, the students, the children.
It seems that nearly every day now in the paper there is a new story about parents fighting for some aspect of their school system that they value: parents fighting to keep their busing in rural schools, parents fighting to keep their music program going, to keep their child's phys ed teacher, to keep the French immersion program alive, trying to keep all the things that we know are essential to our children's education.
It seems ridiculous. Isn't it ridiculous that parents have to spend so much energy fighting for these things? Doesn't everybody know that education is the foundation of our society, of our culture? Doesn't everybody know that a good education provides children with the tools they need to become responsible adults? It seems to me that this is common sense.
The reason our group can include people who actually voted for this Conservative government is that they believed the promises about not implementing cuts that would hurt our education system. I talked to a parent the other day in North York who had voted for Mr Harris. She was furious.
"Why are they trying to take money out of Toronto?" she wanted to know. "Can they actually do this? Can they actually take money I paid in property tax and just add it to the provincial budget? Don't they understand what is different about Toronto? My son is in a class of 30, and a third of the kids are recent immigrants. Don't they understand it costs more to teach children for whom English is not their first language?"
Our group includes people who voted for Mr Harris, because they thought they knew what common sense was. They assumed it was common sense that smaller class sizes were something to be valued and preserved. They never thought that, as so many studies have shown the value of early education, it would ever occur to the government to throw it out. They thought it was only common sense that if you have an adult who wants to make him or herself employable by going back to school, we should do everything in our power to help them.
They know that spending money on education makes good common sense. They have read all those reports and studies that have proved that money spent on education is money saved in other areas: money saved in health and welfare costs, money saved by the criminal justice system. The parents know all these things, and they feel that with this bill the government is ignoring the larger truths and only looking at the immediate numbers. Our children aren't numbers. Education is not a business.
Before you allow this bill to become law, I urge you to consider your own expectations of the public education system. I urge you to listen to parents when they speak about their expectations, in fact about their assumptions to do with Canada and its history of public education. We assume we'll have a system that's strong, that's high quality and that provides an equal education to all its citizens. Huge cuts like these will destroy that system.
At the beginning of this deposition I told you about the reasons for the inception of this group. I told you about the fund-raising demands in my child's school. I told you about a principal asking parents for money for math books. If education funding continues to be cut, then money for math books is only the beginning. As the cuts continue, parents will be asked to fill in more and more, which will create huge inequities in the system. Worse, as the cuts continue and the class sizes grow and schools are forced to operate with poorer equipment and fewer resources, the parents who can afford it will take their children out of the public education system and put them in private schools. Then you end up with a two-tiered system like they have in many other countries.
As parents, we can't believe this is actually happening right here, right now in our own province. I think it is important that you all know that, as parents, we will not sit idly by and watch as our education system is slowly dismantled. Parents are not a passive group when they feel their children are threatened. They will be very vocal in their opposition to these cuts.
I urge you to vote against this bill. Vote against it because of what it means. Vote against it because public education is not just a deficit issue. Vote against it because you know that our children are our most important asset.
Mrs Janet Ecker (Durham West): Thank you, Ms Kidder, for coming before us and making your presentation. I very much appreciate your concern about education. Before I ask a question, though, I would like to clarify something which I find quite frustrating as someone who cares very much about education, which is that the only people who were talking about taking $1 billion out of the system was the Ontario Public School Boards' Association, the trustees, who one would think might have some familiarity with what could or could not be removed from the system. Our reduction to school boards is actually less than $400 million at the current time.
Ms Kidder: This year.
Mrs Ecker: Certainly. I guess what I find quite interesting is why it is that a school board would not be able to -- with the acknowledgement that I have had from trustees and teachers and people that there are ways in the system that we should be making sure that money is there in the classroom, as opposed to going on other things which are not as important and have to make those choices -- that somehow or other 2% is an impossible goal. What I would be curious about is, are there suggestions from your perspective, with the expertise and the obvious commitment you have to the system, are there better ways that you believe we should be making reductions so that we can try and achieve the savings goals which have to happen across the government?
Ms Kidder: I think it's very important that we think about and look much more clearly at what we value in our system first before we start cutting it, and that's not what's being done. It's being looked at purely as an economic issue. We're looking at efficiency instead of effectiveness. We're looking at it as business and it's not at all in any way the same as business. The city of Toronto has already cut $400 million out of its education budget in the last four years. The $400 million that this government is cutting is in this year. That's what's happening. That's between now and December. That's why the $1 billion is there.
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Mrs Ecker: But the other thing I would suggest to you as well is that with an Education Quality and Accountability Office and with a College of Teachers, which are also something we've done, those things are very much directed to quality in the system. They are not economic, cost-effective things. They are quality things in the system. I guess what I would say again is, how do we make reductions in the system that are going to maintain the things you think are important and yet at the same time make reductions?
Ms Kidder: Maybe we have to look at other ways of raising money to support the system, like not allowing people to appeal their property taxes in downtown Toronto so that you're having to make the huge cuts.
Mrs Ecker: Yes, we're doing that. Absolutely; couldn't agree with you more.
Ms Kidder: We have to look at fairer taxation, at not cutting taxes by 30% so you can actually support an education system.
The Vice-Chair: I have three more questioners.
Mrs Ecker: Sorry. Go ahead.
Mr Preston: Do you know what the cost per student is in your area?
Ms Kidder: No.
Mr Preston: Then you have no idea whether your school can cut at all.
Ms Kidder: I know our school doesn't have money for masking tape right now. I know there's no money for math books in our school right now.
Mr Preston: I'm not asking about what they haven't got. I'm asking about what they have got that they can do without at your school.
Ms Kidder: There's absolutely nothing that they can do without.
Mr Preston: Not your school. I'm talking about the whole school board.
Ms Kidder: You asked in my school. But in my school, which is a downtown Toronto school --
Mr Preston: In your school area I asked. It's a Toronto school?
Ms Kidder: Yes.
Mr Preston: You're roughly $10,000 a student.
Ms Kidder: I have no idea.
Mr Preston: Our schools are $4,900 to $5,100. Do you think there's a difference there and why?
Ms Kidder: Because there's a huge difference between an inner-city school and a school -- I'm not sure where your school is.
Mr Preston: Cayuga, Caledonia, Dunnville, all the way up to Paris, Ayr, part of Kitchener.
Ms Kidder: My particular school, Palmerston school, has refugees who come in for a few weeks at a time and go out. It has a huge population of ESL students. It has a lot of students with special needs, with learning disabilities. There's a different population in inner-city schools than there is in schools outside Toronto and it costs more to educate.
Mr Preston: In Cayuga half of a public school is for the trainable mentally retarded and there are only 600 people in the town. They draw them from all over the area to come in. That's half a school.
Ms Kidder: I don't understand the point.
Mr Preston: You're talking about having a whole lot of special-needs kids and I'm suggesting that you don't have that many. The population should be the same all the way across, or is there more of that in Toronto than there is in --
Ms Kidder: Yes, there is.
The Vice-Chair: Just a minute, Mr Preston. That's the last question. Do you have one final comment on that question and then we've got to move on?
Ms Kidder: No. I think statistics show that in Toronto there is a higher percentage of ESL students and students on welfare and higher-need students.
Mr Richard Patten (Ottawa Centre): Thank you very much, Ms Kidder. I think your presentation is right on the button. I applaud your clear and forthright manner of expressing it. You have arrived at the heart of the issue, because the government continues to say that it needs to save money. From what? For what?
Mrs Ecker: It's $1 million more an hour, Mr Patten. That's for what.
Mr Patten: It's for the tax cut, and we all know that.
Interjection.
The Vice-Chair: Just a minute now. Let's deal with the delegation.
Mr Patten: A lot of people are concerned about education. As you rightly said, $400 million for this year, and when that becomes annualized, it will be in the neighbourhood that you suggest. If you are experiencing now in grade 4 -- your child's in grade 4?
Ms Kidder: Yes.
Mr Patten: -- some 32 students in her particular class, what do you anticipate will happen when that figure becomes doubled, from $400 million to $800 million or $1 billion? What will happen in terms of class size and other areas?
Ms Kidder: Because of where we live, and we've already experienced really big cuts to education, I can't see anything but it getting worse. If you talk to any teacher, they say 32 kids, especially in a downtown Toronto school -- sorry, where you have a lot of kids who don't speak English -- it's impossible to teach that many kids. I can't see how you can lay off teachers as they have in the boards outside of Toronto and not increase the class size, and that's what's going to happen.
With these cuts, what you do is you start to slowly pare away what are considered extras, which usually are special-needs teachers, all the kinds of specialty things, the music programs and the gym teacher, the stuff that eventually starts to be considered extras. We feel it's very important that there's a kind of whole that is education and it's very important that we maintain that whole and we maintain a broad form of education, and that's what will start to be lost.
Mr Patten: One of the things we've heard as witnesses come forward is members, especially from the government side, ask about the differential in costs. I'm prepared to accept that there are some boards that can find some resources. My personal opinion, and certainly our party's, was that we would keep whatever resources were found in the educational system and plow them back in to help strengthen -- the teachers and equipment and whatever it took. We come at it very differently.
But what tends to happen is people will use Toronto as an example and say, "See how expensive it is." Of course, there are some good reasons why it is more expensive. I'm also prepared to suggest there are ways in which you could take some resources from perhaps administration and be more supportive to schools like yours, and that would be very important.
I wonder if you might talk a little bit about the organization that you're part of, how it's growing and where it's growing. How many parents are now becoming involved in your organization?
Ms Kidder: We just started in February. We started talking to parents just in Toronto. When people found out that we existed, parents started phoning us from Hamilton and Windsor, from the Halton and Peel boards that had big cuts, from Barrie. Now we've been talking to parents in Sudbury and Thunder Bay.
It's important to us and to all the parents we've been talking to outside of Toronto that they don't see this as an issue of Toronto the fat cat and that they're losing because of us.
We had a demonstration, our first rally to support our schools, to save our schools, at the end of March, and 1,500 people came to Queen's Park. People are signing a petition opposing the cuts. We're organizing another festival to save our schools at the end of June. At this one we're going to have music and bands, choirs and drama groups, to show what's at risk in our schools. There are thousands and thousands of parents now on our phone and mail list, and a lot of them are outside of Toronto. They're across Ontario. They're very, very worried.
Mr Michael Gravelle (Port Arthur): A terrific presentation. I agree with Mr Patten. I think you really came to the heart of it.
One point that particularly struck me was the concept of defining what is essential in our schools before we start cutting, and I think that's absolutely true. I think you start playing with terms, like what is classroom and non-classroom, and I sure don't expect you to sit here and tell us right now what is defined as essential, but I think that's a very good point and one that probably should make a lot of sense to everybody, all three parties involved. I hope it's listened to.
Ms Kidder: Thank you.
Mr Floyd Laughren (Nickel Belt): I enjoyed your presentation. I'll try and choose my words carefully because I don't want to malign anyone, but I'm wondering to what extent people out there, in your organization, as an example, understand or have a good sense of the kind of language the Minister of Education is using as this debate unfolds.
That's why I say I'll choose my words carefully, because I don't throw the word "dishonest" around lightly. But when I hear that the reductions are only 2%, that is playing people for fools, to think people will buy that it's a 2% reduction when it's a 15% or 16% reduction. People aren't that stupid, I hope. Also about the whole classroom issue, that the money that's coming out must not come out of the classroom, and how stupid the minister thinks you and others are to think you can take $1 billion out of the system without affecting the classroom. All sorts of historical images come to mind about people who made up those kinds of stories --
Mrs Ecker: It was your government study that said that, Floyd.
Mr Laughren: -- and said that if you tell it often enough, people will believe it. I'm wondering to what extent there's an awareness out there, where I'm not -- I don't have any kids in the school system any more -- of what's going on and what this language means about the classroom and 2% and so forth. Do people really have a handle on that, or are they buying it?
Ms Kidder: They're not, because they're parents. The thing about most of us who are involved in this organization is that we are parents. We're in the schools all the time, every day. We actually know what a classroom is. We know what's involved in maintaining a classroom. We know you can't just define a classroom as being the teachers and the pupils in the middle of nothing. So we're not at all fooled, and that's why there are so many of us who actually are people who voted for the Conservative government -- they're really shocked at what's happening, and they are not fooled and they are amazed and they are very upset.
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I think when they listen to these numbers, they just have to go and look and understand what it means. They just have to know how many teachers were laid off in their board to know what those numbers mean.
Mr Laughren: As someone who is concerned about the deficit as well, there are two aspects of this debate that bother me. One is to pretend the deficit is important while you're cutting 30% out of the income tax system. It blows my mind that you could make that argument and think that people will buy it.
The second is the honesty of the debate. My own feeling is that if the government and the minister had said, "We are going to cut and we're going to cut in the classroom, and it's going to be $1 billion a year," or whatever, that would be an honest debate. But to say there are going to be cuts but they won't affect the classroom is truly -- I'm uneasy about using too strong a language to make a point, but honestly, how can anybody expect to be believed when that's the case?
Mr Preston: That's the case in many, many boards.
Mr Laughren: We know that's not possible.
Ms Kidder: The thing is, we are not stupid, and the thing about parents is that they're quite obsessive when it comes to their children. So parents actually look at it really hard, most parents, and aren't fooled and do know what's really going to happen because of these cuts. I think that's why we came here today, to sort of let people know there are a lot of parents out there who are going to scream and yell and not allow this to happen.
The Vice-Chair: Thank you very much, Ms Kidder, for your presentation.
JACK GARNER
The Vice-Chair: Next we have Jack Garner, who is the chair of the business and finance committee at the Simcoe County Board of Education. Welcome to our meeting. You have 30 minutes for your presentation, and that will include any questions or comments that may come from committee members.
Mr Jack Garner: You'll be happy to know that I'll give you some makeup time because my presentation isn't anywhere near that. On the other hand, I'm sort of happy to see you're in the chair, because being an ex-cadet from RMC, I'm counting on you from Kingston to make sure no one beats up on me.
The Vice-Chair: I'm glad you got Kingston on the record.
Mr Garner: Before I begin, though, you see here in front of you a 60-plus grandfather who was one of 11 children, who had two sons and now has three grandchildren in the public education system in Ontario.
I support the principle of public education in the province of Ontario, but I'm very, very concerned about its survival. The reason I'm concerned about its survival, generally speaking, before I begin specifically, is because whether we like it or not, based upon the economy of this province right now, it is overfunded. I'm sorry to say that, but that's an absolute fact. But that's another story at another particular time.
I'd like to take about five or 10 minutes of your time right now to give you my little presentation referenced to the amendments to the Education Act, which of course is Bill 34. If I may, I'd like to give you a short background on the Simcoe County Board of Education and then also on myself.
The Simcoe County Board of Education is considered to be a fairly large public board. We have a student population around 50,000 and we have an annual operating budget of about $300 million. We are considered and we are a very responsible and proactive board. We react in a very fast and positive way to any anticipated changes in legislation, ministry programs and/or funding, and the reason we do that is because we believe we are in a changing economy now and in a changing education system, and therefore it behooves us, as a board, to react very quickly to these changing times.
As an example, we adjusted our expenditures just this last January so that we were able to flatline our education taxes in the city of Barrie for the second consecutive year, thus proving that if there is a will, there is a way. Plus, and this is the most important thing, we as a board at the same time continue our guarantee to our students that we will give them the highest standard of education, second to none, anywhere. We are committed to that and we are able to deliver on that commitment.
I'm a volunteer elected trustee on the board from the city of Barrie. I am not here as the board's official spokesman, because no single trustee, as no single MPP, speaks for the policy of the corporation. Our corporation, of course, is the Simcoe County Board of Education. However, I was elected by my board peers to chair the business and finance committee as well as the budget committee.
With respect to the proposed Bill 34, our board has reacted. We have set policy in that we will not continue the junior kindergarten program beyond June 30, 1996 -- unfortunately but realistically. We have set policy that adjusts our adult education programs to reflect the funding changes and other possible changes through the proposed Bill 34.
We have set policy that increases our cooperative support with the Simcoe County Roman Catholic Separate School Board, Georgian College and municipal governments in Simcoe county, as well as the community private sector, in joint cost-saving ventures. These are very positive recommendations in this proposed bill.
We have set policy that recommends the repeal of the Education Act in respect to covering absence because of illness, which is commonly known in education and political jargon as retirement gratuities.
Our board is not on record in respect to the proposed changes in legislation in reference to equalization payments. I really don't want to comment on that right now because it would simply be a personal comment, not a board policy comment or even possibly a comment that should be coming from some other jurisdiction except possibly Metro Toronto and the Ontario government.
I know you have heard many statements, comments and recommendations in respect to junior kindergarten programs and adult education. Therefore, I'm not going to address junior kindergarten or adult education except to answer any questions any committee members might have for our reasons as a board to develop the policy we did in both of those programs.
Cooperative cost-sharing between coterminous school boards, as proposed in the act, is an area where major cost savings can and should be made in education. This is an education area that has great potential for many of the savings the public education system in Ontario requires. However, and this is where I caution you people of government's responsibility, the legislation and government direction to reach this goal is going to have to be very direct and very firm. The province cannot leave any doubt in the minds of the coterminous boards that this is the goal you expect.
In reference to the section in the proposed bill on sick leave entitlements, you, being the government, must repeal this section of the act. To give reasons for this, I have attached for you some background information, which I might add is very interesting, on sick leave entitlement. It's very informative information that I would ask each and every member of this committee to read.
One piece of information is an excellent paper on the history and development of the retirement gratuity, prepared by Manon Bouchard. Mme Bouchard is an honours graduate in labour studies at McMaster University.
The other piece of information, equally as interesting, is the actual experience of the Simcoe County Board of Education, through our administrative reports, that will show you that our retirement gratuity payout rose from $436,000 in 1990 to $3.4 million in 1996. Our projections, and you have copies of our projections there, show that this will amount to $5 million per year in payouts within the next couple of years.
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I just had to make this little comment on the side, because this committee I'm sure is very familiar with the temporary moratorium the ministry has placed on capital funding to school boards. We in Simcoe county are considered a major growth board. We have six new schools in the planning right now that the ministry had given us pre-approval for. We are now awaiting ministry approval for the funding of these, and also approval of the projects. My comment on the side is that we as a board could, capital from current, build one of these schools each year for $5 million each if we had those funds that we're now spending on retirement gratuities. I certainly find that something to think about.
Something else that I think is very, very important: If you research this and if you talk to a lot of people about this, a lot of people within the system, the repeal of the sick leave entitlement, commonly known as retirement gratuity, is the one single section in collective agreements that most teachers are willing to agree with as school boards move towards the absolute necessity to downsize the total compensation packages they have with their employees. If anyone doesn't agree with that statement, I would suggest if you research it a bit and you do a little talking to the people in the trenches, you'll find this statement to be correct.
It is an absolute necessity for school boards to downsize their compensation packages to employees. If they do not downsize -- and I guarantee this 100%; I can't speak for every board in this province, but we are all in the same boat -- they will not be able to continue their past practice of employee remuneration unless this government is willing to accept the responsibility of fully funding provincial education or the boards are prepared to accept the responsibility of major increases in local taxation. There is no choice other than those two possibilities. Either way, minimum annual increases of 5% in the boards' operating budgets will be required to fund the salary and benefit increases alone.
I'll give you my conclusions and recommendations now, if I may.
First of all, I would ask you to legislate coterminality in administration between separate and public school boards. Maximum out-of-class savings can be made through the amalgamation of board administrations. This is a major, obvious area for education finance reform, but please put enough teeth in your legislation to force, if necessary, these goals.
I've been asked many times -- I'm sure a lot of people have and a lot of trustees have, both by public and separate school supporters -- "Tell me please, Mr Garner, what is the difference between a Catholic bus and a Protestant bus?" There really isn't any difference. The only difference is in the bureaucracy of the way we set up our transportation systems.
Please repeal the section in the Education Act in respect to sick leave entitlements. Mr Laughren, I'm sorry you missed this; you would have enjoyed it, sir. Oh, he didn't hear me. Adjustments are needed to contracts, and this repeal will have the least effect upon teachers' future economic status and benefits in comparison to other possible adjustments such as salaries and benefits. At the same time, notwithstanding grandfathering obligations, school boards will have more economic flexibility to meet other important budget requirements.
That brings me to the end of my presentation. I would like to thank you very much for the time you've given me, I'd like to thank you very much for your committee's attention, and most of all, ladies and gentlemen, notwithstanding what we have to do these days, I would like to thank you very much, each and every one of you, for your dedication to the citizens of this province.
At this time, I'd be more than happy and more than pleased to answer any questions you might have.
Mr Patten: Thank you, Mr Garner. I appreciate your presentation; it's very clear. Frankly, I don't have any difficulty with some of your recommendations, certainly, on the strengthening of the consortia to find ways of saving and things of that nature. But you did say in your presentation that you'd be happy to explain in more detail the reason why your board has modified adult education, to what degree, and that you've dropped junior kindergarten. These are two classrooms. So could you explain the rationale for the board?
Mr Garner: Yes. In reference to junior kindergarten, that would be very difficult now because this is board policy and I would possibly just give you my rationale, what I believe to be the rationale of the trustees. We have 18 majority language trustees on our particular board and 16 wanted to abolish it -- I shouldn't use that word -- as of June 30, and two for their own personal reasons and their own philosophical reasons decided to keep it.
Very simply, it just fell below the economic and/or programming priority that our board felt that we were going to have to maintain over the next one, two, three, four or five years to provide the standard of education that the five-year-olds to and including OAC and then to grade 12 are going to require to have them accomplish what they have to to meet the particular marketplace. I realize that's a very short and a sort of very simple answer.
We, as a board, realized very quickly that $100 billion is a lot of money. The deficit of this province, I think everybody agrees, we can't sustain. No 11 million people can sustain this deficit any more, and therefore everybody involved is working on this.
Therefore, as we made our moves, and this board began to move in 1990, to downsizing programs -- and I'm sorry, they do affect the classroom. You can't take one cent out of education without affecting the classroom, but the bottom line is that you try to minimize the education effect on the student. We could debate until this world comes to an end whether they should have 32 or 33 or 31 in a particular room but, whether we like it or not, economics enters this particular equation. Therefore, reluctantly, that's why we decided we could not sustain the quality of education for our 50,000 students and continue the JK program.
When it came to adult education, as you know, the funding formula was changed for continuing education. Therefore, we had to make particular adjustments to that, because there is a certain segment of society out there, even though they understand the necessity and agree with the necessity, as I do, whereby we have to provide broad education even to those particular adults, there are a few people out there who say they had their kick at the cat on the public system.
What we're doing, very simply, is we're adjusting ours whereby we're going to equalize, in cooperation with private industry and other persons in Simcoe county, the revenues and the expenditures in our continuing education whereby it will flat-line and therefore will not reflect a cost that we can use on educating our kiddies from kindergarten to OAC. It's as simple as that: reluctantly, JK, we can't do it; when it comes to continuing education, our programs in continuing education will be at least as successful in the future as they have been in the past with the new structure.
Mr Gravelle: I find it astonishing, Mr Garner, that you would actually admit you cannot maintain the quality of education based on having to make these cuts.
Mr Garner: No, I didn't say that, sir.
Mr Gravelle: I thought I heard you say it. What I heard you say is that you obviously have increased the size of classrooms.
Mr Garner: Yes, sir.
Mr Gravelle: You've done that. That's how you've managed your cuts. How many teachers have you had to lay off?
Mr Garner: Gosh, right now we are in the process. When it comes to secondary and/or elementary, we're a growth board, and so therefore we haven't come to our final staffing yet. The Simcoe County Board of Education, if I may speak for them, we don't believe that money is the main criterion for education success, sir. We think it's dedication. So therefore we adjust to the economy as we have to, honourable sir, and we are reluctant to do particular things like that. But we're not blind to the economy and that's exactly why we're moving in that particular direction. It will not lower the quality. It does not have to, and it will not lower the quality of education for students in the classroom.
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Mr Gravelle: But you admitted it affects the classroom. You did admit that. In one of your answers you admitted it affects the classroom.
Mr Garner: You can't take one cent out of the education budget without in some way having it affect the classroom. Will it affect the quality of education to the student in the classroom? No.
Mr Gravelle: You obviously seem very concerned about the level of debt. How do you feel about the fact that over the next four years the level of debt will rise by $20 billion?
Mr Garner: I hate that.
Mr Gravelle: You hate that.
Mr Garner: That's right.
Mr Gravelle: But you still buy into the argument that indeed you've got to deal with all the education -- it's almost like education isn't your priority, sir, and I don't mean to be rude, but certainly --
Mr Garner: Oh --
Mr Gravelle: Well, I mean, that's the impression that you left with me in terms of --
Mr Garner: No, sir.
Mr Gravelle: There's certainly a toughness about you and I admire that, but there is a sense that you really have said, "What the bottom line here is that we've got to meet the targets we're told to meet."
Mr Garner: No.
Mr Gravelle: Well, the financial targets. You proudly say that, "We're told we have to deal with it and we deal with it right away and we handle it."
The Vice-Chair: Mr Gravelle, your time has run out.
Mr Garner: Actually, sir, I have a very genuine concern. If you want to cut to the quick, why would a 61-year-old guy like me do this if I didn't, really? But there are a lot of people who do not want to include the economics of it in the equation. We cannot include the economics in the equation, and therefore we take what we get and we do the best with it that we possibly can.
But you mentioned $120 billion. I don't like $120 billion, but I would dislike $130 billion or $140 billion more. But, anyway, I'd sooner have it zero.
The Vice-Chair: Mr Laughren, any questions?
Mr Laughren: Sorry I missed your presentation.
Mr Garner: I'm sorry you did too, sir.
Mr Laughren: I had to return a call to a parent who's having trouble with getting her son into a program, because he has special needs. I regret that I had to take time out from your presentation to deal with that parent. I'm sure you'll forgive me for missing your presentation.
Mr Garner: Absolutely, sir.
Mr Laughren: I assume that even if the government had not cut education grants to the boards you would have done these things anyway, right, because there's too much money in the education system, you indicated?
Mr Garner: No.
Mr Laughren: I thought you said that the education system was overfunded.
Mr Garner: It is.
Mr Laughren: If there hadn't been any cuts, what would you have done to reduce the spending in the education system? Why wouldn't you have cancelled junior kindergarten and made changes in the adult education at the board?
Mr Garner: We're getting very specific now. I would suggest myself, and I'm just guessing now, because in reality the cuts were made. That we would have made minor adjustments. We would have done the continuing education regardless of the cuts because we were still able to. But we're picking the bottom of the bucket when it comes to particular program savings like that in that particular respect. Whether we would have been able this year to retain the junior kindergarten program, I really don't know, sir. I would suggest basically by most trustees it was based upon an economic rather than a philosophical point of view, because as you well know, some people look upon it as an extension of day care and so on and so forth. But, no, I think, sir, it just did not, regardless of the cuts which came and therefore I can't speculate what would have happened if they didn't come, sit above our program of economic priorities. Reluctantly, that's what we did.
Mr Laughren: I understand. I was trying to get at the underlying philosophy that the education system is overfunded. Presumably, if it's overfunded, you would take money out of it in order to be a responsible member of the board. So presumably you would take money out of it and I was just trying to get at whether or not what the government did was almost irrelevant to the operations of your board, whether you would have done those things anyway.
Mr Garner: Mind you, it did give us the impetus to focus on it a little more. However, sir, we're still dedicated to the flat-lining of local taxation for many obvious reasons, because there are a fair number of people who just simply don't feel and cannot, especially in Simcoe county, being a fairly diverse agricultural area, there are some people out there who don't have any money in their pocket, and so therefore we're moving in that direction.
But, no, you're absolutely true when you say that had the government not imposed this upon us, then we might not have made the maximum adjustment. You see, we had to adjust about $19.1 million within our budget, and therefore we possibly might not this year have the focus to do that. So they certainly gave us a kick-start, if that's what you want to call it.
Mr Laughren: Will you be able to reduce the property taxes for your ratepayers?
Mr Garner: This year? Gosh, you missed that, sir. We did flat-line them, sir.
Mr Laughren: No, no, reduce.
Mr Garner: I can just give you my opinion, and I don't particularly want to give you my opinion at this particular opinion. But I can give you my particular philosophy, if you want, on the localization of taxation and so on, and as to the tax burden people are carrying, because of who carries it. Who carries it? Everybody carries the responsibility both residentials and so on and so forth, but I don't know whether this is the time and place for that --
Mr Laughren: I'm responding to your presentation here; whether you come on your own or from the board isn't my determination; you decided that.
Mr Garner: That's right. I understand.
Mr Laughren: So what I'm trying to get at is why you haven't reduced taxes for your ratepayers, the way the government has reduced income taxes.
Mr Garner: Well, again without getting into it, because of the unequal assessment in Simcoe county we have reduced the actual taxation levy for a fair number of people in Simcoe county.
Mr John O'Toole (Durham East): I want to thank Mr Garner for the background information on the teachers' gratuity. I had a quick flip through it. I'm fairly familiar with it -- excellent report. Thank you for giving that to us.
I guess you're familiar with the Sweeney report. One of the appendixes in there refers to the retirement gratuity, and I'm just drawing it to your attention that you're right on the mark. Right now, the gratuity liability stands at around $900 million, and the actual money that anyone saved, which they should have or were supposed to have saved, is around $100 million. This is a serious, serious liability for someone. Who does that belong to: the boards or to the Ministry of Education? That's $900 million of retirement gratuity, which is a perk to retire at 52; that is $900 million that does not go to students in the classroom. Has your board got a view on that?
Mr Garner: I think you'll find, John, in our buildup to that in our administrative reports, we began last June to develop a process to account for and/or set aside for the unfunded liability that we have in our board for the retirement gratuities. We ended that process in January, and we're not going to move into a process to fund those liabilities. However, we have moved into a process, in our particular board, whereby we're very, very closely going to guesstimate the amount of moneys needed and for retirement gratuities based upon the 90 factor and so on and so forth, and that's why in this year's budget we put $5 million into our current operating budget.
Mr O'Toole: I think that's important, and if you apply that to -- there are many boards in Ontario that have been very good and have saved that money in a reserve fund and many that have not. In fact, it's $900 million to $100 million. So many of them have not been honest with their taxpayers.
If you've read that, my view is that this is really, in a broader sense, about equity in education. Do you believe that the province is taking the right direction that a child is a child, and that whatever the grant level is, the funding per student should be equal across the province, regardless, for the purity of education, not those special grants for ESL and adults, like learning problems and those kinds of external grants? Do you believe that we should be aiming or working towards fairness and equity across the province for all students in Ontario? Cornwall isn't Toronto, isn't London, isn't Muskoka, isn't Barrie. I realize the difficulty involved, but having said that, I agree with that statement.
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Mr O'Toole: Do you believe that fundamental to this whole thing is education finance reform?
Mr Garner: Oh, absolutely, no doubt.
Mr Bruce Smith (Middlesex): Welcome to the committee. Yesterday, the Ontario Public School Board Association, of which I assume Simcoe county is a member, indicated to the committee that to the best of their ability approximately 10% or 12% of their member boards would actually be involved in some form of cooperative service delivery arrangements. I found that a little bit surprising, and I just wanted to get your opinion today as to whether or not you feel the legislation as it is currently drafted will provide boards with the opportunity to see an expansion of that 10% to 12% into a much broader basis.
Mr Garner: Yes, I do, Bruce, and why I hesitate is because I'm a very strong advocate of local governance, and I would like to think that coterminous boards such as our coterminous board in Simcoe county would move full speed ahead in this particular direction. In this particular case, this is why you'll notice in my presentation I used the words -- reluctantly to some degree -- "put teeth in the legislation." In other words, I believe, notwithstanding local governance, you people do have a responsibility because it is your responsibility; therefore, I would like to see, and I know our board would like to see, a very strong move towards the total coterminality of administrations in coterminous school boards vis-à-vis ours in Simcoe county.
My own personal opinion is I don't think it will happen voluntarily and therefore I think you people are going to have to give very serious consideration how far you want to go to achieve those fantastic savings in education outside the classroom.
Mr Terence H. Young (Halton Centre): The Ontario teachers' pension fund is worth around $42 billion right now -- it's more than the Canada pension plan actually -- and yet this year the province of Ontario will pay about $900 million into that. As well, we have an $8-billion commitment over the next 40 years. Would you agree that should be reviewed?
Mr Garner: That is not under the jurisdiction of Bill 34. I am very familiar with the teachers' pension fund. The responsibility for funding it is yours and the teachers'. Forty-two billion dollars is an awful lot of money. The unfunded liability has built up over a fair number of years, especially the last three, four, five years, but yes, I believe -- we are getting off the subject, but if you ask me, I believe myself that some government of courage in the next little while is going to have to address that issue very, very seriously.
The Vice-Chair: Okay, we'll have to leave it at that. Thank you very much, Mr Garner, for your presentation.
Mr Garner: Greetings to Kingston, sir. Thank you.
PAUL STEINHAUER
The Vice-Chair: Next we have Dr Paul Steinhauer, who is a psychiatrist with the Hospital for Sick Children. Welcome to our meeting, sir.
Dr Paul Steinhauer: I would like to talk with you, Mr Chair and ladies and gentlemen, as someone who has been a child psychiatrist for 34 years now and who much of that time has felt like the person who goes to the bank of a river with drowning bodies by the thousands floating down and has to decide what is he going to. Is he going to pick out a few and provide mouth-to-mouth resuscitation or is he going to go back upstream and try to do something about the rate, to cut down on the rate of developmental carnage?
Over the seven years since the Ontario Child Health Study has come out with my colleagues in the Sparrow Lake Alliance, who are roughly 200 professionals from seven different service sectors with representation from youth groups and from the groups of adults whose children have problems of one sort or another, and with my colleagues from Voices for Children, which is the last printed document that you have -- and the 16 or 17 organizations in Ontario are listed on the back side of that pamphlet. We also have two national colleagues, the Canadian Institute of Child Health and the Child Welfare League of Canada.
I want to talk with you today about junior kindergarten. I think there's a general feeling that if you ask people, "When does a child's education start?" they will often answer, "When he goes to school," or, "On the first day of grade 1." However, most kids who later on go on to drop out are already well behind by the first day of grade 1 and the majority of children who drop out of school do so often because they arrived at school without the skills and attitudes that are needed for success and learning by the time they reach grade 1.
On the first page of the stapled handout that I gave you, I've listed on the top some prerequisites for success in grade 1. I would like to suggest to you that research is increasingly able to pinpoint the fact that during the first three years of life, there is a critical period in child development during which certain developmental capacities, if they don't occur during this period of the highest development of the brain, will not occur fully. Those include intellectual functioning, they include the capacity for emotional control, including the capacity to control aggression, and also the capacity for forming attachments, which is related to the quality of relationships the children will form throughout their lives and their ability to be sensitive to the feelings of others.
As a very interesting article in Newsweek showed on February 19, those windows of opportunity in those three areas close by the end of the third year. That doesn't mean it's game over for those kids; what it does mean is you're going to have to work harder and you're going to achieve less in terms of helping those kids achieve their full potential if you start after the fourth year of life.
Apart from genetics, the main factor that helps get kids ready to be successful in school is the quality of caring they receive from parents and others before they arrive in school. I'm talking here about the time adults take with them, the energy they have to be involved with them and sensitive to their needs, their ability to respond appropriately to the needs of the child, to give them the cognitive stimulation without which they're never going to reach their cognitive potential and to give them the kind of structure they're going to need if they're going to get their impulses under control, particularly their aggression, and if they're going to learn to focus their attention.
Who gives this head start to Ontario's children? In 13% of cases -- and I have only Canadian statistics here; I don't have any specifically for Ontario -- there is a full-time parent in the home. That's although 65% of parents say they wish there could be a full-time parent in the home but they can't afford it.
Why can't they afford it? They can't afford it because in 1976 it took 41 hours of work at a minimum wage job to keep a family of three out of poverty, whereas to achieve the same level today, in the 1990s, requires 75 hours of work a week to maintain a family of three at the same level. As a result, in almost 70% of our families, we have two parents who are working and often parents lack the time and the energy to give their kids the start they need. In the 60 years that statistics have been kept in both the United States and in Canada, at no time has there been less actual time that parents spend with kids than is the case here in the 1990s.
That doesn't necessarily mean it's a bad thing if both parents have to work, because kids can do fine as long as three conditions are met. The first is that the parents are involved, caring parents when they get home from work. The second is that whoever looks after them when they're not at work is going to care for them well, meeting those same characteristics that I was talking about a few minutes ago. The third is that the parents aren't so stressed out by work that even though they have the time they're not free to have the quality of relationships with their kids that kids need in order to get ahead.
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There are some groups of kids who are particularly at risk. We know for example that poor kids have over twice the rate of dropping out of school. Poverty in these cases is an additional stress, but it's often the combination of poverty with the psychosocial factors that are often combined with it, the higher rate of abuse, the higher rate of mental illness in parents, and particularly by that I mean depression, particularly in the mothers.
We know that first nations kids on reserves are at particularly high risk. We know that you can be disadvantaged without being poor, as well as you can be poor without being disadvantaged. Children who are exposed to chronic conflict and violence and/or abuse and abuse of the other parent or abuse of other children can be as damaged as if the child himself is the subject of the abuse.
We know that parental mental illness can be a major factor in undermining the child's preparation for school, and we know that the family that is neglectful, the family that doesn't stimulate the child cognitively, that doesn't provide the structure in an ongoing way that will help him achieve the ability to focus his attention and to control his impulses -- those kids are going to be at risk.
For those kids a high-quality experience in some sort of either child care or early childhood care and education will have a dramatic effect in enriching those children cognitively and preparing them for success at school.
I've got a list that I gave you, I think it's the second sheet of the stapled sheets I gave you, which talks about the Perry preschool project. That is a school-based program. It is with multiply high-risk kids. All of those kids had a minimum of four risk factors, which quadruples the risk of their getting off to a bad developmental outcome, and I want to make it very clear that for those kids it was high-quality, early childhood care and education in a school base over a three-year period. So I don't think, I'm not suggesting for a minute, that just one year of early kindergarten is going to have the same result.
What was special about this project was that they followed those kids until they were age 27, and when they compared them to other kids from the same kind of families, they found 50% fewer arrests and convictions; 33% more high school graduates; 50% fewer who had ever been on welfare; and there was 42% fewer who had ever had a teenage pregnancy, which meant that they were not set up for chronic dependency for life, plus a number of other factors.
That was an extremely high-cost early childhood care and education program, but when they compared the cost of that program to the cost of not having the program, the additional mental health services that were required, the additional remedial education services that were required, the cost of crime control, the cost of welfare and social assistance, and also if they titred in the number of those kids that were paying taxes rather than being on the dole, they figured that every $1 that was spent on the program had saved an estimated $7.14 by the time those kids were 27 years of age.
That shows what can be done by a really high-quality early childhood care and education experience.
On the bottom of the first page, going back a page, I have listed the effects on children of high-quality and poor-quality early childhood care and education. I want you to look at what poor-quality child care does. I don't care whether it's poor-quality care by parents, by relatives, by a nanny, by home care or by day care. What it does is accentuate the losses in all the areas that are necessary for achieving in school and for controlling aggression by the time of school, and also we know that poor-quality child care, wherever kids get it, is so damaging that it can't fully be offset by even high-quality parenting. On the other hand, the combination of poor-quality parenting within the family and poor-quality child care when the parents aren't around really tends to set kids up for failure.
I've tried to illustrate to you through the Perry project what a difference it could make. I've warned you not to expect comparable savings for a single year of junior kindergarten, because other studies have shown that the more high-quality childhood care and education young children get before school, the more likely they are to do well in school. But there is no doubt, from everything I've seen in the literature -- and I think I know it reasonably well in this area -- that the attributes that are needed for success in school, those ones that were listed by the conference board, and also for the control of aggression -- and I would warn you that these two conditions go hand in hand. The poorer children do in school, the more likely they are to have problem in control of aggression, and the more poorly they control their aggression, the more likely they are to have problems in school, so that dropping out and becoming delinquent have a high potential for aggravating each other.
I also remind you that we've had junior kindergarten in this province since the days of Bill Davis, and junior kindergarten is something that is important to voters. We know that because the two things the Alberta electorate rose up about were medicare and junior kindergarten. I suspect the Ontario voters, from some results I have seen, feel the same way.
I respect the need to do something about a deficit that is eating up 40% of every tax dollar to pay for interest, and I know that means certain services have to be cut, and I think there is room for cutting in each of the service systems. However, if we're going to go cut, let's cut smart and not cut stupid. I would suggest to you that cuts that undermine the development of kids at risk or kids who are at the borderline of being at risk are stupid cuts in that they save dollars now but we're going to pay much more later and achieve much less for it -- for the dropouts; for the illiteracy and innumeracy that result; for the crime control costs we're going to be faced with; and for the social assistance and unemployment insurance costs.
I suggest to you, ladies and gentlemen, that there's no better investment for a society in either economic or human terms than a good investment in supporting children to achieve their developmental potential. If they make it to become healthy, competent and productive citizens, then we all benefit and the province benefits. If they don't make it, then we will all pay for higher health care costs, higher mental health costs, higher remedial education costs, higher crime control costs, higher costs of social assistance and a lower quality of civic life.
The Vice-Chair: Thank you very much, Doctor. We have five minutes per caucus left and we start with the New Democratic Party.
Mr Tony Martin (Sault Ste Marie): I just get here and I'm on already.
The Vice-Chair: You've got to be ready at all times.
Mr Martin: Good thing I was a Boy Scout.
Mr O'Toole: Do you want us to take your time?
Mr Martin: No, no, I wouldn't want to do that.
You make some really excellent points, Doctor. It certainly raises some questions for me, and I would suggest that if it doesn't raise some questions for the folks across the way, they're just not listening to what you're saying.
Mr O'Toole: How do you know?
Mr Martin: Some of the things you're doing indicate that.
In light of the very real evidence that you've put on the table today and that we know is out there to support the inclusion of as much early childhood education and opportunity for kids to learn and to socialize and to interact as possible, particularly in the environment we have today where, as you said, a lot of parents are both working and the pressures that are there tend to increase the stress level as opposed to bring it down, we need the kind of intervention that we as a government were moving very dramatically and clearly to making sure was there.
What in your mind would possess a government, given the long-term gain for the present investment in that kind of opportunity, given that there's been nothing tabled to support the dropping of junior kindergarten and some of the pre-school initiatives that were beginning to unfold and take root, to make the cuts that are being proposed in this particular bill or that would ensue because of this particular bill?
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Dr Steinhauer: I can't presume to think what's in the mind of the government. What the government has said is that it's concerned about the effects on the next generation if the economic system continues to deteriorate. I think it's a real concern if the economic situation continues to deteriorate. However, as I said, I think there are cuts that can be made that are not going to impair the development of the children who are going to be the parents of those children in the next generation. To me, there's a need for long-term planning rather than just, "Let's cut now and we'll see what the consequences are later." I think the consequences are clear from the literature if we don't get kids off to a good start.
It's like a 19-wheel tractor-trailer; if you want it to go north, it makes a lot more sense to start it going north than start it going south and, when it's going 100 kilometres an hour, tell it to do a fast U-turn.
Mr Martin: I know there's a ton of information and study and research that's been done to support more intervention at an early age, more opportunity at an early age. Is there any documentation or study done to say that's at least, even at the very best, neutral?
Dr Steinhauer: There's a great deal of information that has shown that interventions at every level -- appropriate and focused interventions, because not all interventions are equally good, nor can you do everything through just government-funded interventions. We've got to do more in families. We've got to do more in our workplaces to take the pressure off parents. We've got to do more in our communities in particular, in addition to the sort of mainstream and specialized services. But there have been studies that have shown that we can cut down on the number of very low birth-weight babies who have all sorts of complications across the board, and also the number of brain-damaged babies.
There have been studies that have shown in the population that involves most of an American state, and that have been duplicated by studies in other states, that really high-quality home-visiting programs can cut down on the rate of child abuse very significantly -- 50% below the child abuse rate in the whole state and 75% below that of high-risk people who weren't intervened with. If you cut down on child abuse, you cut down on teenage violence and other things. I've given you some of the statistics in the early childhood care and education area, but there are others from other countries that suggest equal results.
Mr O'Toole: You've outlined that optimizing a child's potential developmentally is affected by many factors, and you mentioned genetics, socioeconomic and care of the child.
Dr Steinhauer: Yes.
Mr O'Toole: Who is the primary caregiver, ideally?
Dr Steinhauer: Even if a child were in day care from morning to night, the studies have shown conclusively that the parent is still the primary caregiver.
Mr O'Toole: That's very important and I support that view myself. I have five children and my wife is a junior kindergarten teacher. In the interest of my peers, I'll let them make the same points perhaps.
Mrs Ecker: Just a very quick question. I believe you said 65% of parents wish to stay home if they could. Was it 65%?
Dr Steinhauer: Sixty-five per cent of parents said the best way to bring up a child would be to have a full-time parent in the home. However, only 13% said they could afford to have a full-time parent in the home.
Mrs Ecker: The reason I want to clarify that, because it certainly matches with what I'm being told by the parents I've been consulting with in the child care review very much, is because in the Star article that you've included you talk about 40% of parents wishing that one of them could remain home to parent full time. I wanted to make sure whether it was 40% or 65%. I'm not trying to put you on the spot, but I wanted to make sure because I've quoted you frequently and would like to continue to do so, so I'd like to make sure I've got the right figure.
Dr Steinhauer: I will check that figure. I believe the figure is 65%. I will give you a call tomorrow with the figure corrected.
Mrs Ecker: I'd really appreciate that. Just for your interest, when I made the statement at a session with child care -- the Ontario Coalition for Better Child Care -- that the majority of parents did wish, if they could, to stay home and look after their child if they could afford to do it, recognizing many can't, I was roundly booed for that, which was an interesting opinion on their part.
Dr Steinhauer: By the way, I believe that the corrected figure is on the family fact sheet that was left with you, because the figure on that is correct. I will not call you if that figure is on there, and I think it is, because I know that was correct. We checked it before we came.
Mr Young: Under this heading, "Prevention Pays," these are dramatic, startling numbers on the results in arrests and convictions, teenage pregnancies, those sorts of things. But it is a fairly narrow demographic group. I guess it was about 1970, it was in the United States, it was in a project, it was children of poor, poorly educated, single teenage mothers. How does that apply to society at large in Ontario today?
Dr Steinhauer: First of all, as I said to you before, that's a multiply high-risk group. My guess is that all of those figures, with the exception of the teenage pregnancy rate, would be comparable with the very extremely high-risk populations here in Ontario. I don't think the teenage pregnancy rate probably would be comparable.
Again, that's talking only about the extremely high-risk sector of the population. We know for other kids that high quality early childhood care and education can be good for all kids, however well they're parented, but it can be really lifesaving in terms of potential for the ones who are most poorly parented.
Mrs Julia Munro (Durham-York): There are a couple of points that I wanted to make, and certainly one of them is the fact that we have made the commitment to reinvest moneys into child care and intervention. I wanted to ask you also about the Staying on Track program that was done in Belleville. I wonder if you could tell us how many people were kept in Staying on Track. In other words, of the 100% of the babies you saw, how many were kept in the program?
Dr Steinhauer: I'm sorry, I can't give you that figure right now. I will get back to you with that figure. Can you give me until the beginning of the week?
Mrs Munro: Oh, absolutely. I would ask you then to comment on that project.
Dr Steinhauer: Let me comment on that then, because I chose that as one of 12 outstanding programs in terms of getting kids off to a good start, some of which go right back to the prenatal period and others of which are dealing with the reorganization of communities. I chose that as one of these model programs for a paper that I did for the National Forum on Health called How to Protect the Development of Resiliency in the Face of Disadvantage.
It's a terrific program in that it pinpointed, at a very early point, kids who were at high risk. It tended to follow them to get them to help earlier. It picked up all sorts of problems, many of which probably would not have been noticed if that kind of contact hadn't been established. I know that towards the end of the program they got into trouble for financial reasons, but I think it is one of the two more promising programs of that sort that I know.
Mr Patten: Dr Steinhauer, it's a delight to finally meet you and hear your presentation. I am aware of your career, having worked at the Children's Hospital of Eastern Ontario Foundation. If I'd known you were going to wear that tie, I would have worn mine this morning, because I have the same kind of tie.
I'd like to comment, first of all, in that the information you gave certainly is in tune with others who referred to various research projects. This gives a lot more detail, inclusively. If I might humbly suggest that if you can directly find a way to communicate to the minister, or one of his staff persons over there, the problems with committees are that usually the decision-makers are not at the committee. I think the data are piling up more conclusively every day in terms of the value and the investment related to junior kindergarten, if it is good junior kindergarten, in terms of long-term investment and the offsetting costs that would occur with the lack of such programs.
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I would also concur with your statement when you talked about the Alberta parents and their reaction to the Alberta government's affecting junior kindergarten. I would say the same thing, that the single most frequent representations that I have had by letter and by telephone and in person have been related to junior kindergarten over the last year.
In relation to your comment of smart cuts, I think everyone would agree that there are ways to be more efficient in big systems and that there are areas where perhaps you can afford to cut more without affecting truly the quality and the contribution of education. It would seem to me that this is one area. Part of the problem is that this legislation provides targeted areas. We heard from the school board yesterday that essentially said, "If you engaged us as a partner, we will help find that volume of resource, but we will find it in a less damaging manner." I wonder if in your experience as well that would be true.
Dr Steinhauer: I would think that one of the saddest things about the way things are done by governments, and I don't just mean the present government but all governments, is the fact that often practised wisdom from the people who are on the front lines doesn't get through, that government research is usually done by people in the government who have an axe to grind.
I think that some research that's done out in the community has an axe to grind too. What I think makes our Sparrow Lake Alliance different is that it has representation from a number of different sectors which are often competing with each other for funding, from the child care sector, from the education sector, from the children's mental health sector, from the corrections sector, from the education sector, so that anything that we come up with is at least some sort of balance, that if one could leave aside the parochial interests of each group, what seems to make the most sense in the long run.
I think it would be really important. I think often the impression that those of us in the field get is that if we are asked to form a partnership, it's a partnership where the decision has been made before we're asked in. This is not any one government I'm talking about, but this has been the experience that governments deal with their own information, that the ministries have their own particular silos and that the outside is treated as if it were an enemy source.
I think that the leaders of all of the groups that are working with children have some awareness of the fact that we can't all have it all and continue to go on in this way. Some cuts have to be made. We have suggested to the federal government and I have suggested to each of the three major ministers who are involved with children in a paper that I wrote on the Canada health and social transfer some general guidelines that could make it possible for ministers to cut in ways that would allow savings without doing violence to the kinds of services that are needed if we're going to get those kids who are at risk off to the kind of start they need to become competent and productive citizens in the future.
The Vice-Chair: Thank you very much, Doctor, for your presentation.
WARD 2 PARENTS' COUNCIL
The Vice-Chair: I'd now like to call upon the parents' council of Ward 2, Abby Bushby and Sudhatri Murthy, to come forward, please. Welcome to our meeting.
Ms Sudhatri Murthy: My name is Sudhatri Murthy; I'm chairperson at the Parkdale Public School-Community association. This is Abby Bushby from the Howard Park --
Ms Abby Bushby: Home and school association. We're both representatives of the Ward 2 Parents' Council in Toronto.
Ms Murthy: I'll begin. I would like to read a prepared statement on behalf of our school-community association.
Thank you for this opportunity to address you on Bill 34, An Act to amend the Education Act. My name is Sudhatri Murthy, and I chair the Parkdale Public School-Community association. The bill amends five sections of the Education Act, but I will concentrate on only three: the section which allows Metropolitan Toronto to give education dollars to the province of Ontario, that section which makes junior kindergarten a local option and that section which limits the rights of adults over the age of 21 to attend high schools. These are of priority to our school community and have a significantly negative impact on our school and family of schools, which include Queen Victoria Public School and Parkdale Collegiate Institute.
As school communities, we support the Metropolitan Toronto School Board and the Toronto Board of Education in their opposition to legislation allowing property tax dollars to be remitted to the province. Property taxes collected for education should not be used to pay down the deficit. Our parents have supported increases in the local mill rate to support the level of service we need from the Toronto Board of Education through our representative, Trustee Atkinson. This level of service is in place to ensure equity of opportunity and in turn equity in outcome for our students, and we have argued to maintain it in the face of ongoing budget cuts.
These services are under attack because they are viewed as extras that drive Toronto's average student costs above the 905-area average, $1,400 per student worth. Equity of opportunity is supported by the Toronto Board of Education inner-city allocations that include increased staffing, funding for nutrition programs, English-as-a-second-language instruction as well as special education programs. These are not extra in a school where "there is serious economic and cultural deprivation." That's a quote from the proposed Metro-wide inner-city formula 1996 document.
A class at Parkdale Public School may be composed of half ESL students, a majority of the class living in high-density neighbourhoods as tenants, a turnover of students as high as 110% and a significantly higher-than-average number of working poor, two-income households and single-parent families.
The parents and taxpayers of Parkdale have an even greater stake in this legislation since many of them are working poor and tenants, two qualifiers that often go hand in hand. They are relatively unorganized but are a large constituency and represent the majority of families at Parkdale Public School, Parkdale Collegiate Institute and Queen Victoria Public School. As tenants, they are paying a higher rate of property tax while being represented on a per capita basis less than any other Ontarian. They live in a neighbourhood that is of medium density to high density, which is inherently cost-effective, yet are facing cuts to service for which they pay so much.
This redistribution of education dollars, as it finds its way down to the Toronto Board of Education and each of its schools, will mean a reduction of service and a reduced responsiveness to the local community, which in our case is very vulnerable. This legislation takes advantage of those who lack political representation and knowhow. The high investment in education in Metro is to ensure some degree of equity in outcomes for its students. Instead of commending this independence and local responsiveness, this legislation is penalizing it.
Junior kindergarten and adult education are two services which provide equity of opportunity to our diverse population through the public system rather than through personal resources. They both contribute to a healthy, educated and increasingly sophisticated population, which benefits all of Ontario. The kindergarten teachers at our school encounter children in junior kindergarten who often have not had any experience being with a group and who have not had the opportunity to use materials and toys that would benefit them in their grade 1 experience. In our neighbourhood, kindergarten is already having to ameliorate the lack of opportunity that young children face.
For those at the other end of the formal schooling spectrum, due to whatever combination of socioeconomic or migration forces, the chance to complete their high school education with a broad range and depth of courses benefits all high school students.
These two program opportunities are necessary to our family of schools and the families in that school community, and ensuring that the property tax dollars stay in the classroom will help true equity in education. Student needs should drive the budget and not equal payments for taxpayers.
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Ms Bushby: I have an address to largely read also. It's from the text but perhaps speaking it makes it come alive.
I'm a parent at Toronto's Howard Junior Public School. I'm in my second term as home and school chair. I'm also a member of the Ward 2 Parents' Council. It's a six-school group straddling Parkdale and High Park in Toronto. Our ward body is one of the most diverse in the city, with full income ranges, single- and two-parent families, recently arrived immigrants and a strong community-parental involvement with our school.
My daughter's class of grade 3 and 4 has 28 children. In grade 1 there were 22 in the class. Our inner-city programming, which measures income, the presence of public housing, statistics on juvenile delinquency, mother's educational level and the predominance of non-English-speaking recent immigrants puts us into an inner-city category of the lowest rung.
Last year we suffered a cut of $19 million in the Toronto board budget due to our declining tax base. We lost some teacher allocation, half of our educational assistants and there were some cuts to central administration which I'm sure the board has informed you about.
Earlier this year I began to volunteer in my daughter's class and the common area once a week. Our school is designed with small classrooms that surround a common area serving six classes. They used to be staffed full-time with educational assistants who earned a mere $19,000 a year. Now they do their help with curriculum supports, turning studies into three-dimensional projects and supervising a large working space on half-time. With our after-tax cookie sales we fund-raise to pay for babysitting so as to encourage more volunteers with young children to help out. For this we were featured in the Toronto Star, but it only adds about two half-days of volunteering a week. Already we've begun to notice that those classes without strong parental support are having to get by with less. Those with better strong parental supports -- usually reading the wealthier children -- get better parental supports. Volunteers cannot replace working professionals. As much as I love it, I will not be able to volunteer like this in September.
Non-inner-city Toronto schools have worse pupil-teacher ratios. Brown school at Yonge and St Clair has a grade 4 class with 38 students. How much worse can it get before those parents give up on public education and send their children to private schools? I understand that in Manhattan 55% of children attend private schools. A huge chunk of them left the public system when money was taken out of that system in the early 1980s. Is this what we want for Ontario? I hope not. I think not.
Last year I acted to pull together a network of parents from across Ontario who are concerned -- across Toronto; Ontario's next -- who are concerned about what is happening in education financing. We promote parents becoming informed on the various reform measures under way that impact public education, and parents act in their own wards with their MPPs and politicians that matter. In our own ward 2 council, we have made submissions to the Sweeney and Golden commissions, the GTA panel and now to this committee.
Bill 34 pits student equity against all the problems associated with our declining tax base. I take it as a reasonable guess that if we did cut out junior kindergarten, we could afford the school property tax payment to the province. We cannot do that. A well-funded early intervention program in Alberta of 30 years ago was followed up recently. For every dollar spent in the early years, $7 was saved in not having to pay for adult education, adult retraining, less juvenile delinquency, and a reduction in welfare payments.
To transfer adult students to adult education is to transfer them to an inferior system. For good reasons, teachers in continuing education earn less. It's less rigorous and has poorer resources than regular day school. I know several people who have taken the conversational French and can't speak French; I'm sure you do too. Furthermore, the greater the inner-city need, the more the students of low-income, troubled, single-parent or non-English-speaking families, all of whom live in Toronto in greater than average proportions by comparison to other parts of Ontario, have more disadvantages to overcome, with fewer personal resources.
I agree with earlier submissions that it's probably illegal, and certainly contravenes the purpose of local property taxes, which ought to be primarily of a local benefit, to extract a school property tax payment from Metro. Non-residential property taxes are too high and now they are being asked to support the whole province. The truth is that they have been supporting the provincial education finance system for a long time because of the nature of the education grant system -- I'm not telling you anything you don't know -- being based on real estate value. The flight of non-residential taxes from Toronto and Metro to neighbouring jurisdictions is well documented.
The tax differential problem between residential taxpayers is not hard to solve. To digress for a minute, note that the tax differential between homeowners and tenants in urban and suburban GTA communities disappears if Toronto tenants are taxed at the lower residential rate and single-family homeowners' in Toronto taxes increase to meet them. That's a city of Toronto submission before the Golden commission.
But we must solve the inordinate tax problem between Metro and non-Metro, non-residential tax bases. While homeowners are not particularly hit hard by the $30-million property tax payment, non-residential and tenant residential property taxes will bear the greatest burden, causing predictable impacts. You attract this murky mess by extracting school property taxes with Bill 34; you can't avoid it.
What to do:
Let's recognize that we cannot solve our overspending problems by mere across-the-board cutbacks. It was a mistake to omit education governance from the Golden commission, because it created a situation where the Ministry of Education, under the Sweeney commission and now Bill 34, purports to raise property taxes without regard to the need for interministerial, non-siloed and provincially led, regionally considered leadership. The province must act on property tax reform in all its implications that were before the Golden commission, and that part of Bill 34 which deals with the property tax payment ought not to be legislated at this time.
The most important recommendation of the GTA task force to ease our region out of the current fiscal crisis is regionally coordinated land use development within the existing urban boundaries and concentrated growth points, for savings of $55 billion over the next 25 years. With figures like that, why are we taking $1.2 billion, or even this $400 million, out of education? Without arresting trends to urban sprawl and excessive waste of resources, the temptation to take money out of education seems to be too great for governments to resist.
Good services and public education make a region great and attractive to a far greater extent than do excesses of roads and sewers. The lack of coordination of school capital development in the region and the role of schools in fuelling low-density urban sprawl is part of the problem. Why do we continue to build new schools at the urban fringe on 10-acre sites where most students have to be bused, when three- to four-acre school yards in medium-density urban areas are more than adequate? Children can walk to school. Integrated school facilities with community recreation and public libraries, not separate, low-density facilities for each, ought to be developed.
The good-quality educational standards we have in Toronto were developed in the protection of our non-residential tax base. The province may know little of what our programs are and how we assess student need since these programs were all developed locally. Inner-city programs include higher staff allocations for designated inner-city schools, early childhood education starters, books for supplementary take-home reading, special projects like the Parkdale 2000 music program, secondary school tutoring, targeted student support for alienated youth to return to school. The Golden commission and the GTA panel recognized the importance of maintaining good-quality education in the core city.
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We are losing our non-residential tax base with or without good provincial leadership. The province ought to take a serious look at the student equity approach. The Metro board has developed systems for measuring student need and developing appropriate programs and should be extensively consulted.
By whatever tax reform takes place, Toronto will still raise a lot of taxes, whether in sales tax, GST, income or property taxes. We conserve resources in land costs and infrastructure. We attract higher costs because of human needs, particularly in welfare and education. A province-wide system of funding needs ought to be developed. But do not use the tax system, which creates most local burdens, without permitting local benefit; that is, the school property tax system. The province ought to take a serious look at New Jersey's Quality Education Act, which as I understand it takes local property tax assessment into account in determining eligibility for state subsidies, but also regards student income, which you can take to mean some form of family-based income.
Cooperative service delivery is a good idea, but the recommendations of Bill 34 do not go far enough. If education spending must be reduced, surely we must start looking at ways of integrating public, Catholic and French boards of education. A recent survey indicated strong citizen support -- 71% -- for integrated boards. To increase funding for Catholic and French schools at a time when funding for all education is being downsized is not wise. France, one of the most Catholic countries in the world, has long favoured public education. The government was told by the Toronto Teachers' Federation in the fall of 1995 apparently that $300 million a year could be saved in administrative costs with integrated boards. The province ought to take leadership in achieving non-sectarian boards that accommodate all interests.
We would like to see the province, including citizens and the government, engaged in examining what is essential for a good quality educational system. Yesterday you heard Kathleen Wynne and Peter Clutterbuck talk about the essential school project. We invite the province to take leadership in setting the direction for essential schooling. The state of Tennessee recently adopted a wide-scale program of introducing $300 million across the state into schools to bring the pupil-teacher ratio down to an unbelievable 14 or 15, because the results for learning, even a decade later, are so dramatic -- a full 10% differential for those students who had lower pupil-teacher ratios. Special education could be revised with lower pupil-teacher education resources.
We want to see a good quality educational system in all of Ontario, but one that does not find a new way to drain more dollars out of Toronto.
Mr O'Toole: I'll share this with my peers here. First, I commend you for your report and dedication as volunteers and parents. I gather you favour parent advisory councils, the process of involving the parents legitimately in the school educating process?
Ms Murthy: We support it, but it implies a lot of investment. If the establishment of that council would mean that trustees are reduced or that the proportion of representation per capita is reduced, then there has to be some investment in --
Mr O'Toole: That leads me to another question. You've read the Sweeney report. You've looked at education finance reform. Do you realize what education finance reform is, that it's changing how it's funded? Do you see there would be a usefulness for boards if it was funded from the province, if the money all came from the province, and the policies and the programs? What exactly would they be doing? Parent councils would be very important.
Ms Bushby: Yes. First of all, parent councils are a fine idea. We have them in many parts of Toronto now, and they were designed by looking at a lot of what we do in our wards at present. They're aren't throughout the city; they should be.
Mr O'Toole: They're mandated for 1997.
Ms Bushby: Yes. There are a few additions that come with the provincially mandated form and we welcome them; a community representative, for one. I personally think it's dangerous at this point for us to lose our trustees, because we are going through such an incredible period of reform that this is virtually a full-time job. I happen to be up on the issues because I've just finished a master's thesis on the topic, but a lot of people are not so up. When we get to a more stable system, then we can talk again about whether or not we need trustees. But for the interim you won't get this commitment from the average volunteer.
Mr O'Toole: if there are other questions on this side, I'd be pleased to share --
Mr Young: I'd like to comment. That raised my interest, what you said there. All of our universities, colleges and hospitals in Ontario are run by volunteers. Many people have asked, "Why can't our schools run in the same way?" There's a lot of talent out there and people who will contribute for the sake of making a contribution. Don't you think that makes sense?
Ms Bushby: Volunteers in what capacity? To be on the board of directors of the Toronto General Hospital -- there are a lot of benefits that flow with that. There are not so many benefits that flow with being active in your ward council. I personally find a lot of them because I love doing it, but you require a lot of change to get to that kind of system. People vie to be on the board of directors of major hospitals and then they run for political office.
Mrs Munro: Are you in favour of boards seeking opportunities to work coterminously with other boards for cost savings?
Ms Bushby: Most definitely, yes. My comments were directed at more of that.
Mr Patten: First of all, I had a chance to visit Howard school one time. It was a fascinating evening and a good debate. The community is one of the most active I have seen around in terms of your schools. I commend you for that. I would like to ask you about the class size. You refer to studies. As we've looked at it, some of us agree. Especially that Tennessee model was quite dramatic in terms of a very bold jurisdiction saying, "If we want to minimize the costs by virtue of crime or corrections, this sort of thing, it's education you have to increase investment in." You're talking about 38 kids right now in -- what grade was that? In Brown school, was it?
Ms Bushby: Grade 4 at Brown school.
Mr Patten: That's now. What do you suspect is going to happen, given that the government will find some way of extracting the equalization payments?
Ms Bushby: I don't know the impact of a $30-million cut, but with pooling across the GTA under the Golden commission, if the distribution method had been equal dollars per student, in Toronto we would have lost $47 million annually from the budget, which would probably have put class sizes up around 50 to bear the initial brunt of the impact. If the model of pooling non-residential taxes across Ontario under the Sweeney recommendation were to be formed, I've heard estimates as high as -- again, this is the city of Toronto board -- $175 million lost annually. That's a Metro board estimate. The ridiculous amounts are unimaginable, that kind of impact. Clearly it can't happen at present.
I'm worried about incrementally moving that way. I'm mindful that the present system we have of basing the educational grant on property taxes was given a huge boost in the late 1960s, early 1970s. That was introduced by Treasurer MacNaughton, under Darcy McKeough's and Robarts's direction, as part of a fiscal framework for the future, and the Toronto-centred region plan was a huge component of it. That would have controlled urban sprawl and reduced those costs we've incurred that Pamela Blais now says in her Golden commission report are costing $55 billion over the next 25 years.
Mr Martin: You talk a fair amount in your brief and the comments you made about the issue of taxes and how that has an impact on our ability to deliver education, the cost of education. You talk about equity and your concern that none of the taxes collected by way of the property tax system get shifted out of Toronto to other parts of the province. I represent a part of the province that doesn't have the same density of industrial tax base that you have here and certainly would have some conversation with you about that that would be interesting, I'm sure.
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But the question I want to ask you is something that you didn't touch on, the issue of the new wrinkle that's been thrown into this whole package, the tax break, and what you think of the tax break now and the ability of school boards to deliver education.
Ms Bushby: John Spears in the Toronto Star had a really good analysis of that. It seems that if we weren't committed to a 30% break in income tax, we could possibly refinance schooling through the income tax system, which would drop property taxes considerably. That requires some political will that I wish were there, perhaps could be there still in a reformulation. I think we have to seriously take a look at that.
The reason I mention New Jersey is they do a compromise. They take property taxes, presumably for base amounts -- and then the Quality Education Act, that's purposely intended to redirect inner-city need money at inner-city schools of Newark and whatever the other major cities are in New Jersey. And it works; it's been around for some years. Does that answer your question?
Mr Martin: I'm not sure where you're getting your information on New Jersey and Newark.
Ms Bushby: From the impact assessment of New Jersey. It's an impact assessment of a regional land use plan and the education finance was caught up with it.
Mr Martin: Certainly that's not the information I'm getting, and I would disagree with you on your assessment of what's happening in inner-city --
Ms Bushby: My information is from 1992, so you may be more current.
Mr Martin: Yes, it is actually more current and it's actually happening as we speak. The inner-cities of New Jersey and Newark in particular are finding it more and more difficult to provide even the basics of education to their children because of the tax --
Ms Bushby: There might have been a reformulation of this formula that I studied in 1992.
The Vice-Chair: Thank you very much to both of you for your presentation. Thank you for joining us this evening.
ONTARIO TAXPAYERS FEDERATION
The Vice-Chair: The next and final presentation for today is by the Ontario Taxpayers Federation, Paul Pagnuelo, if you could come forward, please. Welcome to our meeting, sir.
Mr Paul Pagnuelo: First of all, I'd like to take the opportunity to thank all of you for the opportunity tonight to comment on Bill 34.
Listening these days to the shrill rhetoric of the various special-interest lobbies that are decrying the reductions in provincial transfer payments to Ontario school boards, the message seems to be coming across that there's some sort of covert, monstrous plot by the government to destroy Ontario's education system.
Despite one's political ideology, I find it very difficult to believe that any government in this country, regardless of political stripe, would deliberately set out to lay waste the future prosperity of a democratic and civilized society by de-educating tomorrow's workforce.
To suggest that cutting even one penny out of a $14-billion education budget will result in lower standards and that it will hurt the quality of academic training our children will receive is not only ludicrous, it's irresponsible.
Our advice to Ontarians is really to ignore the radio and TV ads they're hearing and seeing, the petitions that are being circulated by parent-teacher associations and the letters from elementary and secondary principals which are coming home in the school bags of our children warning of imminent disaster in the education system because of spending cuts that are being made. I think we need to look at these warnings for what they really are, and that's nothing more than desperate, passionate pleas from powerful spending coalitions whose sole objective is to maintain the status quo and to defend their place at the public trough.
In plain language, the cost of Ontario's education system has grown to unsustainable levels. Confirming our own findings, the Sweeney report says that taxpayers made it clear, particularly during municipal and provincial election campaigns, that they cannot bear, will not tolerate, tax increases.
In fact, what taxpayers -- and remembering many of us taxpayers are also parents with children in the system -- are looking for is tax relief. It is indeed ironic, in our view, that an education system which is supposed to be preparing our children to become productive members of society can't teach itself how to be efficient, affordable and how to improve the quality of its service delivery and outcomes.
The problem currently facing our provincial school boards is not a revenue shortfall but one of overspending.
I'm going to digress a moment from the prepared text. If we take a look around us at other levels of government, provincial, federal, if we look at what's going on in private business, everyone is finding ways of achieving economies of scale, doing more with less. For the suggestion to be made that school boards are somehow exempt from all of this, that they're cut to the bone in terms of efficiency, simply defies logic.
We think that existing school board budgets provide limited discretionary opportunities for cost cutting in non-employee expense areas, and when we see them trying to get into those areas what normally gets cut are things like classroom supplies and computers. That's not to say there's no opportunity for substantive savings in administration, but in terms of the total overall $14-billion budget, the amount is not all that significant. As a consequence, I think we need to seriously look at salaries and benefits in both the instructional and non-teaching areas, and they have to be considered as realistic opportunities for system-wide cost reductions.
Bill 34, we think, is a modest -- and I stress "modest" -- beginning to a vast array of reforms which are needed in Ontario's education system. That is not to say we agree in total with the amendments proposed in the bill, because we don't. In some cases we don't think they go far enough. In others the proposals amount to little more than tinkering at the edges, while avoiding the politically difficult structural changes which ultimately must be made.
In addressing each of the five areas in which the bill is organized, some of our comments will be brief. Much of our time we'd like to spend in dealing with the amendments affecting sick leave.
First of all, in dealing with adult education, if our amendments in sections 3 and 4 of the bill are correct, if our reading is correct, the objective appears to be to end access by adult pupils to a costly and inefficient system and to redirect them to a continuing education program which should provide far better value for money without denying the adult pupil the right to take a credit course. In these circumstances, we agree with the amendment.
In terms of cooperative agreements, the federation wholeheartedly supports all initiatives which seek to encourage lower cost and quality results at all levels of government by the sharing of human, physical and financial resources. However, we believe the legislative changes should go further by also encouraging cooperation and partnership ventures with private sector organizations.
In order to measure the relative success or failure by boards that will be required to publicly report on their efforts annually, we would suggest that the province, by way of regulation, clearly stipulate those matters on which the boards are expected to seek cooperative agreements.
Equalization payments: We believe that one of the primary objectives of reduced provincial transfer payments is to force local boards to do more with less. The government has been quite clear that it fully expects the boards to meet these reductions by cutting costs outside the classroom and without increasing the property tax burden. Unfortunately, that's not what we're seeing happen in reality in many cases.
In effect, the province, by reducing the size of the cheques it writes to the boards, can achieve what municipal taxpayers have been trying to accomplish for years with little or no success. While this initiative is long overdue, the benefits of these forced reductions will fall exclusively to the provincial treasury and, by extension, to all Ontario taxpayers. However, if through reduced transfer payments boards are forced to maximize their efficiency, then we must ask what opportunities remain for local taxpayers who are also looking for some relief on their local property tax bills.
We think a fair and more equitable way of approaching cost reductions would have been to impose a moratorium on any property tax increases, with a cost reduction target expressed in percentage terms, with the savings shared equally through both lower provincial transfers and lower education property taxes.
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As a matter of principle, we disagree that assessment-rich boards should be obligated to subsidize assessment-poor boards using the property tax system. The Bill 34 proposal, as we read it, enables boards not subsidized by the provincial government to make equalization payments to the province so that the impact of grant reductions is shared by all, but in our mind, this simply avoids the more difficult issue of having to deal with fundamental education financing reform. We don't think this is a solution that should be pursued.
Junior kindergarten: Our federation has always strongly objected to JK being a mandatory requirement for boards. While we applaud the decision to once again make it optional, we would like to see the bill strengthened in several respects:
First, we believe that if a board decides to offer JK, all associated costs should be accounted for separately and not included as part of the elementary panel.
Second, all optional services provided by a board should be funded exclusively from local property taxes, thus ensuring the local board is held fully accountable for its management of optional programs.
Third, the decision to approve or reject optional programs should be made by municipal taxpayers through a binding referendum conducted in conjunction with municipal elections. The decision for optional programs should not be allowed to rest with the board, which can easily be swayed by those lobbying for programs which are going to be paid for by somebody else.
Sick leave: This is a concern which we raised through correspondence with the Minister of Education last September and specifically dealing with the matter of retirement gratuities and the huge unfunded liability which exists, and something which the Sweeney report specifically mentioned.
The sick leave benefit forms the basis for the retirement gratuity, and the Education Act provides in part: "A board by resolution, may establish a system of sick leave gratuities for employees or any class thereof...."
The act also provides that no employee can receive more remuneration than that equalling the amount earned if 50% of cumulative sick leave credits were cashed in for payment; no full-time employee can receive more than an amount greater than 50% of the final year's remuneration; and when an employee, pursuant to a collective agreement or board policy, is on part-time status immediately prior to termination of employment, the amount cannot exceed 50% of the full-time annual rate of earnings received during the last calendar year or school year.
The sick leave gratuity may also be paid to a departing teacher along with other benefits that may be granted by the board with which he or she is employed. This could include retirement incentive plans, severance or other individual payment schemes for which the teacher may qualify.
Retirement gratuities may also be paid to other members of school board staff who work in non-teaching occupations. Because a number of different unions represent these employees, we were unable to address the frequency of the sick leave benefit for other employee classes, but we understand there has been some considerable success in bargaining out this benefit in the non-teaching areas of Ontario's school boards.
There is a variety of methods employed to arrive at a teacher's final sick leave gratuity payment, and there is a wide variety of plans and formulas that exist across the province, with some boards offering more and others offering less than the average. They can be broken down into three broad classes: full benefit, limited benefit and no benefit. We won't get into the details of those tonight.
Last year, we conducted an analysis using 1993 data, which I recognize is quite stale now, but in orders of magnitude, I think what we would find if we looked at the current numbers is that the total unfunded liability probably sits somewhere around $1 billion or so today, and going back and looking at the 1993 data, we found that just over 8% of that total liability was in fact reserved, which places a huge unfunded liability on taxpayers.
I think this issue starts to provide some further insight into some of the reasons behind the high cost of Ontario's publicly funded education system and the extravagant tax burden which it is placing on taxpayers. Virtually no one in the private sector today has a benefit that pays people twice for some days they work during their career and that's given to employees at retirement. Many of those plans that existed years ago have now been phased out and moved over to short-term and long-term disability plans.
One of the things we found that needs to be looked at in the studies and analyses we conducted was that there seemed to exist a number of discrepancies between both the audited and reported data by the boards of what their unfunded liability was. We found situations where in terms of the schedule 18s, which are the reports provided to the ministry, there were no unfunded liabilities shown, or no liabilities shown. Then you take a look at the audited reports and they tell you a different number, a different situation. We also found that there didn't seem to be any consistency in how boards report these numbers, when they actually begin the clock starting in calculating what those accrued liabilities are.
We felt, looking at all of those data, that the strong possibility exists that the number that is being reported, both in terms of schedule 18s and the audited financial statements, may be very substantially understated. What might be a $1-billion total liability could in fact be many times higher than that. We think there's a need for the Provincial Auditor to become involved and to look at standardizing how these liabilities should be reported.
It would be interesting if we could go back in time over a 10-year period and see what's actually happened with the reserve portion. Has it declined over the years, has it remained stable or has it actually increased? We think one of the ways the boards have tried to accommodate the wishes of local municipal taxpayers in the last five, six years to bring in low or zero tax increases is to simply not put any money in the reserve funds. I think that's foolish, because what it's doing is deferring taxes to some point in the future. It's not being honest with local ratepayers in terms of what the true cost is of running the system.
We believe the Ontario government is the only one in a position to clean up this province-wide mess and bring some reasonableness back to the system. There are several specific amendments we would like to see to Bill 34 in respect to the sick leave provisions.
First of all, we believe the bill should terminate it completely -- prohibit the retirement gratuity and not leave it as something that can be continued in collective agreements.
Due to the severity of the unfunded liability, if we look at the fact that possibly only about 8% or 9% of it is funded today or reserved today and that there's a huge unfunded liability, the reality is that there is absolutely no way taxpayers are going to be able to make up that difference without a huge tax increase. The fact is that there are a number of people in both the teaching and non-teaching ranks who are going to be retiring in the next five to seven years. We're going to find all of that cost coming down in the very near future. The reality is that we've got a situation that's been allowed to get out of control and there's no money there to pay for it.
Our suggestion is that what we have to do is pool those funds, cap it in terms of what the payout's going to be, limit it to what exists today in the reserve fund. We would say the payout shouldn't exceed 5% of total liability and the remainder should be plowed back into the schools in some of the equipment and supplies that are needed.
We think also that only those eligible personnel with a minimum of 10 years' service should be eligible for any payout under the phase-out plan.
Lastly, the existing sick leave program which exists today has to be replaced with a modern, up-to-date insurance plan which provides both short-term and long-term disability, with employees paying all or part of the premium cost, just as they do in many other industries.
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In conclusion, Bill 34 is a small, first step in the right direction. It certainly needs amendments, particularly in the area specific to the situation of Toronto and the matter of equalization payments. We'd also like to see substantial changes in the section dealing with the sick leave benefit, because our concern is that we've got a ticking time bomb out there in that unfunded liability.
Thanks for listening to us this evening. We hope our remarks will help in the deliberations.
Mr Patten: Thank you for your presentation. You have some good ideas and some suggestions. In the case, for example, of Toronto, the equalization payment side of things, were you suggesting that one way that could be dealt with is that these boards be required to directly reduce, make an equalization payment back to their own taxpayers?
Mr Pagnuelo: In terms of the specific example, Toronto, I think it's wrong to expect property owners in one municipality to subsidize property owners elsewhere through the property tax system. If we look at education, we believe there needs to be equal funding throughout the province. The problem is that the way we've got the funding system arranged today, part of it comes from local property taxes, part of it comes from the province. It's a real mishmash.
If we look at the importance of education, stable funding and ensuring there is equity throughout the province, there are some boards where, if you take a look at what they receive in funding versus what they have to derive from local revenues, there are situations where you've got assessment-rich boards and assessment-poor boards, and the quality of education can be affected by how much they can possibly raise in local taxes to offset whatever amount they get from the province.
We need to look at education in Ontario being funded wholly by the province, on a per-student allocation basis, with proper allowance for both regional and demographic differences, including possible differences across the province. The way the system is organized today is just a mishmash. If the province is serious in trying to straighten out the overlap of responsibilities between municipalities and the provincial government, there can be very significant tradeoffs of provincial responsibilities today going back to municipalities and municipal school responsibilities coming back to the province in funding.
That's not to say there would necessarily be any lower burden in overall property taxes, but we think funding specific to education should be a provincial responsibility. You could look at your local municipal property tax bill possibly being responsible for funding optional programs a board may wish to offer, if local taxpayers were in agreement with that. There's also a possibility to look at perhaps whether just the operating costs of education should be funded by the province, with perhaps capital expenses for buildings financed locally through the property tax system. That might bring some better fairness to the system overall.
Mr Martin: Thank you for your presentation; I found it interesting. There is a piece in here, on page 2, where you say, "In fact what taxpayers -- remembering many of us also are parents -- are looking for is tax relief." Certainly all of us are taxpayers --
Mr Pagnuelo: Not just tax relief, but I think what --
Mr Martin: If I might, that's not the question. Okay?
Interjection.
Mr Martin: Yes, I have to make my speech first.
We're all taxpayers, including some of those folks who are identified out there as special-interest groups. We are looking for other things besides tax relief. We're looking for good education for our children --
Mr Pagnuelo: Absolutely.
Mr Martin: -- I have four -- we're looking for a good health care system and we're looking for good infrastructure, because that's what investment is looking for when it comes to an area. People have done some very complicated and interesting studies to show that, for example, an investment in junior kindergarten pays dividends down the road. Have you done any such investigation yourselves to determine where the balance is there re cutting taxes and actually having those things remain and stay viable and effective into the future?
Mr Pagnuelo: First of all, I think we need to make a clear distinction between junior kindergarten and senior kindergarten. We think senior kindergarten, as it's currently constituted, does provide extreme benefit in preparing children as they come into the elementary school system and getting them ready for their first year. But the feedback we've gotten from parents who are close to the system is that junior kindergarten, when you look at it, is nothing more than a universal day care system funded by all taxpayers and doesn't provide any true long-term benefit in reducing some of the problems that have been spoken to earlier. Junior kindergarten is --
Mr Martin: Do you have any detailed study by anybody in the field to support that position?
Mr Pagnuelo: No. We like to rely in that particular case on the feedback we get from parents. That's not to dispute that junior kindergarten may be a laudable thing, but how far do you go? We have to make very clear distinctions between things that are nice to have and that we need to have. Unfortunately, junior kindergarten is on the wish list of things we'd all like to have, but is it truly affordable? We have to look at it.
One of things that's happened too is, look at the number of portables that exist in the system today. The more we expand things like junior kindergarten, it's crowding children out of regular classrooms and into portables. When we can't even provide the infrastructure for children in the basic elementary and secondary panels, we shouldn't be expanding the system to further levels.
Mr Toni Skarica (Wentworth North): It's disturbing when you hear about unfunded liability of almost $1 billion for sick leave gratuities, and we've heard recently there's an $8.2-billion unfunded liability for the teachers' pension. How did this happen? I'm looking at pages and pages of superintendents and managers making $100,000 a year and trustees making substantial money. How did we get here?
Mr Pagnuelo: I think it happened over a long period of time and I would blame many taxpayers for simply not being alert and taking the time to find out what was going on. It was only in the last year and a half or so that it became common public knowledge that this thing existed out there called the retirement gratuity. I can remember attending many school board meetings at budget time where they'd always ask, "What are we putting aside in reserves this year for the retirement benefit?" I never quite understood what that retirement benefit was and they never went into any deep discussion of it. Now we know what it really was.
When you take a look at a director of education who might be earning $140,000 a year and is entitled at retirement to collect a one-time cash payout of $70,000 in the form of retirement gratuity and the same day start collecting his or her pension, there is something really wrong with the system. These are the same people who are telling us that cuts are going to hurt the quality of education, cuts are going to hurt our children, but they're quite prepared to take home very generous cash payouts and not give those up.
Mr Skarica: Anybody else? I've got one more if I've got time. There are something like 150 school boards throughout the province. Did any school board, to your knowledge, set aside money for these unfunded liabilities?
Mr Pagnuelo: There are some that have reserved. There are a few, from my recollection of the list, that were fully funded, but they were by far the exception. The problem we had was, when did they actually start the clock? Did they only start the clock ticking in counting the liability five or 10 years before an employee is ready to retire? There is no consistency. Technically, they should start it the day that employee starts working, as they're accruing those credits. We don't think that's happening. We think, talking even of $1 billion, that can be very substantially understated.
Mr O'Toole: Just a quick one: I heard you say that you believed in equity and fairness across the province for education.
Mr Pagnuelo: Absolutely.
Mr O'Toole: With that in mind, you're familiar, I'm sure, with the education finance reform that's looking at possible other methodologies for funding education. Do you support taking it off the property tax base?
Mr Pagnuelo: We do, but there is not strong consensus for it. From all the discussions and meetings I've had with various ratepayer groups and individual ratepayers, and even discussions with our own supporters, I'd have to say it's about 50-50. The main concern we find people have with taking it off the property tax system -- and I think this is where there are some fine distinctions that need to be made -- is that they feel that means automatically the province becomes the negotiator for all contracts across the province, that the boards give up that ability they have today.
The concern with that is that if you move to province-wide bargaining, that's going to push up costs and not bring them down in any respect. The fear people have in saying, "Let's take it off property taxes and move it to the province," is that at the same time, if that were to happen, they feel contract costs could go up very significantly.
Mr O'Toole: There are studies that support that, but there are some other --
Mr Pagnuelo: I think there's a distinction that needs to be made between how you fund education and how contract negotiations take place. Essentially, the boards would get an envelope of money based on the number of pupils, and how they manage that money would be within their discretion.
The Vice-Chair: Thank you very much, sir, for your presentation.
We're adjourned until we meet in Windsor, 9 o'clock on the day after Victoria Day. There's a subcommittee meeting tomorrow morning. We're adjourned.
The committee adjourned at 1802.