EDUCATION AMENDMENT ACT, 1996 / LOI DE 1996 MODIFIANT LA LOI SUR L'ÉDUCATION
ONTARIO ENGLISH CATHOLIC TEACHERS' ASSOCIATION, NORTH SHORE UNIT ONTARIO TEACHERS INSURANCE PLAN
CENTRAL ALGOMA BOARD OF EDUCATION
ONTARIO ENGLISH CATHOLIC TEACHERS' ASSOCIATION, SAULT STE MARIE UNIT
ASSOCIATION DES ENSEIGNANTES ET DES ENSEIGNANTS FRANCO-ONTARIENS
SAULT STE MARIE WOMEN TEACHERS' ASSOCIATION
ONTARIO SECONDARY SCHOOL TEACHERS' FEDERATION, DISTRICT 30
SAULT STE MARIE BOARD OF EDUCATION
ONTARIO ENGLISH CATHOLIC TEACHERS' ASSOCIATION, SUDBURY SECONDARY UNIT
CONTENTS
Friday 24 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
Ontario English Catholic Teachers' Association, North Shore unit; Ontario Teachers Insurance Plan
Sharon Anderson, president, OECTA, North Shore unit
Jim Smith, second vice-president, OECTA
Mark Cazabon, executive director, Ontario Teachers Insurance Plan
Randy McGlynn, executive director, Ontario Teachers Insurance Plan
Central Algoma Board of Education
Donna Latulippe, teacher
Carolyn Morrow
Ontario English Catholic Teachers' Association, Sault Ste Marie unit
Art Callegari, president
Carolyn Stevens, executive assistant, OECTA
Jim Smith, second vice-president, OECTA
Association des enseignantes et des enseignants franco-ontariens
Rufin Dugas, membre, conseil d'administration
Robert Millaire, adjoint administratif
Alan Robinson
Sault Ste Marie Women Teachers' Association
Gayle Manley, president
Emily Noble
Ontario Secondary School Teachers' Federation, District 30
Wayne Jackson, president
Geoff Shaw, president, OSSTF, Sault Ste Marie division
Sault Ste Marie Board of Education
Frances Sewards, chair
Ray DeRosario, director of education
Don Edwards, trustee
Bert Campbell, superintendent of business
Lorne Carter
Ontario English Catholic Teachers' Association, Sudbury secondary unit
Nina Stapleton, president
Teresa Stewart, principal, St. Albert Adult Learning Centre
Kerri Wiermier, student, St Albert Adult Learning Centre
Bruce Holden, student, St Albert Adult Learning Centre
Mark Brown
Will Debruyne
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:
Brown, Jim (Scarborough West / -Ouest PC) for Mrs Ecker
Grimmett, Bill (Muskoka-Georgian Bay / Muskoka-Baie-Georgienne PC) for Mrs Johns
Skarica, Toni (Wentworth North / -Nord PC) for Mr Jordan
Martin, Tony (Sault Ste Marie ND) for Mr Laughren
Parker, John L. (York East / -Est PC) for Mr Pettit
Clerk / Greffière: Lynn Mellor
Staff / Personnel: Ted Glenn, research officer, Legislative Research Service
The committee met at 0900 in the Holiday Inn, Sault Ste Marie.
EDUCATION AMENDMENT ACT, 1996 / LOI DE 1996 MODIFIANT LA LOI SUR L'ÉDUCATION
Bill 34, An Act to amend the Education Act / Projet de loi 34, Loi modifiant la Loi sur l'éducation.
The Vice-Chair (Mr John Gerretsen): Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to our public hearings into Bill 34. This is the fourth of four days of hearings that we're holding throughout Ontario. The committee has been to Windsor, Ottawa and Thunder Bay, and is in Sault Ste Marie today. For those people who are here to present, you'll have a half an hour for your presentation, which will include any time for questions and answers. From past experience, it's always been extremely worthwhile to get the comments and the various questions from the various caucuses.
On my right is the government caucus, and today we're welcoming Mr Parker and Ms Munro.
Mr Toni Skarica (Wentworth North): And Mr Smith; don't leave him out.
The Vice-Chair: And Mr Smith. No, Mr Smith was here yesterday too -- or at least in Thunder Bay.
On the left side here are the official opposition and the New Democratic Party. I believe all three gentlemen were here yesterday as well, or at least in Thunder Bay.
ONTARIO ENGLISH CATHOLIC TEACHERS' ASSOCIATION, NORTH SHORE UNIT ONTARIO TEACHERS INSURANCE PLAN
The Vice-Chair: Our first delegation today is the Ontario English Catholic Teachers' Association, the North Shore Unit. I understand that Sharon Anderson, the president, is here, together with Randy McGlynn and Mark Cazabon. I guess there's someone else with you as well that I'm not aware of. Perhaps you could introduce yourselves for Hansard's purposes and then you may proceed with your presentation.
Miss Sharon Anderson: Sure. Good morning. I am Sharon Anderson, from the North Shore unit of the Ontario English Catholic Teachers' Association. To my right are Mark Cazabon and Randy McGlynn, executive directors from OTIP, which is the Ontario Teachers Insurance Plan. To my left is Jim Smith, our second vice-president from our provincial office of OECTA.
The focus of our presentation today will be on teacher sick leave credits. I am a grade 8 teacher. I am pleased to have the opportunity to speak here this morning. It's very refreshing at 9 o'clock in the morning to speak to people whose hair is not dyed in orange, purple and pink, as most of my grade 8 students have lately.
I'm sure we are all aware that the education sector is not alone in its use of sick leave credits; most industries have some type of system in place in their collective agreements. When we examine the communities along the North Shore, for example, we recognize that industries and businesses all carry some type of sick leave program or system, whether these be in place within the nursing or law enforcement professions or within our mill and mining industries.
Specifically in the education sector, though, the one difference that we are aware of is that data from Statistics Canada show that in 1994 absenteeism among teachers was lower than the labour force as a whole. Interestingly, in September 1995, 11,520 people received UI sick benefits. Statistics Canada further reports that only 90 of these 11,520 were teachers; that is, 0.78%. Stats Canada further assures us that this is a fairly normal month.
Teachers do not abuse the use of sick leave. There are safeguards in place to discourage this. In our local board, for example, the board still maintains the right to request a medical certificate or other documentation as proof of our legitimate absenteeism.
One distinct difference between the teaching profession and other occupations is that it is actually a terrible inconvenience and increases our workload to be away. Yes, currently we are entitled to sick leave, but what we are painfully aware of is that we are still responsible for that day. We must see that a preplanned program and individual lessons are clearly outlined and activities set for the day. Any teacher will tell you of their personal experience of having to drag themselves from their death beds or, in the case of the flu season, the family toilet bowl, literally drag themselves into work to set in place an action plan for their replacement for that day. Upon return, we must follow up this work and any other circumstances which might have transpired during the absenteeism.
Teachers are also very much aware that it is oftentimes the very profession itself that makes us more susceptible to illness. On a daily basis we are exposed to hundreds of children and adults. Schools are virtual pools of exposure to many communicable diseases. Workers in education and health services are at a far greater risk than in the population at large.
A typical junior grade teacher, for example, might have a class of 31 students, as is the case in my school. Just as he begins his program in September and October, he is faced with the outbreak of fall colds. This is quickly followed by the flu season, then the chicken pox, then strep throat, and even today we can't count out the measles. I won't even at this time expand on the lice outbreak that no one is immune from and the teacher who had to spend much time washing down her classroom late into the evening.
Further to that, the amount of stress that is a direct result of the profession accounts for much sick leave, yet teachers continue to resist being away because of their dedication to the profession and the students entrusted to them. It is unfortunate at this time that teachers are now having to defend innuendo and unsubstantiated political rhetoric with regard to the sick leave credit system.
I thank you for your time this morning and I will pass over the rest of the presentation to the OTIP officers.
Mr Mark Cazabon: Mr Chairman, ladies and gentlemen, at the outset, on behalf of the Ontario Teachers Insurance Plan, I wish to thank the North Shore OECTA branch affiliate for including us in their submission and for providing us with an opportunity to make a brief presentation to your committee. Randy McGlynn and I are officers of OTIP-RAEO.
The Ontario Teachers Insurance Plan was established through cooperative efforts of the five affiliates of the Ontario Teachers' Federation as a not-for-profit trust to provide insured benefits to teachers and other educational workers in Ontario. Since its establishment in 1977, OTIP has always maintained as its primary focus the provision of long-term disability insurance plans in education. Today, over 75,000 Ontario teachers and educational workers are insured for long-term disability provisions through OTIP. As such, OTIP provides LTD insurance through 134 school boards in Ontario.
The purpose of our presentation today is to provide information to your committee on LTD-related issues and to review potential repercussions that may result from changes to the teachers' cumulative sick leave plans. I will deal with the first part of the presentation and Randy will focus on the possible ramifications resulting from changes to cumulative sick leave plans.
As you are certainly aware, stress-related leave for Canadian workers has increased significantly over the last decade. Faced with double-digit unemployment figures, downsizing, layoffs, reduced staff and increased family pressures, Canadian workers are now taking more stress leave than at any other time in history. This trend is driving down productivity, increasing the number of mental and nervous LTD claims and driving up LTD insurance premiums. Overall, industry-wide, mental and nervous claims accounted for 19% of all group LTD claims in 1994.
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Teachers and educational workers are not immune to the general stressors referred to previously. A good case can be made that this group of employees is currently exposed to greater stress conditions than ever before and to a greater extent than other professions and occupational groups. This fact is confirmed through studies which show that the education system is outpacing other sectors by as much as four times in the number of mental and nervous LTD claims. While 42% of all LTD claims in the education sector are due to mental and nervous conditions, this type of claim accounts for 19% of LTD claims of blue-collar workers and those in the health sector, 29% of claims of other professional workers and 9% of LTD claims of technical workers.
As indicated, general economic conditions and related stressors also affect teachers. In addition, in light of their primary client base, teachers are impacted by societal factors that affect the school environment. Among these are changes to the family unit, with all the school-related challenges of single-parent families, immigration and the challenges of serving diverse cultural needs, changing curriculum and the imperatives of modern technology in education. The list could easily be expanded to include the added pressures of the current climate of budget slashes, layoffs, school closures and reductions in services to children with special needs.
All these factors combine to create a work environment that is highly stressful for teachers and educational workers and illustrate the conditions leading to the high levels of mental and nervous LTD claims in the education sector.
We felt it was important for you to have this type of background information on LTD claims in the education sector. Another important statistic is that related to claims per 1,000 insured lives. For educational workers, claims are running at a ratio of 15 claims per 1,000 insured, whereas the overall industry average runs at approximately nine to 10 claims per 1,000 insured.
In looking to the absence rate statistics related to day-to-day or short-term absences, the trends referred to above reverse themselves. Where other occupations would have a high incidence rate of annual average days per year absenteeism, elementary and secondary teachers haver lower absenteeism rates on a day-to-day basis.
In days lost per worker in a year, the 1994 StatsCan report confirms that elementary and secondary school teachers had an absence rate of 7.8 days per year per employee, where all industries and occupations had an absence rate of 9.2 days per employee. The public administration rate was 10.2, medicine and health was 16.6 days per employee, and nursing had an absence rate of 19.6 days per worker per year. These figures measure the number of days lost per worker in a year and are adjusted to reflect the actual length of the work year in the sector measured.
On the basis of this information, one may conclude that teachers are, on average, generally absent from work less than other employee groups on a day-to-day basis. One could conclude that there is more pressure on teachers to remain at work even when an illness day may be warranted. This pressure is one that teachers easily understand: the needs of 25 to 30 or 35 children in an elementary classroom or the needs of 120 to 140 secondary school students. On the basis of our LTD claim experience, we note that teachers file their LTD claims near the very end of the waiting period, indicating their anticipation of returning to work without the necessity of going on LTD.
In addition to the personal commitment factor, we understand that other pressures exist within the system that influence teachers to remain at work even when they are rightfully eligible for sick leave. These pressures are due to the fact that many school boards, faced with budget constraints, limit access to supply teachers for coverage of the absent teacher's class. This means that other teachers must cover for the absent teacher or that the pupils are reassigned to other classes for the day.
Based on our experience and information, we find no data to support the need for modifying the existing sick leave provisions for elementary or secondary teachers. We believe any tinkering with the present system may prove to be cost-ineffective and lead to greater utilization; it will most assuredly lead to increased administrative costs and could impact negatively on the cost of fringe benefits, particularly if the existing system were to be replaced by an insured, short-term disability type program.
Mr Randy McGlynn: In this section of our presentation, we will comment on the current method of replacing income for disabilities that are short-term. We will also comment on the current marketplace demographics and environment. Finally, the issues of alternatives to the current replacement income program will be raised, including cost factors. Our conclusions will include comments on the best approach to replacing disability income and the process changes needed to improve results in the future.
The issue of replacing income while people are unable to work due to a disability caused by either an illness or an accident is a challenge that's faced by all organizations. The rate of disability has increased from 10.4% of the population in 1986 to 12.7% in 1991. This information was made available through the most recent StatsCan study in 1992 in their health and activity limitations survey. In 1994 the Canadian survey on disability and workers' compensation programs found two thirds of 860 human resource professionals indicated managing short-term and long-term disabilities was the most crucial issue they faced.
There are several causes for this increase in disability claims. The incidence of disability is significantly impacted by age. The following is a representative demographic breakdown of the teacher community in Ontario. To summarize, 74% of the population currently being served by replacement income programs is 40 years of age or older.
Stress in the workplace is another factor. Recent studies have shown that workplace stressors are on the rise. Disability statistics in education validate this assessment. In addition to the rise in stress-related claims, new and more prevalent illnesses are further increasing the incidence of disability as opposed to replacing other illnesses. These diseases include chronic fatigue syndrome, carpal tunnel syndrome and fibromyalgia.
The present replacement income program has had to respond to all these challenges. It is not surprising that claims results are on the rise.
It there a better way to manage replacement income programs? At OTIP-RAEO, we believe that the answer lies not in the system that is used but in the processes that are adopted in the future as preventive measures.
One alternative to the current sick leave program is a replacement income plan which is managed externally. The plan would operate in conjunction with long-term disability plans so that replacement income would commence at the date of disability and there would be a seamless transfer through the entire disability period, which would terminate on return to work, death or retirement.
In order to design a replacement income program with an external party, it is necessary to examine the existing long-term disability plans. The average waiting period for long-term disability programs is 107 working days. The average cost is 1.3% of salary. For every reduction of 10 working days in the waiting period, the cost would increase by 6.05%. This is a significant difference that needs to be considered when evaluating the approach to short-term replacement income.
Other factors include:
Confidentiality of information due to outsourcing claims adjudication and required communication back to the employer and claimant.
Timely benefit payments to replace income will be affected by the process of submission, investigation and adjudication of the claims. This delay adds stress to the claimant and additional work to the employee benefits administration department at the board of education.
There will be problems with the administration of pension plan contributions. Like sick leave, an alternative replacement income program will be required, in addition to providing benefits, to make contributions to the Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan Board. These contributions would have to be made on the basis of working days and represent 8.9% of per diem salary. Our experience with this is that third-party private administration companies have great difficulty in administering a two-phase system that requires contributions to two different parties.
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Coordination of claims to assist in an orderly return to work when the individual claimant's good health is restored is another issue. Who will take responsibility for the required workplace modification, rehabilitation of the individual and coordination of the staffing and in-school needs?
As is the case with pension contributions, there will be a problem with the benefit payments made to the individual. The teacher is compensated on a per diem basis and this calculation needs to be reflected in the actual benefit payments made to the individual versus the norm, which is the annual salary divided by 52 weeks. Third-party administrators will have difficulty adjusting their systems to accommodate this requirement.
Now let's look at the costs to administer this program.
When you examine the specific modifications that we've just described, there will be retention charges -- that's insurance lingo for cost for administration -- required by the third-party administrator that will be higher than those currently experienced by the board. This will include the cost of investigation, adjudication, medical reports, visitations, communications and contact with board officials. In addition, there will be the actual cost of record keeping, including payments to the two required sources: the individual and the pension board.
The board will also be required to pay premium tax on, at the very least, the retention charges. This will depend on the funding vehicle selected, the most likely being administrative services only.
Earlier we discussed the impact on long-term disability premiums should the waiting period be reduced. It is also important to keep in mind the unemployment insurance premium reduction. If the replacement income plan does not continue to qualify for the UI premium reduction, then the board and the teachers would be forgoing a rebate that, at the maximum, reduces premium by a total of $132.31 per employee per year. Seven twelfths of this or $77.13 is the savings realized by the board. The minimum requirement to qualify is a program which provides 75 working days of benefit per disability. The maximum waiting period permitted is 14 calendar days.
When considering these issues, and particularly when examining the costs and delivery of a timely, well-managed replacement income program, it becomes apparent that third-party administration is not a viable alternative. The replacement income aspect of the sick leave program has served educators well in the past. It is our view that an empathetic, well-managed plan best serves those people who unfortunately need to collect the benefits of this program.
The real issue is serving the healthy people and/or those who, in the past, have chosen not to utilize this benefit. It is this group that requires assistance.
As we indicated, today success depends upon coordinated disability care and post-disability management to assist those members who have returned to work. Tomorrow's success requires a focus on the pre-disability period. This includes, and this is key, promoting wellness programs, accessible and complete employee assistance programs, safety programs and ergonomic reviews, not changes to the current sick leave arrangements.
Organizations that put their emphasis here will see the most significant improvements -- and that's dollars -- and have a more satisfied workforce, which should lead to improved morale and improved productivity.
In concluding this presentation, we wish to emphasize that, in our view, the current legislated sick leave plan is the best vehicle to ensure adequate protection in relation to short-term illness absenteeism. Further, the accumulation of sick leave credits provides the level of protection required to bridge waiting periods from short-term illness to long-term disability benefits. This area is the most essential protection afforded through current legislation.
In our view, sick leave credit accumulation to bridge LTD waiting period requirements needs to be preserved. To do otherwise would generate administrative problems, increase the cost of LTD plans and increase hardships associated with long-term illness. In fact, in our view, there are no real savings in dismantling the current cumulative sick leave plans.
Mr Bud Wildman (Algoma): I have two questions: The first deals with your very detailed presentation. I appreciate it and I understand the main point you're making, that the proposal to have a different approach doesn't save money and won't serve the people it's supposed to serve. But, frankly, isn't the main point of what the government is proposing in Bill 34 with regard to these changes that the government wants to enable boards to avoid having to pay retirement gratuities?
Mr Jim Smith: Obviously that's one of the thrusts of what the government is proposing, I don't think there's any question about that, but our real concern at this stage of the game is the bridging aspect towards LTD and the impact immediately on the physical and mental wellbeing of our teachers.
Mr Wildman: The other question I have relates to page 3 of the presentation that was just finished. In the top paragraph you list a number of the stresses that have led to claims, and at the end of that paragraph you say, "This list could easily be expanded to include the added pressures of the current climate of budget slashes, layoffs, school closures and reductions in services to children with special needs."
The government has made it very clear, time and again, that the reductions they are making, the 16% reduction in the transfer payments, the general legislative grants, will not affect the classroom. So how on earth is it that there are layoffs of teachers, school closures and reductions in services to children with special needs? Is this just because the boards have not done their job and they are not really concerned with serving children in classrooms?
Miss Anderson: I'd like to answer that. The pressures that we're speaking of do include budget slashes, layoffs, school closures and the delivery of special needs to children. In fact, my board just two weeks ago passed their budget for the next few months, and of course they had to deal with the budget cuts that were outlined for them. One of the cuts they made was that there would be a reduction of resource withdrawal and special-needs programs and that those children would be integrated more into the regular classroom. This of course adds burdens to not only the students but the teachers as well, and these children are going to be integrated at a very large increase in time.
Mr Wildman: What about class sizes? Are they increased?
Miss Anderson: Yes, class sizes have increased as well, very significantly.
Mr Peter L. Preston (Brant-Haldimand): Two questions, first of all to OTIP: You will cover long-term income disability for anybody across Ontario that's involved in the education system. Is that correct?
Mr McGlynn: That's correct.
Mr Preston: What reason would a presenter have for telling us he can't even get a quote on LTID?
Interjection.
Mr Preston: I wasn't going to mention a name, but somebody told us they couldn't even get a quote.
Mr Richard Patten (Ottawa Centre): OSSTF.
Mr McGlynn: I wasn't there so I'll comment on the marketplace, if I might. The insurance marketplace is very suspicious of providing long-term disability to educational employees because of the incidence of claims. I assume that was the message the individual was giving. Certainly you are able to get a quote because we would be willing to provide a program. They may not have liked the price based on the incidence of disability and the rate that develops from that, but you would be able to get a price.
Mr Preston: That wasn't what was said. It was, "I can't even get a quote."
If quality and criteria were maintained, knowing that early childhood education is a very important matter, what are your comments regarding alternative sites and differentiated staffing, if quality can be maintained? That comes to the federation.
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Mr Jim Smith: First of all, the premise that if quality can be maintained we believe is faulty. We do not believe that quality of program delivery in the early childhood education area of specifically JK can be maintained by substituting unqualified, uncertified teachers, and so from that perspective, we're adamantly opposed to --
Mr Preston: No, that's not the perspective I put to you, sir. I'm saying if quality can be maintained. I have not yet been able to get an answer to this question. I would like to find one.
Mr Jim Smith: We might say if pigs could fly too, but the point is we don't believe --
Mr Preston: You're not willing to give me an answer to that, if quality can be maintained.
Mr Jim Smith: We do not believe --
Mr Preston: Thank you very much.
Mr Jim Smith: -- that quality can be maintained.
The Vice-Chair: Let the gentleman answer.
Mr Preston: He won't answer my question.
The Vice-Chair: I'm sorry. He's been cut off a few times. Go ahead, sir.
Mr Jim Smith: As I said, I think you're beginning from a premise that we do not believe is sound.
Mr Preston: Well, give me that.
Mr Jim Smith: We do not believe that quality can be maintained by substituting unqualified teachers any more than I believe that quality in childbirth delivery can be maintained by substituting a midwife for an obstetrician, and I think there's a parallel that could be drawn there. There are certain skills which come with the teaching profession in terms of progression, progression of ideas, progression of programming, that are only available to those people who have undergone rigorous teacher training in this province.
Mr Patten: Thank you very much for the presentation. Teachers must be worried going to school these days when you consider the risks to their health.
I found the presentation on the insurance analysis to be very, very helpful to me. I suppose in a nutshell what you're saying is, "Listen, if you want to go to a purely third-party arrangement it's going to cost you," because built into the present system are incentives where in other situations, for example, people who might work in the public service, who may not feel well and stay at home, they're most likely not replaced and they most likely can pick up their work when they come back a day later, whereas the pressure builds up for teachers. My wife is a teacher. Some members think that's a conflict of interest; I don't. But I know when my wife is feeling terrible, has a terrible cold, she still goes to work; she's missed only a handful of days in six years. There is that pressure there and the sense of accountability and responsibility to the kids.
I wonder if you would have a model, or if it might be too much to ask whether you had an example of a particular school board -- and it could be based on an actual school board, but let's say school board X -- and said, "If this school board went ahead and replaced it with a third-party insurance plan, here is what could be the difference in terms of costs for the human resource administrators, the costs of whatever it would be." Do you have such a model? You lay it out here, some of the factors, but for me it would be helpful to say, "Look, here's an example," and I think it would be useful for us to have at this particular time.
Mr McGlynn: There's a possibility to model if school board X was able to provide a three- to five-year record of their sick leave payouts, and at this point we have not found a board that has kept those kinds of records. When we did our analysis, we looked at the cost of running the system versus the payouts, because we did not have data on their sick leave programs. That was the basis of the commentary of the additional expenditures.
The key component, however, as opposed to managing those people who are disabled, was looking after the people who are healthy and creating a better environment there, better support than exists today through both the EAP programs and the wellness programs, in order to keep them in place. Certainly the US model says there is significant payback for investments in that area, and that's what we're recommending be focused on.
Mr Patten: Some boards do that, too, questions of stress and things like that.
The Vice-Chair: Thank you very much for your presentation. You shed some new light on some of these topics, and we appreciate that.
CENTRAL ALGOMA BOARD OF EDUCATION
The Vice-Chair: Next we have Donna Latulippe, who is a teacher with the Central Algoma Board of Education. Welcome to our hearings. You have 30 minutes for your presentation. I notice it's not too long, so there may be a number of questions.
Mrs Donna Latulippe: You'll notice I did a double copy because I'm trying to save on paper at the school.
Good morning. Bill 34, or the toolkit as it's fondly called, was announced on March 6, 1996, and has had a chance to impact on our system as I feel it. Thank you for listening to a teacher who works in a classroom every day and who feels, along with my students, the impact of the decisions, because I think we're referred to as the bottom line.
I'd like to give you a little bit of background so you'll know where I'm coming from on this. I teach for Central Algoma Board of Education, which is to the east of Sault Ste Marie. I have a split grade 7-8 group at the moment, 27 students. I teach in a portable classroom which is not attached to the main school. There are 12 grade 7 students, 15 grade 8 students in the group, and four of my students have been identified with special learning problems.
I've worked actively in my federation, FWTAO, and this year I am the chief negotiator for our elementary teachers. I have presented some workshops around the province. I was hired by our board to work half-time as a drama consultant two years ago for one year, and this gave me a bit of a glimpse into the administrative side of things.
I've raised two of my own children in the system that I teach. My son has now finished university, and he's working for Stats Canada in Ottawa. My daughter is going to be graduating in June from Central Algoma Secondary School, our only high school in central Algoma, and hopes to attend Trent University. I want to say that I feel I work in a good system, but I do have some concerns.
I want you to know that morale is a little low right now in our schools among our staff. When the toolkit information hit the papers -- and I understand the effect the media can have -- with many promised changes, and then the legislation appeared, it seemed that the responsibilities were turned over locally, and I'm afraid that some of the areas do not appear to have been addressed equally.
I want you to know that classrooms are being directly affected, at least in our board. In our small board, which has six elementary schools and one high school, 23 pink slips were handed out to our elementary and secondary teachers. The impact was devastating to our young teachers, as you can imagine. I teach with a young man on our staff who asked if he could write something for me, so I'll just share it with you. I didn't include it. It says:
"As a young teacher, I see myself coming to school each day wanting to make a difference in the education of a student. I've been teaching since 1990 and was an occasional teacher for five years until finally obtaining a full-time contract this year with Central Algoma. The opportunities provided to me during my teaching career have been very rewarding. However, I am deeply saddened with the cuts in provincial grants and how it will affect not only my bleak situation and other young teachers, but especially the students who will be situated in larger classes, the students who will require extra assistance and the special-needs students who will not receive the proper resources.
"Students being taught and assisted through different learning processes and other developmental changes require the ongoing service and commitment offered by local school boards. I believe these cuts will affect Ontario negatively and as a result students will no longer receive a high standard of quality education. Seeing the look of confidence on a student's face when achieving success gives an educator great satisfaction. Please consider the future of Ontario, which includes the students of today, and do not hurt our classrooms."
At the high school, older students such as my daughter, who is an OAC student, see and understand the effect of these cuts and have talked personally with their teachers. I feel we have to have a balance between younger and experienced older teachers such as myself so we can share our experiences, we can update our knowledge with each other about the new methodologies that are out there but, more important, so we can share the energy.
I would like to encourage you to please pursue the 85 factor or some factor for earlier retirement. I've received two pieces of information just recently. One is on the back of your handout. It was a letter from the Ontario Teachers' Federation about pension negotiations updates, and then I received in the mail from the teachers' pension plan board an article which says there is no truth to 85 factor rumours. We did have a teacher on staff who, if there had been an earlier retirement, could have retired in June. I realize that's not going to happen, but we did encourage her to get her papers in order and look at these things. We did have in our group of teachers a number of teachers who could have retired. What's confusing us in the schools is that we're not sure, really, what the status of negotiations is and we're not sure that we've really been asked for teacher input -- at least, I don't feel like in northern Ontario we've been asked for teacher input. I'd encourage you to find out from the teachers how they feel. I would encourage you to continue to work with OTF. I think that's very important. I think there's been a lot of misinformation given to us and it's very confusing for the people who are actually in the building working with the children every day.
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As I remind you, teaching requires high energy. Today's children are very bright. They require so much to be adequately challenged. We need a careful balance in our teacher ranks to meet this mandate. Parent expectations are very high. Ministry expectations are very high. The surge of pink slips and the current lack of jobs have to be addressed. Many of my former students, who would be wonderful teachers and are fully qualified, just simply cannot get a job.
A retiring teacher's salary would allow two starting teachers, approximately, to be hired, or savings to be had for boards. There's a very high imbalance right now. I hate to say "old," but we have --
Mr Wildman: Senior.
Mrs Latulippe: Senior, right.
Mr Tony Martin (Sault Ste Marie): Mature.
Mrs Latulippe: Mature, wonderfully mature; that's it.
Mr Preston: My wife's a teacher.
Mrs Latulippe: Okay, great. So am I. We have many mature teachers in our board, very few young teachers on our staff. I know this would be a saving. In our small board alone, we had approximately 11 teachers who could retire from the elementary system with a new factor. We have three teachers retiring this year and we have several going each year for the next few years. But this would be a great saving overall. I think it would help to keep the balance that I'm talking about.
I'm concerned about my grade 8 students who are moving into our only high school in Central Algoma, because the young staff there are very active in a lot of the extracurricular activities. I understand they had 12 pink slips go out and they presently have eight teachers who will definitely not have jobs at this point. I am concerned because -- I'm not playing down the academics at all, don't get me wrong here -- I know what keeps some children motivated at high school. I understand the number of hours that are put in and the energy that's required and I know there are a number of young teachers at Central Algoma who keep children in school because of what they do after hours. Their energy level is there. They're coaching and so on.
Also, we have educational assistants being pulled from our classrooms who are assigned to our special education students. In our board alone, we have 10 educational assistants who have been dismissed for the fall. I have taught children who are attention deficit. Many of my children have learning disabilities. We have two hard-of-hearing children who are wearing hearing aids in our school and we have many children who are slower learners in the classroom. If they don't get some extra help, some special consideration, it is a very difficult day for them. Every day is a difficult day. And then, the classroom teacher has to fill that gap. So I don't know if we're going to increase the school day or what we're going to do, how we're going to get that all in.
This cutback also has increased a lot of class sizes in our area. In Thessalon, where I formerly taught for 18 years, they're going to three grade 7-8 classes of 31 students each. That's 93 students, and they have 27 students who have been what they call IPRC'd with special learning abilities. In Echo Bay we have a classroom of grade 2 students and there are 28 in the grade 2. One of those students is an autistic student. Now, that's dealing with a very special kind of learning problem. That child will have an assistant. That's one of the people who will be kept. But you can't put children on hold and they certainly don't wait, so you have to somehow figure out how to juggle the day to fill the demands.
Central administration, as I understood from Bill 34, was supposed to restructure and cut back to save the classroom. Now, Bill 34 has left this up to local areas and we seem to be lost in a paper game with no definite answers about required levels of administrative staff. I have some questions:
Does a small board the size of Central Algoma require 11 positions at a board office? Can we afford this size of administration? Who is checking to see if this is being handled fairly? Does a secretarial position from April 1995, a year before Bill 34, that has not been replaced count in this cutback? Wasn't this before the Bill 34 was even thought of? If a business administrator is on a short-term disability, does this count as a cutback if no one is replacing that person?
I was just told the other night at the negotiating table that our board will not be making any cuts in administration. Those were the two cuts, and they're sorry, but they can't do with less staff.
I commend our board on keeping our JK program. They've had to change it considerably, though. We've blended our SKs and JKs together and we'll be busing them every second day to eliminate noonhour busing and to cut back on busing. In our area there is a severe lack of alternative facilities for early childhood education. The research shows you will have fewer expenses later on if you give these children the opportunity of JK and SK.
I'm not really clear what our board has done about adult education. There have been some changes there. Maybe you could find out or explain this to me. If not, this does reconfirm my concern, which is about follow-up to ensure that this bill does not affect our children.
I have a final question. I would like to know when we're going to return to Common Curriculum or whatever you're going to call it now, back to the curriculum we're working with with children. We need to refocus again back to what we're doing with the children.
I think you can see that we are being affected in our classrooms. I know it is difficult when we are working with legislation, but the bottom line is, where I am at is in the classroom every day. I must return to teach at 10 to 1 this afternoon. I very much appreciate the opportunity to come here and talk to you like this. My principal, when he asked me two weeks ago, assured me I would not be here: "Don't worry, Donna, you'll never get there." I really thank you for the opportunity.
You carry an awesome responsibility in providing for our future generation an education that we can all be proud of in the future when these children are going to take over from us; remember that. If at any time I could be of further assistance or you would like to come to our school some day and visit the real challenge, please accept this as your personal invitation into my classroom. My adolescents would love to see you. Thank you very much.
The Vice-Chair: Thank you very much for a very personalized presentation. We do have some time for questioning, almost five minutes per caucus.
Mr Skarica: Thank you very much for your presentation. I found it fascinating. You raise a question which I've asked and wondered about as well, and that is, does a small board the size of Central Algoma require 11.5 positions at the board office? You've told us that there have been a number of teachers given layoff notices, and we've heard that in these hearings, but I don't recall in three weeks of hearings that we've heard once from anyone that as a direct result of the savings, as a direct result of Bill 34, a board has reduced so many trustees, a board has gotten rid of so many administrative staff. Has Central Algoma, to your knowledge, reduced any administrative staff?
Mrs Latulippe: I asked that the other night and was told, "Yes, Karen Doyle." This is a secretarial position. I said: "I'm sorry, but Mrs Doyle left in April 1995. I'm talking about since Bill 34. What have you done?" They said, "I guess you're not going to count that." I said: "No, I'm not going to count that. It doesn't count." The next thing was, this lady is a supervisory officer -- she is our business administrator -- and she's presently on a short-term disability suffering from cancer. She is receiving the disability but also the pay. I said, "We can't count that position either." He said, "Then I guess we don't have any."
Mr Skarica: All right. Because I'm finding that's happening throughout Ontario. In Toronto, for example, they have 35 administrators in the board there who make over $100,000 and six of them are not being replaced because they're retiring. I questioned same thing: "If they're retiring anyway, that's not a result of Bill 34." If they hadn't been retiring, I suspect they would still be there. That causes me some concern.
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Mr Bill Grimmett (Muskoka-Georgian Bay): I too would like to congratulate you on the objectivity of your presentation today. I wanted to ask you about your comments on the 85 factor. I've talked to a lot of teachers myself and I've been in classrooms with them as well. Both the senior and junior teachers, and many of my constituents who aren't teachers, have the same concern about the aging of the teaching population and the apparent reductions in the number of junior teachers.
I wondered if you were aware of some of the costs involved in the teacher pension plan in the province. Are you aware of the amount the public pays and contributes towards the teachers' pensions?
Mrs Latulippe: I have a handout here.
Mr Grimmett: It's my understanding that it's upwards of $1 billion a year.
Mrs Latulippe: It was my understanding that some of this had been invested, and invested very well, that it was also a moneymaking thing. So I have a real conflict with that. I understand what you're saying, and I don't want to put this on other people, but my understanding was that for years we've been paying into a pension plan that was invested, invested very well and handled very well, and that it is a moneymaking project. Therefore, where is the money now that's it time to retire? I understand we're a big bunch because we're the baby-boomers and we're creating a big problem here, but I thought we had invested this money very well and I thought that money was there without affecting the taxpayers.
Mr Grimmett: I wonder if you've had discussions within your organizations about whether there are ways of reworking the money that's presently there to allow for an earlier exit of the senior teachers.
Mrs Latulippe: I understand that's what the negotiations are about with the government, and the negotiations are going to continue.
Mr Preston: I have to congratulate you. In weeks and weeks of these hearings, this is one of the most balanced presentations I have seen. You don't have an axe to grind; you're just concerned about the kids.
Mrs Latulippe: Yes, I am.
Mr Preston: That is refreshing in these hearings. This could very well be a pattern for a very well-run education system. Thank you very much.
Mr Michael Gravelle (Port Arthur): Good morning and thank you very much for your presentation. It is really wonderful to actually have a teacher here speaking very much from the heart, as you obviously have, someone who really is at ground zero, who really knows what it's like in there.
The question I want to get into is in a more personal sense. You have a grade 7 and 8 group of 27 students; 12 grade 7 and 15 grade 8. How do you do it? That strikes me as a really difficult job. You clearly seem to have enthusiasm and energy and obviously a great deal of concern for it, but clearly this is a difficult job and it's very demanding in terms of your energies.
Mrs Latulippe: I try to provide for the students. I do a lot of grouping. Adolescents love to visit anyway, so I try to take advantage of that. I was just talking to the young man at the end of the table about his bouncing chair this morning. I said it reminded me of my grade 8s on Friday. I try to use their energy. The Common Curriculum has opened that up a little bit for me. I have a fair amount of freedom with information that's been provided through -- I'm very involved in committees in my board. The more I do in professional development, the more I can help what my kids need in the classroom.
The problem is that you get so strapped for time. That young teacher who wrote for me, I have him in my classroom for an hour. I have three children who are just struggling with math -- it's a very big problem for them -- and he works with those three children. Sometimes he stays in the room and we mix them with the other groups. They work away and he makes sure they're on track and helps them. Then sometimes he withdraws them for a unit. It depends on the needs. I pre-test them so I can figure out where they're at and then I work the unit through with them and post-test them at the end.
Mr Gravelle: Are your class sizes going to change next year?
Mrs Latulippe: Yes, it looks like they're all going to go up.
Mr Gravelle: I suppose what I'm leading into is, at what point do you yourself say -- I'm sure you've got a pretty good gauge on what you can do and you've obviously got a good system. In some ways you sound very much like a model teacher, one I wish I'd had in my days too. But having said that, there's got to be a point where you say: "This can't work as well. If the numbers get to a certain point, I recognize I can't provide that quality." Is that fair to say?
Mrs Latulippe: It's always fair to say that for kids. I teach adolescents -- I've always taught them -- so I can't really say --
Mr Gravelle: You're really brave.
Mrs Latulippe: Well, some days. Children are very into themselves, you know -- "There's only me." But there's not "only me"; there are 27 or 30. It's partly an awareness of what you have to give yourself. Now I have to say I have some very brilliant children in my room, and they help each other. Once I have that set up for them, they have to help each other. It's not going to hurt them to learn how to do that, because sometimes I'm just not available for them at the absolute moment. I try to make myself available at recess. If I'm on yard duty, they may walk with me and talk to me then. We have all our kids bused, so it's a really serious problem; after school is just not available for them. You just have to make yourself available whenever you can.
Mr Gravelle: If you had 10 more students, though, it would be more difficult to do it?
Mrs Latulippe: Yes. Ten students? You know that stress thing this man was talking about before?
Mr Gravelle: It's just so clear how much you care, and obviously you want to be able to --
Mrs Latulippe: You want to make an impact. He said something very interesting to me right before this presentation. He said to me, "I remember grade 8; it was a memorable year." It is a very memorable year. Children have memorable years because of their relationships with their teachers. The bottom line is that they spend as much time with me awake as they do with their parents. So I have to be.
Mr Patten: Thank you, Donna Latulippe. I'm past president of the Canadian Tulip Festival. We should give you an honorary membership.
I was going to use the same words Peter used, and that was that I thought your presentation was balanced and that the questions you raise are in the interest of the whole organization.
You identified 23 pink slips that have been handed out to teachers. How many teachers do you have in your board?
Mrs Latulippe: We have 90 in the elementary, and I'm not sure how many there are in the secondary system. I believe there is a gentleman coming from our secondary system this afternoon to talk to you.
Mr Patten: A couple of hundred?
Mrs Latulippe: I would say 50 or 60, around that. We have only one high school.
Mr Patten: Now, these pink slips --
Mrs Latulippe: As far as I know right now, there are eight teachers still not being hired back at the secondary, and as of the other night we have 84.5 who are going to be hired.
Mr Patten: I agree that there would be -- I would hope there would be -- some incentives for some "senior" teachers, some of whom are eligible now, to actually take the step, because it's worth it. But there has been some debate on the cost to the boards and the immediate payoffs and when those savings would be made. I understand there's some talk about anything between 90 and 85. There may be an 87 factor or something of that nature.
Mrs Latulippe: I think anything would help alleviate the situation you're running into.
Mr Patten: But I think you're right: You need to have a balance on your staff of senior and new teachers.
Mrs Latulippe: It's very important for the kids.
Mr Wildman: Thank you, Donna. We very much appreciate the fact that we were able to get you on the list and ensure that you were able to make a presentation. You yourself are a very experienced teacher and have the reputation of being an energetic person who works hard for her students in a very good system, a very small system but a good system. It was really useful.
I agree with Mr Preston and Mr Patten in their remarks, although I must say I am disturbed. The reason I'm disturbed is particularly the note you read from your young colleague who said -- and I wrote it down as you read it -- that these changes will hurt Ontario and students will no longer receive a high standard of education. That's the basic bottom line of Bill 34.
What happens to your colleague? Will he be in your classroom an hour every day next year helping students?
Mrs Latulippe: He doesn't have a job next year.
Mr Wildman: Will there be anybody there helping remedial students who need help with mathematics?
Mrs Latulippe: I don't know how much help we're going to have because right now they still have not nailed down the staffing. We're at the end of May, but we still haven't nailed down the staffing. There was just a transfer, but they were still working out some changes in schools.
Mr Wildman: We've had some discussion about the balance of newer and senior teachers and the whole issue of the 85 factor. I noticed on the reverse side of your presentation the memo from OTF in which it says that there were meetings in February, March and April but the government had cancelled meetings also in February, March, April and there would be no further meetings until mediation began. Have you had any information from OSSTF as to the reasons why the government has not participated in these meetings?
Mrs Latulippe: This article I just received from the teachers' board, which just says spring 1996, says they're going into mediation. It says that under the terms of the partnership, the OTF and the Ontario government can negotiate changes to pension benefits every three years, and when no agreement was reached by May 1, 1996, a process of mediation and arbitration began. Any changes to the plan will likely be effective not until January 1, 1997. That would be the next time they would be able to have something out.
Mr Wildman: The problem is then, if that were the case, even if there is an agreement, that may not be a viable way for boards that are faced with $1 billion less in transfer payments from the provincial government this year.
Mrs Latulippe: We really needed it this June to alleviate the problem for the next year.
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Mr Wildman: You mentioned education assistants being dismissed, 10 education assistants in your board. I've had contact from some of the parents of these special-needs children who've really expressed serious concerns, one in particular who has a child with a number of disabilities who has made significant progress over the last couple of years. This parent attributes that particularly to the education assistant who has been working with their daughter.
Mrs Latulippe: I think it's the relationship that's developed between the assistant and the child, yes.
Mr Wildman: As a result of these dismissals, this particular education assistant will not lose her position but she's bumping, she's being transferred, so she'll no longer be working with this child. The parents don't know whether she will have an assistant now, and if she is going to have an assistant, they don't know who it might be. They are now considering removing her from the system and keeping her at home and helping her themselves, and the mother is going to quit her job because of this.
Mrs Latulippe: Those are some of the ripple effects that we're feeling. Parents are upset about these things as well.
Mr Wildman: Yet the government continually says that classroom education is not being affected, or shouldn't be affected.
Mrs Latulippe: I know it is being affected. The question I want to leave you with is, who's going to check on this? Please check on it, because there is some checking that has to be done.
Mr Wildman: They've mentioned 28 students in a grade 2 classroom, and class size is going to increase?
Mrs Latulippe: No, this is the new projection for the fall, but one of those kids is autistic, remember.
Mr Wildman: Up to now what has it been, about 25?
Mrs Latulippe: For a while the sizes were only 20 and 21 -- there was a bylaw -- but it's steadily increasing now. It was a new initiative brought out that classrooms in primary be kept to 20 students, I believe it was, because of the fact that you're trying to teach children how to read and all the concerns.
Mr Wildman: For pedagogical reasons.
Mrs Latulippe: That has been waived now, so the numbers are just going to keep increasing.
Mr Wildman: Again it hasn't affected the classroom, right?
Mr Preston: When did it start increasing?
Mrs Latulippe: Actually it started last year that some of the sizes went up, and now it's larger again.
The Vice-Chair: Thank you very much for a very interesting presentation. I think we all enjoyed it and it really came from the heart.
CAROLYN MORROW
The Vice-Chair: Now we have Carolyn Morrow with us. Welcome to our hearings.
Ms Carolyn Morrow: Mr Chairman, members of the committee, my submission to this committee regards the future of junior kindergarten in the province of Ontario. My perspective is not from the standpoint of an educator or as a member of a professional association. It is as a parent who has observed at first hand the difference junior kindergarten makes to the development of a child. It is also as a taxpayer who is concerned that the governments of the day make the most judicious use of my tax dollars, not just in economic terms but with equal consideration given to the social costs and benefits.
As of May 3, 1996, 31 public school boards in this province had voted to maintain their junior kindergarten program as opposed to 20 that chose not to introduce it or to dispense with programs already in place. While junior kindergarten can benefit children living in all the school board districts in this province, many of my comments to you will be within the context of the West Parry Sound district, which will be providing the program in the upcoming school year. This is the school board district in which I live and the one with which I am most familiar. Like all board districts across this province, it has its own special needs arising from its local demographic composition, geography and economy. However, using this district as an example illustrates the practical relevance of junior kindergarten to Ontario society as a whole.
In April 1988, the West Parry Sound Board of Education approved the establishment of junior kindergarten, based on its own research which resulted in the following set of rationale:
Nursery schools or other private preschool programs are accessible only to those who can afford them and can physically access them.
The social pattern of life is changing in that children now have fewer opportunities to experience meaningful social and physical growth in the accompaniment of adults.
It would provide the growing number of children at risk entering our education system with socialization and language skills.
It would provide recognition, early intervention and remediation of health, physical and learning problems.
The board also acknowledged that it is largely impossible for any home environment, no matter how willing or nurturing the parents are, to meet the full potential of social interaction, varied materials and access to highly skilled professionals.
These and other supporting arguments for preschool programs have been addressed by a number of professional and government studies. Of all the North American studies undertaken by education professionals on the benefits of preschool programs, the Perry Preschool Project was the first and perhaps the most definitive. This committee has already heard a submission in Toronto detailing this particular study; however, I will briefly recap the highlights.
When compared with the control group of children who were not enrolled in the program, the study subjects showed marked positive differences in the areas of education, employment and social responsibility: higher numbers completed high school; higher numbers attended post-secondary educational institutions; smaller numbers were enrolled in special ed or compensatory programs; higher numbers were employed at the age of 19 and were self-supported by their employment earnings; fewer received public financial assistance; and fewer became offenders of the law.
Interestingly, while the preschool group surpassed the control group in intellectual performance between the ages of four to seven, this advantage levelled out beyond a child's seventh year. This finding supports the theory that early childhood education equips children to become better students not through sustained improvements in intelligence but through more enduring and life-determining attitudinal changes. The results of the Perry Preschool Project are supported by other longitudinal studies have found similar results.
In addition to these studies, Canadian federal and provincial governments have published reports on the merits of early childhood education and on the necessity of their implementation. In 1985, the Ontario Ministry of Education established the Early Primary Education Project. Citing the findings of the Perry Preschool Project, it determined that education in these years is not only a legitimate learning experience in its own right but is critically important to the children's success both in and out of school and should begin no later than the age of four.
At the time, Dr Weikart, the author of the Perry Preschool Project report, was asked if the report's findings would be replicated in Ontario. His response was definitive: "The findings have been tested in wealthier areas similar to Ontario in social makeup and there is no doubt that the same results would be obtained in a similar study here." In fact, the findings have already been replicated by the University of Western Ontario Preschool Project under Dr Mary Wright.
In 1989, the Ontario Ministry of Community and Social Services published Better Beginnings: Better Futures, which again corroborated earlier findings, particularly in the area of early detection and intervention of developmental problems.
Most recently, For the Love of Learning, a report of the Royal Commission on Learning, was released in 1994. It found that early childhood education removes barriers to learning at the earliest possible stage, which gives children a stronger start at basic literacy and numeracy. It predisposes children to a more positive view of schooling and formal learning. An earlier start means greater and more equal school readiness for children entering grade 1 at age six.
The experience of primary school teachers in Alberta confirms this. Research conducted by the Alberta Teachers' Association indicates that teachers are observing the effects of the introduction of user fees for the preschool program in some districts of Alberta and complete cancellation of the program in others. Members of the association state that students who did not have the opportunity to be enrolled in the program are not as well equipped or prepared to meet the challenges of grade 1 as were the students who had the benefit of junior kindergarten in prior years. They show distinct delays in social, emotional and academic skills.
Who benefits most from junior kindergarten programs? In Ontario, junior kindergarten was originally established to provide compensatory education for children at risk. Typically, these children fall into one or more of the following groups: they are economically disadvantaged; immigrant children; inner-city residents; have developmental problems; come from homes where both parents work; or they come from high-stress-level home environments, dysfunctional families, single-parent homes or homes where the child is denied adult nurturing or is a victim of emotional, verbal or physical abuse. Junior kindergarten also benefits children who come from good home environments, children who for any number of reasons do not have the benefit of group interaction with other children and children who do not have access to the variety of materials and learning tools available in a preschool setting.
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The experience of our daughter attests to this. We live in a rural setting and as a result my children experience some measure of isolation. Her year in junior kindergarten last year provided Kaitlyn with an early opportunity to learn what it is to be a member of a community. She broadened her circle of friends. Not normally a joiner and often reserved and retiring, her self-confidence grew as a result of her participation in group activities independent of me. It introduced different authority figures into her life. She embarked on an unpressured course designed to give her a strong start in basic literacy. Perhaps most important, she had a pleasant introduction to education in a formal setting. For Kaitlyn, junior kindergarten was a real learning experience, not simply glorified day care, as some would assert. Similar experiences have been recounted to me by other parents in our board district.
Obviously, then, the primary reasons to maintain the junior kindergarten program are the socialization and education of young children. However, there are fiscal benefits that accrue directly to the community. By the time the last participants of the Perry Preschool Project reached the age of 19 in 1984, the cost-benefit ratio of the preschool program was one to seven: For every $1 invested in the program, $7 were returned to the community.
On the cost-cutting side, decreased social expenditures resulted from the following, and I list them in descending order of fiscal savings: reduced welfare and other social assistance payments; reduced special education costs; reduced crime costs to victims and the criminal justice system.
On the revenue side, income to the community came from taxes paid on employment income. This income is cumulative as lifetime earnings rise. In short, public early childhood education programs such as junior kindergarten serve taxpayers' self-interest by reducing the consumption costs of other social services, and benefit the community as a whole.
Let's evaluate the importance of junior kindergarten within the context of the West Parry Sound district. There is some statistical information that can help us draw a general social and economic profile of our district.
The three-month moving average unemployment rate for the economic region of Parry Sound for the months of February, March and April of this year was 12%, a full 3% higher than the seasonally adjusted rate for Ontario in April of 9%. These rates have risen from December 1995 unemployment figures of 10.5% for the Parry Sound district and 8.5% for Ontario.
A conversation with Peter Cowans at the Parry Sound children's aid revealed that the referral rate of child abuse cases has nearly doubled since 1986. During this conversation, he confirmed that school at all levels does constitute an early warning system.
More generally, no one can deny that unemployment poses financial difficulties and emotional stress for all households. A large number of children attending school in this district live in rural areas and are therefore subject to some degree of isolation from peers and services. There is a significant native population, many of whom are economically disadvantaged. Reported cases of child abuse are rising. In 1995, the National Council on Welfare reported that the number of children living in poverty in this province is growing steadily. To be concise, many children in our district can be readily identified as being at risk because they come from one or more of the groups I mentioned earlier.
A report published by Statistics Canada in 1993 entitled Leaving School provides some relevant information about school dropout rates. Since significant numbers of students in the West Parry Sound district come from the groups identified in the report, we can apply the following statistics from the report to our district in a general way: 69% of dropouts or leavers come from high-risk backgrounds; 40% of aboriginal students are leavers; leavers are more often unemployed and have a greater dependency on unemployment insurance, social assistance and family allowance; their low basic skill levels restrict job opportunities, resulting in a cumulative disadvantage regarding employment, income and life opportunities; they are more likely to abuse alcohol and other substances; in rural areas such as ours, 42% of children leaving school early do so before the completion of grade 10.
Remember that these children are less likely to contribute economically to their communities and are more likely to require financial assistance and other local social services. Remember that the Weikart study findings showed that 67% of children who attended the Perry preschool program completed high school, as opposed to 49% of those who were not enrolled. Remember that for every $1 spent on a student enrolled in the Perry Preschool Project, $7 were eventually returned to the community. That ratio may be slightly different in our district, but there can be no doubt that savings would accrue to the community as a whole for the same reasons.
Children from the identified high-risk groups are those for whom the benefits of a universally accessible junior kindergarten program are undeniable and essential. It levels the playing field for a good start in life for these children and helps to break the cycle of poverty that many of them will fall victim to and for which we will all eventually pay. It is not the only strategy, but it is one of the best. Nineteen years may seem like a long time to realize many of the benefits of offering junior kindergarten today, but they are worth waiting for and they are certainly worth paying for. To invest in such a program for our children now is to invest in the short- and long-term social and economic health of our communities and our local and provincial economies.
Who should pay for junior kindergarten? Education in today's society is interministerial in nature. There is a potential for educated students and the educational institutions themselves to provide benefits to every social and economic sector, but it is just this pervasiveness that clouds the issue of funding responsibility for junior kindergarten.
Since its inception in the western world, public education has always served a social function and has always attempted to meet the demands of the society in which it operates. Since that time, curriculum has been constantly evolving because the need that public education fulfils is not static and because the more we learn about human nature and physiological development, the more we realize that the capacity of our minds to learn and to apply knowledge makes education a necessary lifelong process from the earliest age.
If funding for junior kindergarten will not be provided by the Ministry of Education, then by whom? Who can offer an early childhood education program on a large enough scale that it can accommodate all the age-eligible children in this province? Who can offer it at no cost to parents so that it is universally accessible? Private agencies and preschools are not going to operate a not-for-profit program.
That there are many responsibilities associated with becoming a parent is undeniable, so why should it be the community that pays to provide an early education for our children? Unfortunately, it is all too easy to take the moral high ground and assert that the education of children before they traditionally enter the school system for kindergarten at the age of five is the responsibility of parents and guardians. My response to this is that the proponents of this perspective are not accepting the full responsibility that comes with being members of their own community.
Why do we educate? Simply put, "We educate people so they can be publicly useful and privately happy." Those are not my words; those were stated by Dr J.G. Althouse, chief director of the Department of Education for the province of Ontario, 1944 to 1956, and they were reproduced in the Ontario Ministry of Education Report of the Commission on the Financing of Elementary and Secondary Education in Ontario in 1985.
Publicly useful citizens contribute to their communities and their societies in meaningful ways, both socially and economically. If studies and practical experience have shown us that preschool programs contribute to the development of publicly useful citizens, shouldn't we be expected to accept the financial responsibility of providing such programs? No one can articulate this responsibility better than Jean-Jacques Rousseau: "Government ought not to abandon its duty to educate children since the country sooner or later perceives the benefits of educated citizens....To form citizens is not the work of a day; and in order to have men it is necessary to educate them when they are children."
Our society is atomistic; that is, it is the sum of all its parts, not just those members who pay taxes, those who are gainfully employed or those who have reached the age of majority. If we are the society, then it is only to our benefit to do everything we can in an effort to produce members who are able to contribute to our community in meaningful ways. To this end, junior kindergarten should be part of an overall social and economic strategy.
The overwhelming message of employers in today's economy is that the education that potential employees possess is important; often, the more, the better. And what about the future? According to University of Toronto economist and demographer David Foot, the current decline in the birth rate will mean fewer students entering the public school system in the primary grades in the coming years. Extrapolate from this the labour market situation 15 or 20 years hence. Declining birth rates mean a smaller workforce, and if there will be fewer to choose from in terms of potential employees, it is reasonable to assume that service and industry will want them to be highly qualified in educational and social terms. If junior kindergarten has a positive impact on children in these respects, doesn't it make good socioeconomic sense to invest in the program now?
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It is my recommendation to this committee that junior kindergarten be reinstated as a compulsory program in Ontario in order to avoid a patchwork of academic excellence across the province with regard to preschool education. If the present government cannot see the wisdom of legislating it back into existence, my alternative recommendation is to restore full funding. In so doing, the Ministry of Education will at least be providing some guidance to those boards that chose not to offer or to continue the program and will make it easier to implement voluntarily.
The amount and quality of research and information supporting the legitimacy of early childhood education is overwhelming. If our arrogance leads us to question the methodology and results of particular studies because they were undertaken in the United States, England and Europe rather than in Canada, that is one thing. However, our own experts can refute this criticism: experts such as Dr Mary Wright, chair of the department of psychology at the University of Western Ontario, now retired, and author of the University of Western Ontario Preschool Project, which I cited earlier; experts such as Dr Paul Steinhauer, professor of psychology at the University of Toronto, and Dr Fraser Mustard, head of the Canadian Institute of Advanced Research in Toronto, neither of whom believe that the results of all these studies are nationally, ethnically or economically exclusive.
Every child in this world develops in a physiologically similar way, barring certain congenital abnormalities. Every child has the same basic needs. Can't we then deductively reason that the early development of cognitive and social skills through age-appropriate education and that fostering an early appreciation for learning and formal education can only encourage them all to develop as members of their society who have the potential to contribute in meaningful ways? Even in times of fiscal difficulties, junior kindergarten is an investment opportunity this province simply cannot afford to pass up.
Mr Patten: Ms Morrow, excellent; a very thoughtful and well-argued case that not only identifies the pedagogical value and the human value but takes on the economic side. In other words, you're really saying while it may appear to be a short-term saving, in the long term we will be paying in other ways and we'll be paying a heck of a lot more.
Ms Morrow: Most definitely.
Mr Patten: This proposal therefore flies in the face of -- and I try to say this is in a non-partisan manner. Really this bill is more of a money bill because it's looking for money. It targeted junior kindergarten and, interestingly enough, some of the people at the other end who maybe didn't have the advantages of a program like junior kindergarten. Both of those programs have been targeted for X amount of dollars, and the assumption behind the amount of that $400 million from junior kindergarten and adult education is based on some boards not providing junior kindergarten. That immediately raises the question you've raised, the commitment to universality, number one. As to the assumption that boards would drop it, we've heard testimony from various boards who've said: "We weren't really committed when it was made mandatory and we had it. Now we see the benefits of this particular program and we want to keep it, but we can't afford it." It's an economic issue for the boards.
Dr Steinhauer was before our committee and shared his findings from his studies. My only suggestion to you and anyone else who cares about this is to follow through the recommendations, because I contend that this bill is not a educational issue. It's going to hurt junior kindergarten and it's going to hurt classrooms and it will hurt education, but it's a money bill.
I suspect my colleagues on the other side are caught. Because it's a money bill and they're hearing all this testimony that is so powerful, overwhelmingly powerful in terms of the importance and the value of this program, it places them in a very awkward position, because it really is an economic question they must address for Ernie Eves and his demands for the budget.
The Vice-Chair: Any comments at all, ma'am?
Ms Morrow: No, just that he corroborates what I've said and I think I corroborate what he says too. It's mutual.
Mr Martin: This is an excellent presentation. As a matter of fact, it covers the territory so well that it's difficult to get into any specific questions. You've done a very thorough job of supporting the reasoning behind why this province has been moving more and more into trying to make sure that each area of the province is providing junior kindergarten as an opportunity for children. My questions would be more for the folks across the table here if that were the format we were into, so I'll be interested in hearing their comments and in hearing their questions.
My read of what's going on here is that this is a continuation of an attack by this government on children, on poor children particularly, and on people who are vulnerable out there. We have to put it in the context of everything else that's going on. I just can't get out of my head that day in July 1995 when this government, in its wisdom, decided to take 21.6% out of the pockets of the poorest families who, for the most part, support children, who are trying to get their feet under them and get on with their lives.
I'm wondering if any study has been done. I know you spoke in your presentation about the levelling effect of junior kindergarten. It brings kids into an environment where they're equal with all the others in terms of the resources there and the opportunity for learning. But you have to be concerned about the equity even before they get to school. What impact do you think a decision as dramatic as taking almost a quarter of the take-home pay from the poorest of our families has on their ability to come to school and participate and learn and take advantage in the way you suggest kids who participate in junior kindergarten have the potential to do?
Ms Morrow: I can only draw from my own personal experience as an observer. Last year, when my child was in junior kindergarten, I often attended the classes. I actually work as a parent volunteer at that school. There was a high proportion of students in her class last year who, I would say -- whether you want to term them economically disadvantaged or not, I don't know -- came from homes that did not have an income equal to the one my daughter came from. We're a single-income family. Also, my husband works in the area for a utility company, so he is in and out of a lot of the homes in the area.
My opinion is that if these children do not have access to junior kindergarten because their parents have had their incomes diminished -- people on social assistance, for instance -- these parents are not going to be able to afford the apparatus or the materials to teach their children at home. Any single parent who was staying at home with a child is now going to be forced to go out and find a job, so the children will either end up at babysitters down the road or some other alternative, and these people are not always interested or qualified in teaching children. People who don't come traditionally from households where education was valued don't really pass on the value of education to children either.
I do think that by the time these children enter the school system in kindergarten and particularly in grade 1, they will definitely show the disadvantages of not having exposure to appropriate materials or people who were interested even in reading to these kids, and certainly these kids are not going to have access to public library programs. If you can't afford to put food on the table in your house, you're not going to be able to afford transporting your child all over the place to other free programs in the district. It definitely will hurt.
Mrs Julia Munro (Durham-York): I have a quick question, but first of all a comment on the thoroughness of your presentation. On page 6, when you refer to the notion that there is a societal expectation here of responsibility, "My response to this is that proponents of this perspective are not accepting the full responsibility," I just wonder at what age you would suggest that there is that public responsibility.
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Ms Morrow: I think traditionally it has been for kindergarten and grade 1. Mandatory attendance in schools begins at grade 1, not necessarily in kindergarten, but for the last -- I don't know, as long as I can remember, kindergarten was a funded program in this province and was required to be provided by the boards. Traditionally I think the responsibility of society begins there, and has begun there, but I think the changing nature of our society maybe should make us review that position.
Mr Wildman: The royal commission said age three.
Ms Morrow: Is it three or four?
Mrs Munro: That's why I asked the question. Are you suggesting it should go to include junior kindergarten?
Ms Morrow: Yes. I know the Perry Preschool Project suggested three. I wasn't aware. I thought the royal commission said four, but --
Mrs Munro: No, it said three.
Mr Preston: We've tried during our whole thing to keep political posturing out of this, but I think you can see the difference between this side and the other side. We consider them emergency funds and Mr Martin calls it take-home pay. That's really the basis of the problem we have right now in trying to save funds.
There is no question about the value of early childhood education, so I'm going to ask my question in a different way. My wife's a special-ed teacher. My daughter-in-law is an early childhood educator. My eldest daughter is just about to finish her doctorate in child care work. If the level is maintained --
Ms Morrow: We heard this earlier.
Mr Preston: Yes, you heard it earlier, and I've been asking the question three or four times a day in all these meetings.
What about alternatives sites and differentiated staffing? Pigs can't fly, I understand that; give me that. What about alternative sites and differentiated staffing?
Ms Morrow: I'm not sure what you mean by alternative sites. By differentiated staffing --
Mr Preston: Community centres.
Ms Morrow: Okay, I'll address that. By alternative staffing, I assume you mean early childhood educators as opposed to certified teachers. Is that correct?
Mr Preston: That's about the size of it.
Ms Morrow: My own experience has been of Kaity in school last year. I think that within an actual public school setting it is more appropriate to have junior kindergarten there. They had grade 7 and 8 students come in to assist the teacher getting kids dressed, undressed, helping with activities that one teacher in a group of 21 or 22 students simply could not manage by herself. Kaity at that point was exposed to older students who were accepting responsibility in the area of assisting and child care. For those students it's important also to be able to accept some of that responsibility. It's not just something that benefits junior kindergarten students; it also benefits students further up the scale, older students.
Mr Preston: Okay. Let's say that there's room permitting and four-year-olds are on the site, the schools. What about differentiated staffing?
Ms Morrow: This is an area that I really can't tell you. I do not know the difference between a person with an early childhood education certificate and a person who is a certified teacher. I do not know what additional or superior qualifications a certified teacher possesses over that someone with ECE.
Certainly, if the quality could be maintained, I logically don't see a problem with replacing certified teachers with early childhood education professionals; that is if the quality can be maintained. You must take my comments within context. This is an area I have not researched and I am not familiar with.
The Vice-Chair: You finally got your answer.
Mr Preston: No. I always get an answer from one particular sector.
Mr Skarica: We're running out of time. I'm new to politics and Mr Martin made a comment about "an attack on children." I find him to be a very nice person, but I really hate that kind of nonsense because none of us here has any interest in attacking children. The budget --
Mr Martin: Give their families back the money they need to feed them at home.
Mr Skarica: The budget contains, and he knows it --
Mr Wildman: Food on the table; that's what counts.
The Vice-Chair: Wait a minute now. He's got the floor.
Ms Morrow : And I can't hear.
Mr Skarica: This is what I'm talking about. The budget contains $225 million for programs. I don't have time to go through them all, but one of them is to feed children. In my prior career I saw kids who had no chance. You could have JK, you could have whatever you want; I saw kids who weren't getting fed and who were going to school. I saw pregnant mothers who were so strung out on coke they did not know their name. We have provided money for those programs and you have to agree with me that's necessary and it's --
Mr Martin: You can't feed them at home, so you feed them at school.
Mr Skarica: That's necessary and those are good programs. "An attack on children" is just nonsense. That's all I want to say. If you want to comment, that's fine.
Ms Morrow: I don't really see it as an attack on children; I just see it as economic expediency, that's all.
The Vice-Chair: Thank you very much, Mrs Morrow, for your very excellent presentation.
ONTARIO ENGLISH CATHOLIC TEACHERS' ASSOCIATION, SAULT STE MARIE UNIT
The Vice-Chair: Next we have the Ontario English Catholic Teachers' Association, the Sault Ste Marie unit: Art Callegari, president; Carolyn Stevens, executive assistant; and Jim Smith, the second vice-president. I believe there's a video involved in this presentation. Welcome to our hearing.
Mr Art Callegari: Thank you very much for having us come to this meeting this morning. It's our pleasure to be here. I'd like to introduce my colleagues: Carolyn from provincial staff, Jim Smith from provincial executive and Bernice Glew, our principal who helped us gather the information together for this video.
I'd like to thank the committee for the opportunity to present our thoughts, our concerns, our hopes regarding Bill 34. There are several components to Bill 34, and we have concerns regarding all of them, but we have chosen to address only one of them in our presentation today, and that is junior kindergarten.
We do not have a brief, as we have chosen to show you a video to illustrate our concerns. We will leave three videos for you, one for each of the political parties. We will make some opening comments, show you the short video and then answer any questions you might have.
One of the major points we wish to make is regarding the tremendous educational value of JK. It is not a babysitting service but an essential component of the education continuum, and should be funded as such. A love of learning starts in JK. Children are provided with carefully structured activities, experiences and opportunities to develop a host of skills, attitudes and concepts which will serve them for the rest of their lives.
Currently JK allows children from varied socioeconomic backgrounds to come together every day and learn together as well as from each other. If funding is discontinued, only the children of parents who can pay for JK will have this wonderful opportunity.
It is also critical that qualified teachers be in JK classrooms. As trained professionals, they are able to program for JK students in their most formative years, as they are aware of the educational continuum to 12 OAC. They are also trained to observe children carefully and are able to quickly spot those students who may require either enrichment or support in order to fulfil the benefit from contributions to education.
This careful observation and attention to findings is preventive in nature and results in thousands of dollars in savings down the road. Special education programs are very expensive -- expensive emotionally as well as financially -- to boards. The observations, the tracking, the interventions started in JK serve the students in the system well. Day care or babysitting services do not provide this valuable educational service.
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Many of the other types of learning which take place in JK will be seen in this video. This video shows an actual day, really part of an afternoon. It gives examples of the development of literacy and numeracy, spiritual growth, social skills and the fine motor skills that are required. It also shows strategies and activities used to develop spatial awareness, sequencing, left to right progression in reading, and responsibility and organization.
You will see examples of the teacher meeting the needs of the range of abilities and the varying levels in her classroom. An example of this is that all of the students have name cards with both their first and last names on them. Some students recognize only their first name, some both names, and some even know what letter their name starts with. This is a goal, to have all the students automatically know both their names and be able to read them and recognize them.
This is teaching. This is education. This is JK, and it's not babysitting. I'd like you to spend time now watching this video.
Video presentation.
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Ms Carolyn Stevens: I hope that the viewing of the video helped to answer one of the questions that was asked by Mr Preston a little bit earlier, and that would be, is an early childhood educator the same as a teacher? In essence, that was his question. Can they offer the same quality program?
One of the things I tried to show here, or the teacher tried to show, was the actual tracking, because that's the educational process. To a casual observer, that may look like a day care situation or a nursery care situation, but it's not. The difference is very much the planning of the activities and planning them along the continuum of growth for education.
Another thing that's really important that's done at the junior kindergarten level with a great deal of care is the whole issue of tracking progress. Students have a folder which begins as soon as they enter the school system, and that folder follows them all the way through schools. Some of the things you might find in the folder at the junior kindergarten level would be samples of the students' art, which the teacher would examine and the parents, the students too for that matter, as they progress through the year to see the changes.
Another thing that happens is that this particular teacher, Mary, has taken examples which just look like a little scribbled picture, but what this teacher is doing is looking at the fine motor skills of this student and then has commented on them in the page that's attached. This is the kind of material that would go in the folder as well.
In the video there was a reference to the snuggle-up bag and this is the bag that each child has. They all have their own style or whatever. It contains a book and it also contains a chart, a tracking form that goes home to the parents. On the form it indicates: "I listened to a story. I read the story. We read the story together." That involves parents as well, so that's the home-school communication.
I won't talk any more. We have copies of the video for you, one for each party in case you choose to use it for research later. At the end of the presentation we have two of the stars of the movie who'd like to make a little presentation to the Vice-Chair.
Mr Martin: Thank you very much. I felt what you had to present supplemented the previous presentation around the question of the importance of junior kindergarten and the role it plays in the development of children. We'll make those arguments and hopefully the government will understand and at the end of the day make some changes that will reflect an understanding and a compassion and a support for children in the province.
But we can't do it without looking at the fuller context, and the fuller context for me is this attack on children and particularly poorer children. What we see here is a government that is making decisions based on a promise to give a tax break to those who actually can access that tax break by having a job and substantial finances, who probably will be the least affected by the demise of junior kindergarten because they can provide personally and individually for some of the stimulation that we all know is necessary for young children if they're going to grow up to be contributing adults.
I wanted to ask you, given that we've now taken almost a quarter of the resources, we'll call it, of the poorer families in our communities away from them, which affects their ability to actually feed their kids, now schools are going to be asked to do that through this new program that has been put in place. It's my premise that it's better to have families feed their kids at home as opposed to sending their kids to school to be fed.
If you put that together with the increasing size of classes, the fact that junior and kindergarten classes are now going to be mixed in areas where that's seen as a way to save at least some facet of that opportunity, are you as teachers hearing from teachers around what is now presenting at the classroom door in the morning, as kids have less at home by way of resource to prepare them to come to school and how that impacts on the increasing size in class and all of that?
Ms Stevens: There's no question that the kids we're seeing in schools today -- I've been 31 years a teacher, 26 of those in the classroom, so I'm not speaking from the provincial level as a politician, excuse me, or as staff even, I'm talking from my practical experience. We used to get kids coming to school who were well-fed and happy and well-dressed, generally speaking.
The anxiety level that we see in kids coming to school now is the biggest issue of all. They're coming to school tired, some of them are coming to school hungry and they're coming to school without some of the things that they really need and it's because of the stresses in the homes. We have a very different family structure now. The poverty level's increasing; there's no question about that. We have a lot of immigrant children who are coming in. Those families are struggling, sometimes both parents working to make ends meet, so there's no supervision at home. There's no question that we're getting kids who are very needy.
The other thing that's happening is that we're getting kids who have very specified needs. If we can identify those needs at the earliest possible level and start remediating, without it being an intrusionary kind of thing, as part of the everyday program (1) those children stand a much better chance of getting over the difficulties they have, and (2) it helps the teacher because once we get into special education programming, we're talking about isolation of children to some degree -- even if it's within the classroom; I was a special-ed teacher and I know that -- and we're also talking about very high costs. So it's interesting that we would cut out JK in a cost-saving kind of manner and then later on pour it into the whole issue of special education.
I also find it interesting that we'll cut out JK, or we'll cut the funding which will result in the cutting of JK, which is educational -- you know the research; I know you know the research -- but we'll use that money to feed kids at school. School is not necessarily the best place to feed kids; it's a place to educate kids. Now I agree we have to look after hungry children, but I think that the primary thing is education. These kids are our future. I just think it's critical that we address the needs as soon as we can.
Mr Bruce Smith (Middlesex): Thank you for your presentation. I have to say that, as a member of this committee who's sat on the committee for about three weeks, one of the frustrating parts of the process is I think, over the duration of this past three-week period, we've heard from two adult learners, a handful of parents and a great number of teacher affiliates. I just want to thank you for bringing the classroom to us and to the committee through your video because we certainly haven't heard from students, and that's an unfortunate part of the committee system and the process we have to deal with.
I know you were in attendance for the previous presentation. I thought one of the interesting comments that Ms Morrow made was that in Ontario junior kindergarten was originally established to provide compensatory education for children at risk, some of the very children you identified in response to Mr Martin's question. I don't mean to be provocative with my question, but have we by extending junior kindergarten to other groups beyond those disadvantaged children compromised the very client group it was intended to focus on?
Mr Jim Smith: I don't think we have. I think one of the things one has to realize is that we continually focus upon undernourishment in a physical sense. There's a great deal of undernourishment of young children in an intellectual and an academic sense, and that's not a slight upon the parents themselves but rather a reflection or a comment upon the frenetic nature of their daily lives. In many cases it's attempting to hold down two jobs, for whatever reasons, perhaps to make the mortgage payment, perhaps for other reasons.
As parents come back to the home and the children -- if you have young children, as I'm certain many people do; I certainly do -- they demand a great deal of a parent. They demand a great deal in terms of play, they demand a great deal in terms of intellectual stimulation, things as basic as sitting down and reading a book with a child. Unfortunately that's not happening in a great many of our homes nowadays.
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As a consequence, even children you would necessarily think of as being middle class, in the truest senses of that word, enter the system in JK with certain academic disadvantages. A universal JK program provides a level playing field. I think we have this tendency always to think of disadvantaged individuals in a physical or financial sense. We're seeing more and more, given the stresses of daily life and the instability on the part of a lot of our children at a very young age and at an older age, which are reflections of that lack of intellectual, spiritual and academic nourishment not being provided by the home. As a society, I think a school system has a responsibility to take up where the parents have left off.
Mr Skarica: I note from the figures I have here that the Sault Ste Marie District Roman Catholic Separate School Board is not one of the boards that are cutting JK, and that you got an undue burden grant to assist you with the funding reductions, which total approximately $650,000.
We heard from a teacher in the Algoma board who told us there have been no administrative cuts in their board but that there have been cuts that have affected the classroom. Ms Morrow, who gave a very powerful presentation, is here and I asked her the same question -- they have 14 trustees, which are more trustees than I have in a much larger board -- and to her knowledge, no administrative cuts. What about your board? We're talking of reductions that are in the 2% to 3% range. Have there been administrative cuts? It seems to me that if there was the will to have those kinds of cuts, they could happen. Is it happening in your board?
Mr Callegari: No, it hasn't been.
Mr Patten: Thank you for bringing the video. I see you brought a couple of children as well, which is good to see.
I would like to continue on the theme of my friend across the way, Mr Preston, who continues to ask the question of differentiated staffing. I ask you, if you would, to elaborate a little more on what distinguishes an early childhood educator versus a junior kindergarten-certified teacher. I have some feel for this, but if you could elaborate on that, it would be appreciated. By the way, some boards have chosen, in order to maintain the program -- some boards, for example, that had eight junior kindergarten teachers are now looking at four and four, so they were able to reduce the costs but keep the program. They think that can somehow maintain quality.
I'm glad you have this video. I'm going to take one and give it to the editor of the Ottawa Sun, who had an editorial on JK as babysitting and that this was purely an excuse for parents to get rid of their kids and while away their time. I will make a point of sharing that. I don't know whether the Toronto Sun shares the same view, but they might. I would suggest that you offer to the minister's office your background and experience, and the same for Ms Morrow and anyone else. The minister apparently could do a review. We haven't seen any activity or movement on that yet from his office, nor from the ministry, but presumably there will be some activity in sharing your views.
Could you elaborate a little more on the distinction between the early childhood educator and the certified teacher?
Ms Stevens: Basically, the difference is not in the level of intelligence, it's not in the level of skill and it's not in the level of anything that can measured other than in the teaching milieu. A teacher is a teacher, and that's what teaching is about. It's about having the skills that are necessary to impart knowledge to another person. Those are very specific skills. They're very related to the curriculum. It's a whole package. It's a process. It's not something you can learn, incidentally, because today when we get classrooms full of children, we've all agreed already that the kinds of kids coming to us now are not the kinds of children that were in schools 35 or 40 years ago. The curriculum is not the same as it was 35 or 40 years ago. Any teacher alone in a classroom with all those children, as you saw, has to have the ability to work with students who need enrichment. They may be ahead of the others. If you stifle them, it's as great a loss as not providing remediation for those children who need it.
You have to look at teachers having the skills to work with learning disabilities. That's a very specialized area. It takes several weeks -- it's a three-part former ministry course -- to deal with these kinds of kids. It's a three-part ministry course to deal with slow-learning kids, and we have those in the classroom too for whatever reasons. We have students with an attention deficit. Mr Preston was telling me his experience in that area.
Those are all skills that don't just happen. They're not just latent and can be provoked the minute you have a child who has that set of needs.
It is really the ability to impart knowledge, skills, attitudes and beliefs in a meaningful way that will help children grow. It's also a tremendous amount of skill in the area of evaluation, because if you don't evaluate what you're doing, you might as well not do it. That's why the JK program is so important; it's part of the educational continuum. Does that help?
If we could make you a brief presentation, we have our two actors.
The Vice-Chair: We always make time for presentations, even if the other members don't like it.
A skit was performed.
The Vice-Chair: I don't know if we're going to get this into Hansard, but thank you very much.
ASSOCIATION DES ENSEIGNANTES ET DES ENSEIGNANTS FRANCO-ONTARIENS
The Vice-Chair: Next we have l'Association des enseignantes et des enseignants franco-ontariens. With us are Rufin Dugas and Robert Millaire. Welcome, gentlemen.
M. Rufin Dugas : Bonjour. L'Association des enseignantes et des enseignants franco-ontariens, AEFO, apprécie le temps mis à sa disposition par le comité permanent des affaires sociales de l'Assemblée législative de l'Ontario. L'AEFO représente les 5000 enseignantes et enseignants qui oeuvrent dans les écoles de langue française dans la province. L'AEFO est une filiale de la Fédération des enseignantes et des enseignants de l'Ontario, la FEO.
L'AEFO fait sa présentation sur deux sujets du projet de loi 34 qui auront des effets néfastes auprès de la population francophone. Nous traiterons donc exclusivement de la question de la maternelle et de celle de l'éducation des adultes.
Maternelle: Notre problème majeur n'est pas avec la partie du projet de loi qui rend facultative la prestation du programme de maternelle. En effet, 99 % de nos écoles avaient des maternelles avant qu'elles ne soient obligatoires.
Notre préoccupation tient au fait que des réductions de subventions rendent leur maintien précaire, non seulement à cause de la réduction qui affecte tous les conseils, mais aussi parce que les conseils scolaires de langue française sont particulièrement pauvres au niveau de pouvoir de taxation locale. Devant de telles contraintes financières, les maternelles sont ciblées et deviennent très vulnérables.
Les gouvernements antérieurs avaient reconnu l'importance de l'éducation de la petite enfance. La ministre de l'Éducation en 1983, docteur Bette Stephenson, avait mis en place «the early primary education project». Les recherches effectuées par le bureau de la ministre signalaient de façon conclusive l'importance de l'éducation chez les tout-petits afin de mieux les préparer aux futurs défis de la vie.
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En 1985, le Report of the Early Primary Education Project signalait que les parents étaient très préoccupés par l'importance de l'éducation des tout-petits par rapport à la disparité de ces services dans différentes communautés. Ainsi, le rapport demandait aux conseils scolaires d'intégrer graduellement, sur une période de cinq ans, le programme de la maternelle. Le financement et les critères de mise en place relevaient du «Ministry of Education capital grant plan».
En 1987, George Radwanski recommandait dans son rapport au ministère de l'Éducation que tous les conseils de l'Ontario soient tenus de fournir des services d'éducation de la petite enfance accessibles à tous dans les écoles publiques et séparées pour les enfants dès l'âge de trois ans.
En 1989, le discours du trône, sous le gouvernement libéral, annonçait l'obligation d'offrir le jardin pour des demi-journées pour septembre 1992 et des demi-journées de maternelle pour septembre 1994. Le ministère offrait des fonds capitaux pour assurer la mise en oeuvre de ces programmes.
En 1995, le gouvernement conservateur, dans un mouvement de volte-face, a indiqué qu'il avait l'intention de rendre le programme de la maternelle optionnel pour les conseils scolaires. Le projet de loi 34 risque de mettre le dernier clou au cercueil.
Les statistiques du MEFO démontrent que dans les écoles de langue française, sur une période de 10 ans, le nombre d'élèves à la maternelle a augmenté de 5864 en 1984 à 6907 en 1994. Dans cette même période, le total d'écoles francophones et anglophones offrant la maternelle et le jardin est passé de 1690 à 2785.
Les chances de succès des jeunes francophones diminueront avec la réduction du financement et l'abolition éventuelle des maternelles. Déjà, les résultats aux tests provinciaux démontrent que les jeunes francophones ont une bonne côte à remonter. Les mathématiques et les cours de langue vont en souffrir puisque les recherches nous démontrent l'importance de maîtriser ces disciplines à un très bas âge.
Les recherches : La Commission royale sur l'éducation, dans son rapport au gouvernement de l'Ontario en décembre 1994, faisait référence à de multiples données justifiant la mise en place et le maintien des programmes pour la petite enfance. Voici certaines de ces conclusions :
(1) Nous savons désormais que les enfants font l'acquisition de notions de mathématiques dès les premières années de leur vie et que, à l'âge de trois ans, la capacité de compter et de calculer varie énormément. Aussi, le niveau de préparation de ces enfants pour la première année est-il très divers, et les écoles doivent faire des efforts inouïs pour combler ces écarts, qui ont plutôt tendance à s'élargir qu'à s'amenuiser durant l'élémentaire.
(2) Nous savons déjà qu'il existe dès la première année de si grandes différences dans l'expression orale, le vocabulaire et l'entendement, qu'il est difficile pour les enseignantes et les enseignants de resserrer l'écart entre des enfants prêts à apprendre dans un cadre institutionnel et d'autres qui le sont moins. Il ressort clairement que dès l'âge de quatre ans et même auparavant, l'échec d'un grand nombre de nos enfants à acquérir suffisamment de connaissances et de compréhension aura des conséquences graves sur leur éducation.
(3) À Toronto, une étude sur la maternelle à temps plein montre des gains dans l'expression orale, l'attention et l'interaction enfant-enfant et enfant-enseignante ou -enseignant. Lors du suivi réalisé quatre ans plus tard, on a trouvé que les enfants du programme à temps plein avaient un taux d'échec moindre en quatrième année que le groupe témoin.
(4) À Ottawa-Carleton, une recherche menée dans le contexte de l'éducation en français dans un cadre minoritaire a étudié les répercussions de la maternelle à temps plein sur le développement d'aspects particuliers des compétences en français : préparation à la lecture, vocabulaire oral, utilisation du langage. Après un an, tous les enfants des programmes à temps plein démontraient des gains bien supérieurs dans le développement du langage que les enfants de profil comparable ne participant pas au programme.
(5) En Ontario, l'un des groupes qui bénéficierait le plus de l'éducation préscolaire est celui des Franco-Ontariens et, dans une certaine mesure, celui des enfants francophones ethnoculturels. Les évaluations semblent montrer que les élèves francophones obtiennent souvent des résultats inférieurs à ceux de leurs camarades anglophones en mathématiques, en sciences, en lecture et écriture et en communication. Ce n'est certainement pas en éliminant une année d'école que nous allons apporter des correctifs à cette situation.
(6) L'exemple le plus souvent cité dans la recherche en éducation est l'étude américaine intitulée Perry preschool study, dont la composante longitudinale est exceptionnelle : un suivi sur 24 années. Des enfants qui à l'âge de trois ans ont participé en petits groupes à un programme préscolaire bien conçu, fondé sur un programme d'études axé sur les habiletés à penser et à apprendre et comprenant des repas et des soins de santé ainsi que des initiatives spéciales pour rejoindre les parents, furent suivis jusqu'à l'âge de 27 ans. Or, les enfants du programme ont terminé leurs études secondaires à raison de 71 %, comparativement à 54 % des enfants du groupe témoin.
Vingt-quatre ans plus tard, le groupe à l'étude affichait des revenus plus élevés, moins d'enfants illégitimes, moins d'arrestations et plus de propriétaires de maisons. Cette étude est souvent citée car le suivi à long terme montre qu'il y a beaucoup à gagner sur le plan financier et social lorsqu'on offre une bonne éducation aux tout-petits.
(7) Dans certains pays, l'éducation publique à temps plein commence dès l'âge de trois ans pour tous les enfants, puisque la culture souscrit à l'idée que tous les enfants de cet âge ou presque ont des avantages à tirer de l'expérience d'apprendre en groupe. Dans ces systèmes, l'éducation de la petite enfance est axée sur les objectifs de l'équité et de l'excellence. Elle est considérée comme un bon départ pour tous et comme une façon d'accroître les chances d'apprendre plus tard en partant de fondements solides.
En effet, 99 % des enfants de trois à cinq ans en France sont inscrits en maternelle gratuitement ou presque. Les Français prennent l'éducation préscolaire au sérieux. L'école maternelle n'a pas été conçue pour un programme de garderie et ne vise pas seulement les enfants vivant dans la pauvreté : c'est bien un programme universel, public et gratuit. Les enfants qui fréquentent l'école maternelle n'ont pas les difficultés connues plus tard à l'école par les autres enfants.
Constatations et recommandations : Après tant d'efforts et de temps mis à bâtir un programme pour aider nos tout-petits à faire face aux défis de la société, nous voilà en marche arrière avec le projet de loi 34.
Pour l'AEFO, il est indispensable que le MEFO maintienne l'obligation pour les conseils scolaires d'offrir l'éducation aux jeunes de la maternelle. Le ministère de l'Éducation et de la Formation doit également assurer le financement de cette éducation au même niveau que pour les autres élèves.
Le programme de la maternelle répond à un besoin pressant chez les francophones de l'Ontario qui sont un groupe à risque à cause du facteur de l'assimilation.
Le programme de la maternelle et du jardin permet aux jeunes francophones de surmonter un environnement linguistique souvent négatif et facilite la transition aux années subséquentes.
Le programme permet également aux enfants des familles les plus démunies de commencer sur le même pied que les familles mieux nanties.
L'AEFO revendique le maintien inconditionnel du programme de la maternelle accompagné du financement antérieur, puisqu'il est un élément clé de la réussite et parce qu'il expose à bas âge les jeunes à la langue et à la culture.
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Éducation des adultes : Tous les programmes pour adultes francophones sont en voie d'être fermés. Pourtant, selon les données de la Fédération des enseignantes et des enseignants de l'Ontario, 80 000 francophones et anglophones de plus de 21 ans profitent -- ou plutôt profitaient -- de programmes offerts durant la journée scolaire. De toute évidence, ce programme répondait à un besoin marqué chez ces adultes.
La récente création d'écoles secondaires francophones a contribué grandement à réduire le taux d'analphabétisme chez les francophones. Cependant, un bon nombre d'adultes qui ne les avaient pas fréquentées et des jeunes en raccrochage utilisaient le programme subventionné pour se recycler sur le marché du travail.
L'abolition des subventions à ce programme coûtera autant, sinon bien davantage à la province en frais de bien-être social et autres coûts sociaux. Une population qui n'est pas suffisamment éduquée coûte cher et ne rapporte pas de dividendes au trésor provincial.
Les données recueillies tout récemment par le CCF, le comité consultatif francophone de COFAM et OTAB, démontraient un très haut pourcentage de francophones qui sont sous-scolarisés. Par les statistiques que vous voyez là, il est bien évident qu'il y a un rapport, très souvent, entre la scolarité et le taux de chômage puis qu'il y a souvent un rapport entre le taux de chômage de la francophonie et la scolarité.
L'école communautaire a toujours été le point de ralliement de la population francophone, surtout dans les endroits où les services en français étaient moindres. Ces coupures porteront un dur coup sur ces communautés qui ont déjà du rattrapage à faire.
Le projet de loi 34 apporte des modifications au financement de programmes des adultes et risque l'élimination de ce programme dans beaucoup de conseils et de sections de langue française.
L'abolition du Conseil ontarien de la formation et d'adaptation de la main-d'oeuvre, et les contraintes qu'imposera le projet de loi 34 sur l'accessibilité des adultes à l'éducation au secondaire, mettent en péril les aspirations des adultes francophones qui n'ont pas complété leur secondaire et qui doivent faire face à un marché du travail de plus en plus compétitif.
Pour l'AEFO, il est essentiel que l'éducation des adultes soit une composante importante du secondaire en Ontario. Il est donc essentiel de maintenir le financement de ce programme et aussi de faciliter l'accès des adultes au programme du jour au palier secondaire.
Des recommandations :
Pour ce qui est de la maternelle, que le ministère de l'Éducation et de la Formation maintienne obligatoirement pour les conseils scolaires d'offrir l'éducation aux jeunes de la maternelle ;
Que le ministère de l'Éducation et de la Formation assure le financement et le maintien de ce programme sans couper dans les autres programmes de l'élémentaire ou du secondaire ;
Que le ministère de l'Éducation et de la Formation analyse l'impact du programme de la maternelle chez la population francophone avant même de considérer de faire des changements.
Pour ce qui est de l'éducation des adultes, que le ministère de l'Éducation et de la Formation maintienne et facilite l'accès aux cours de jour aux adultes qui veulent se rattraper au niveau de leur éducation ;
Que le ministère de l'Éducation et de la Formation reconnaisse le rôle que jouent les écoles secondaires de langue française comme milieu de ressourcement de la communauté et que le MEFO appuie financièrement les initiatives locales.
Merci.
M. Patten : Merci pour votre présentation. C'est évident que vous, comme représentant du secteur franco-ontarien, avez des besoins spéciaux. Votre dernière recommandation, d'établir un sondage, a un impact sur le programme. Il me semble qu'il est important d'adresser un sondage, mais pas de mélanger le secteur franco-ontarien avec toute la population. Il est important de diviser un sondage selon la population, spécialement pour le secteur franco-ontarien, n'est-ce pas ? Ça vous donne un double défi, me semble-t-il, non seulement l'occasion d'augmenter les compétences avec la maternelle, par exemple. L'autre but est pour les adultes. Vous avez un très haut taux de personnes sans diplômes, donc pour vous c'est très important de maintenir ce programme-là.
En effet, savez-vous combien de conseils ont laissé tomber la maternelle ou leur programme pour adultes ?
M. Robert Millaire : Pour vous répondre combien de conseils exactement, ce qu'on nous dit présentement, c'est que c'est la tendance et qu'on va couper au niveau de la maternelle et des jardins. Si dans certains conseils on décide de les maintenir, on les maintient au détriment des autres programmes ; on coupe ailleurs, aux niveaux de l'élémentaire et secondaire. Les deux ont un effet très néfaste sur la population francophone.
Il est essentiel, d'après nous, de commencer très tôt à travailler avec les jeunes. Il faut considérer également que la population francophone de l'Ontario fait face à d'autres défis. Vous avez les personnes, qui qualifient selon l'article 23 de la Charte, qui ont droit à l'éducation en langue française si leurs parents ont été éduqués en français. Alors, on retrouve également cette clientèle dans nos salles de classe, et cette clientèle ne maîtrise pas du tout le français, mais ils ont droit à une éducation en français. Si nous n'avons pas ces programmes-là, nous sommes en train de nuire au programme régulier parce que nous devrons faire des accommodements, et les jeunes qui maîtrisent la langue sont punis. Alors, c'est essentiel d'avoir cette année préparatoire pour que tout le monde commence sur le même pied dès la première année.
M. Patten : Il me semble aussi que pour les écoles francophones vous avez un problème avec l'accès, que dans quelques cas vous avez seulement une école dans une petite ville ou dans un comté. Si ce programme n'est plus là, cela veut dire que les parents ont le choix d'envoyer les élèves à un autre système, n'est-ce pas, et que dans l'avenir vous perdrez des élèves ?
M. Millaire : C'est ça. Si un système plus gros avoisinant offre la maternelle, ça peut être du côté anglophone, alors la tentation est très grave d'envoyer leurs enfants à l'école anglaise. On sait très bien que les médias, les programmes de télévision et à la radio, pour la grande majorité sont en anglais. Déjà tout le milieu a une influence, un impact, alors si on les expose davantage, cela va être un degré de plus d'assimilation. On sait très bien que dans beaucoup d'endroits éloignés de l'Ontario, il n'y a pas de communication en français au niveau des médias ; c'est en anglais. Les premières années des jeunes francophones sont extrêmement importantes pour les exposer à la culture francophone et à la langue.
Mr Wildman: Merci beaucoup pour votre présentation. As a representative of an area that has a significant francophone population, I appreciate your presentation very much. As you have indicated, not all of us live in Dubreuilville or Hearst or in that kind of milieu that makes it easy for francophones to maintain their language and culture, so there is a particular challenge facing francophone educators in an English milieu.
Having said that, and recognizing the importance of JK programs and adult education programs for the francophone population, I'd like you to comment on this. The government has basically said that the choices in meeting the budget cuts are really the boards' choices. The 16% cut in general legislative grants, averaged, by the provincial government should not necessarily lead to the cancellation or change in JK programs or adult education programs other than pushing adults to continuing education programs, which may not be available to francophones. How do you respond to: "Well, really, it's up to the boards. It's not the provincial government that's doing this; it's the boards, so your argument or your concern should be expressed to the boards"?
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M. Dugas : Juste pour répondre, chez nous, moi, j'enseigne à Sudbury à l'école alternative, qui est une école pour les adultes. On ferme. C'est fini à partir de cette année. Il n'y en aura plus de cours pour les adultes francophones. Le conseil a choisi de fermer à cause des coupures de subventions.
Mr Wildman: While the board made the decision, it's a result of the change in grants.
M. Millaire : Oui. C'est bien ça.
Mrs Munro: Thank you very much for joining us this morning. I just have a couple of questions related to the issue of junior kindergarten. We've certainly heard a great deal to support the idea. Could you tell us, is there a ministry curriculum for junior kindergarten?
M. Millaire : Je ne suis pas un enseignant de la maternelle. Certainement, il doit y avoir un programme développé des lignes de conduite à l'intérieur du ministère sur ce qui doit être couvert en maternelle et en jardin. Maintenant, je ne pourrais pas vous dire plus que ça, alors je ne pourrais pas clarifier ça. J'essayerais de le vérifier. Mais définitivement, au niveau du système d'éducation, lorsqu'on enseigne à un groupe d'élèves, il doit y avoir un programme cadre est c'est basé ultimement sur un encadrement ou des grandes lignes de conduite du ministère. C'est basé là-dessus.
Je ne suis pas certain -- Piaget I, un document qui avait été sorti qui s'adressait, je crois, à la prématernelle et aux jardins est possiblement le document, mais je ne suis pas assez familier, alors je ne pourrais pas vous assurer que c'est vraiment le document de référence auquel on fait allusion lorsqu'on prépare des programmes.
Mrs Munro: The other question I had is somewhat related, only at the other end of the spectrum, in terms of adult education. Is it not true that a credit course in a continuing education program would follow the same curriculum as an adult education program would?
Mr Millaire: I'm not sure.
Mrs Munro: My question came from the idea that if an adult student chose to go to night school to take a credit course, would it not be following the same curriculum as if it were handled in the daytime?
M. Dugas : S'il y avait des écoles du soir de disponibles, je croirais que oui, mais des écoles du soir pour les francophones, je ne sais pas si ça existe en quelque part.
M. Millaire : Beaucoup d'écoles, à cause de toutes les coupures, à la fin de la journée scolaire ne sont plus accessibles en soirée à cause des coupures au niveau de la conciergerie et toute une série d'autres choses. Alors, les coupures ont été faites là également. Est-ce qu'il y a des écoles du soir pour les adultes francophones ? Moi non plus, je n'en connais pas. Autre préoccupation également c'est -- je parle en termes de francophones, puis ça s'applique à n'importe quel parent. Ces parents-là ont en commun leurs enfants qui viennent le soir également. Est-ce qu'on laisse les enfants à la maison pour aller s'instruire le soir ? On est en train de créer -- déjà les familles sont assez divisées, et on les divise d'avantage. Le meilleur temps pour offrir ça, c'est pendant le jour, parce qu'il y a beaucoup de gens qui sont disponibles dans le jour à cause du peu d'emplois de disponibles.
Le Vice-Président : Merci beaucoup pour votre présentation.
Mr Patten: One question raised by Mrs Munro was: Could we find out whether the ministry has a curriculum for junior kindergarten for both the English-speaking sector and the francophone sector? I believe there is one.
Mr Skarica: I could make inquiries.
Mr Wildman: I would like to ask if our research can find out if in northern Ontario, in places like Sudbury district, Algoma district and the northwest and in Cochrane, there are any night school classes, continuing education classes in French.
ALAN ROBINSON
The Vice-Chair: Next we have Alan Robinson, who is a principal within the Central Algoma Board of Education. Thank you for joining us.
Mr Alan Robinson: Mr Vice-Chair and members of the standing committee on social development, I'd like to thank you for the opportunity to make this presentation.
The Central Algoma Board of Education is located east of Sault Ste Marie, from Echo Bay to Thessalon, which is about 50 miles east of the Sault. We're a small rural board of six elementary schools and one secondary school. There's no separate system in our board area. Almost all our students are bused from long distances and isolated areas. Our tax base is mostly farms, country homes and cottages. We have negligible industrial assessment. We are a poor, small rural board.
For our small board, some of the changes proposed in Bill 34 will impact very negatively on the people in the school system. I will attempt to outline briefly some personal concerns and concerns we share as a board.
Probably our main concern is in the area of the junior kindergarten program. Our board took the initiative way back in 1974 to offer junior kindergarten as a pilot project and is in the book by Chris Nash, who really started the whole process of junior kindergarten in the province. We felt then, as now, that there is a great need for this type of program in our rural area. Because of a long tradition of junior kindergarten, many parents feel a sense of betrayal when they hear of cuts to the program.
There are several areas of concern over the JK cuts. We have a severe lack of alternative facilities for early childhood education. Elimination of JK would mean no alternative for most parents in our area. JK is highly valued by our schools from the view of early identification of children's needs. In most cases, we are able to have special assistance in place before pupils begin grade 1. Because almost all our special-needs children are included in our regular classrooms, this is very important to us.
It is our experience that the JK setting often initiates family interest in educational activities and provides a vehicle for early involvement of parents in the education of the child. The elimination of busing and the reduction in funding for JK will probably mean the elimination of the program rather than making it optional.
The other areas I just commented on quickly in hopes that this might be of some value to you.
Adult pupils: Over the past number of years we have worked very hard to provide opportunities and, more important, hope to many adults in our area through an adult education program. Because of being allowed to attend courses during the day, many adults are able to avail themselves of the regular buses and a full range of secondary programs. In my own elementary school we have several adults who have completed their secondary diploma and are now pursuing new careers. In our isolated area, with no viable alternatives, adult students will lose the equality of access they presently enjoy.
Sick leave entitlements: As a teacher, and now I'm speaking very personally, this leaves me very puzzled and in some sense hurt. The only question I can come up with is, is the government just looking at a way to take a punitive measure against teachers? I don't understand.
Cooperative agreements: This certainly seems to be a move in the right direction and we applaud the government for this initiative. We're currently working with other boards in a five-board cooperative on the North Shore, especially in the area of curriculum and other areas. Once again, because of our rural nature, we only have certain limited opportunities.
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I hope equalization payments mean small boards would benefit from increased revenue from such an arrangement and thereby improve the chances of opportunity for our students.
Some quick recommendations for you:
Continue to make junior kindergarten available to rural areas without a reduction in funding, or please offer some other program in its place.
Allow adequate funding for adult education to be offered in rural areas during the regular school day.
Please negotiate the whole thing of sick leave.
Continue to encourage cooperation between boards and other institutions. In particular, I feel there's a lot of room for cooperation among the Roman Catholic and public boards. Just a personal comment on this. We take a great deal of pride in the fact that we are truly a public board, because I have the privilege of having in my school Roman Catholic students and any other religion as well, and I feel it's a very valuable contribution to a public system to have other faiths in the school, especially the Roman Catholic.
Pursue equalization of funding.
This isn't a long presentation. I avoided making a lot of comments and referring to documents and figures because it was my intent to present myself as a principal of a local school with some gut reactions to what I feel is happening in the bill. Thank you very much.
The Vice-Chair: Thank you very much. You've left a lot of time for questioning. I'm going to ask one, and I normally don't, but following up on what Mrs Munro said earlier, do you have an answer to that question? Is the adult education program basically the same as continuing education or vice versa?
Mr Robinson: I don't know.
The Vice-Chair: You don't have a continuing ed program within your board?
Mr Robinson: Yes, but my area is elementary. I really don't know a lot about that. I'm sorry.
Mr Gravelle: Good morning, Mr Robinson. Thank you very much for coming here. As you know, we had one of the teachers from your board here this morning.
Mr Robinson: Yes. She's a friend of mine.
Mr Gravelle: She was wonderful and she gave a terrific presentation which was very balanced and --
Mr Robinson: Her area of expertise is dramatic arts.
Mr Gravelle: Is she still here? She was terrific.
Mr Robinson: She's a great lady.
Mr Gravelle: You bring forward in your short but clear presentation some important points. One of the key ones is in terms of JK. In our public meetings, we've been to Windsor and Ottawa, and as to Thunder Bay, probably some of this applies in terms of the district, the smaller communities, but they didn't make representation, so I think it's important to explain it in terms of the alternatives to junior kindergarten. I presume you are also very much a believer in the value of early childhood education.
Mr Robinson: Yes, I am.
Mr Gravelle: In other words, if the situation continues, you're talking about a full loss of early childhood education in most ways in your board area.
Mr Robinson: It would be a net loss to us because we do have to bus; so much of our program depends on busing. Next year we're moving to a full-day, combined JK-SK every-other-day program, which is a brand-new venture for us. We're not sure how it's going to work. We aren't sure we can afford to run it. If we can't, we'll have to cancel JK in the following year, and that's a very real possibility.
JK is such a volatile issue with a lot of people because it seems to me it's very often based on personal experience. Very quickly, my personal experience was that when JK came along for my kids, my wife said: "No way my kids are going to JK. It's just a babysitting service. I'm not interested in it." My wife did take the kids, did get involved, and today she is one of the main supporters of JK that I know of. She thinks it's very valuable. Other people have the same experience, or they say, "No, it's a babysitting service."
I truly believe in early childhood education. I believe as early as junior kindergarten in my school I can spot the potential problems, especially in the area of behaviour, and begin to deal with them as early as JK and on up through kindergarten and so on.
Mr Gravelle: I think that's a significant statement you are making too. We've heard about statistical information that proves the value of JK in a long-term way and even in terms of its economic benefits down the road, and we have heard anecdotal references in terms of how people can see the difference, but from your perspective, it's significant to hear you say you see the difference over the number of years you've been there. That is a case we want to make as strongly as possible.
One of the things the government finds itself saying at times about this is that they haven't really eliminated this, that it's up to the local boards, and they've watched various boards make decisions, like you have, to maintain it so therefore it's perhaps okay to have these funding reductions. For one thing, you have said you may not be able to maintain it next year, and that's even without further cuts down the road.
Mr Robinson: That's correct.
Mr Gravelle: With further cuts it's probably totally inevitable, but even without further cuts it's inevitable. I presume also that you've had to make some major adjustments to maintain it.
Mr Robinson: Certainly staffing adjustments and moving people around. We have to look at new curricula to run the program and so on. It's a very upsetting time. When I talk to my parents who come into the school --
Mr Gravelle: I was going to ask you about the level of anxiety.
Mr Robinson: It goes all the way from being very angry to very confused. They don't understand, because the things they read say that junior kindergarten is very important.
One of the things that bugs me personally -- and since I get to talk, I can do a personal thing -- is that to me, once again it points out the value we as a society place on the youngest members in our society. It really hurts me to see, first of all, that secondary children are given higher grants to start with. There may be reasons for that; I'm not interested in arguing that sort of thing. But to look at the youngest members in our school system and say, "We're just going to slash the funding for these people; they really don't have any value" -- that's the message that gets to me. That may not be what it's supposed to be about, but that's what I feel.
Mr Gravelle: There has been discussion by various members on the government side of the concept of differentiated staffing. I'm curious about your views on that as a way of dealing with the reductions.
Mr Robinson: As a federation member, I think they certainly should have teachers in place in JK, in early childhood education. On the other hand, my personal experience is that I have met early childhood educators whom I esteem very highly, who do an excellent job. I don't know where the answer for that lies. I have personal opinions on it, as I said, but I don't know exactly.
Mr Gravelle: In essence, they're different tasks, or a different role, different needs?
Mr Robinson: I don't know enough about the early childhood educators to really comment, in a sense, to differentiate. I know what kindergarten teachers do, and especially in the area of evaluation, I really feel they're very important.
Mr Wildman: Thanks, Alan, for coming. I very much appreciate it. My children, as you know, have all benefited from junior kindergarten in your system.
Mr Robinson: Yes. Thank you.
Mr Wildman: I've had four who have attended junior kindergarten -- for one of whom that was her only contact with the education system -- and I'm hoping my fifth child will have the opportunity to participate in junior kindergarten in Central Algoma.
First, I think I should clarify one thing so that everyone understands. I'm sure this is not necessary, but just in case. Even if the junior kindergarten program is mandatory for boards, it is optional for parents to decide whether to send their children to the program. That's important.
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Could you elaborate a little on what changes have been made in the junior kindergarten program for next year so it can be maintained in Central Algoma? You've said it's been changed to a full day, senior-junior kindergarten combined, on alternate days. This cuts your busing costs and staffing as well, I suspect. What other changes have been made that may or may not be beneficial to the students?
Mr Robinson: First of all, at present we run buses so we have a morning kindergarten class and an afternoon kindergarten class. Next year, the children will all come on the same busing system and go home on the same buses. We really are in the process now of looking at curricula, of looking at the whole program to see what we're going to do for the fall. We haven't spent a lot of time at it because we haven't had a lot of time. Most of that is going to take place over the summer, I would imagine.
Mr Wildman: On differentiated programming, I know you didn't want to comment directly, but I should put on the record that one federation, the Federation of Women Teachers' Associations of Ontario, has indicated they're not necessarily opposed to differentiated staffing as long as the program is under the supervision of certified teachers. In other words, you could bring in differentiated staffing as long as they were working under the supervision of a certified teacher.
Mr Robinson: I've heard that proposed. I certainly don't have anything against that. As a matter of fact, one of my staff members just completed her early childhood education diploma this past fall so that in the event something like that happens, she would be in a position to supervise.
Mr Wildman: Obviously this bill, Bill 34, is about money. It's about taking a lot of money out of the education system in one year, and we're looking at further cuts next year. Your board, as you've indicated, is a small, rural, assessment-poor board, and you're interested in the equalization aspect of Bill 34. Are you aware that there is nothing in this bill that requires that the money that may come from agreements with the Metro Toronto board and the Ottawa board of education to transfer moneys to the provincial government will be used in education?
Mr Robinson: I didn't know that, but the climate of today would make me think that certainly would be true.
Mr Wildman: There isn't anything in the bill that requires that.
Mr Robinson: I would be sceptical that we would get any money.
Mr Wildman: And it is very unlikely, I suspect, that boards like yours would see their grants increased above what has been already announced, with the undue hardship assistance that's been provided, because of moneys that come from Ottawa or Toronto. That money will go into the consolidated revenue fund of the provincial government. Maybe some of it will be used to pay the $14.5 million that has been promised to some boards like yours to alleviate the effects of the cost-cutting, but it's not going to mean a major change in what you're already facing now.
This is a particular problem and has been an ongoing problem for your board for a long time, even before the cuts of this government or the previous government. Is it possible that we would see school closures or school amalgamations in Central Algoma because of the financial situation that is compounding the assessment-poor reality of your board? Has that been discussed, do you know?
Mr Robinson: That has not been discussed in a formal way at my level of understanding. However, I think it's a little beyond me. Certainly there is rumour in the community that that is a possibility.
Mr Wildman: There have been rumours about Tarbutt school and Johnson school, for instance.
Mr Robinson: That school wasn't closed, because it's the same school. It was reconfigured so that now all the students are at Johnson school.
Mr Wildman: Thank you very much for your presentation.
Mr Skarica: As indicated by Mr Wildman, you're one of the boards that received an undue burden grant, and I think that reduced the reduction by 40%.
It was brought up earlier that your board has 11.5 administrators, and I note from your brief that you have one high school and I think six elementary schools. I didn't take JK, but my calculations are that you have more administrators than schools. Has there been any effort at all to look at those administrative costs? Do you need 11 administrators for one high school and six elementary schools? Can you get away with half of that or a third of that or two thirds of that? Has there been any initiative to look at saving costs in that area? I'm probably putting you on the spot here, because I know you're sort of in between.
Mr Robinson: Sure you are, but you meant to, so that's fine. First of all, I don't know how the figure was arrived at. I don't know what is included in that figure of administrative staff. Does that include vice-principals?
Mr Wildman: Secretaries.
Mr Robinson: Secretaries? I don't know what it includes. Have we looked at administrative cuts? Yes, we have. For instance, one cut we could do --
Mr Skarica: I'm talking at the board level.
Mr Robinson: But we're talking about such a small board that what you're talking about, as far as I understand, would be principals and vice-principals. I don't understand where you would find -- well, we have a director of education, we have one superintendent, we have a manager of plant, we have a business administrator who's now on leave because she's sick and has not been replaced. Outside of that, I don't know. You would have to include principals and vice-principals. We could cut vice-principals, although with our rural nature we feel it's very important to have a vice-principal in place. It costs about $4,000 a year each for six vice-principals.
The Vice-Chair: That's in addition to what a teacher gets paid?
Mr Robinson: That's correct; that's a vice-principal's allowance. You're asking the wrong person, but I'll give you my personal opinion. My personal opinion is that administratively -- and I'm part of the administration, so it's my opinion -- we run a very lean ship and we do not spend excessively on administration. I wish to goodness we could have consultants. We have one special education consultant for the whole board. I don't know if you'd call her administration or not. She receives a small extra allowance. We have a half-time computer person who does not receive an allowance. He isn't administration that I know of. No, I don't see where we could cut it.
Mr Preston: I want to thank you for being here. I missed your submission, but I did get your answer to a question I've been asking of presenters since day one, and it was an unbiased answer because you gave me two answers from two perspectives.
As a federation member you believe that early childhood education should be taken care of by teachers, but personally, early childhood educators who are qualified have been doing an excellent job, in your opinion. That's the answer I've been looking for, but I've been getting the two answers from the two different parties all along. I never get one to tell me that the other side of the equation is correct, and you have done it. Thank you very much, sir. You made my day, my week.
The Vice-Chair: Is that the only question you have?
Mr Preston: That's it. Hey, when a guy agrees with what I've been trying to do for a whole week, what else am I going to say?
Mrs Munro: Thank you for joining us this morning and giving us your insight. I've just a couple of questions that relate to the issue of junior kindergarten. As this is a rural board primarily, how long are children on a bus to go to junior kindergarten, on average?
Mr Robinson: At the present time?
Mrs Munro: Yes, under the present system.
Mr Robinson: It would vary from school to school and depend on distances, because we cover some pretty far distances. It certainly would be half an hour each end.
Mrs Munro: How long might it be?
Mr Robinson: In miles?
Mrs Munro: No, is half an hour an average? Are there children who are on a school bus, one way, longer than half an hour?
Mr Robinson: Yes, there could be.
Mrs Munro: Would they be there an hour, 40 minutes?
Mr Robinson: I'm trying to think of my experience. I taught on St Joseph Island, which is an island, and I'm trying to remember how long. In my school, half an hour would be about it. In the school I was at formerly, it could go to three quarters of an hour. Even though you may only be travelling 30 miles, you're dropping off kids and doing a circuitous route, whatever.
Mrs Munro: That's right. This would be for two and a half or three hours for junior kindergarten?
Mr Robinson: Yes, it would vary from school to school, depending on when the buses come. In my school, the junior kindergarten come in the morning and they are there at about 8:30 when they're dropped off. Our school day starts or a bell rings at 10 to 9 and they stay until about 11:20, when they get on the bus.
Mrs Munro: You mentioned, as have many of the people who have talked about the importance of junior kindergarten, early identification. How early can you do an IPRC?
Mr Robinson: We do IPRCs on children in junior kindergarten. We did two of them just recently.
Mrs Munro: The point was made earlier that junior kindergarten has always been an option for parents. Given the kind of community you serve, what percentage of parents actually do send their children to junior kindergarten?
Mr Robinson: We would come very close to 100%. To my knowledge, it's very rare to find a family, that is interested in the public school system to start with, that doesn't send their children to junior kindergarten. The only exception I know of would be home-schoolers, which I have some very strong opinions about but I won't get into.
Mrs Munro: I respect the fact that you don't want to get into your opinion on that, but could you just tell us, do you have any sense of the percentage of people involved in home-school programs?
Mr Robinson: If my understanding is correct, we have a fairly large population of home-schoolers in our board area, especially for the size of our board. The last figure I looked at, we have about close to 60 children in our small area who are home-schooled for either religious reasons or reasons of not wanting to get involved with it. You don't want my comments on that, I'm sure.
The Vice-Chair: Thank you very much, Mr Robinson. You've given us a different perspective on the situation.
We're now in recess until 1:30 this afternoon.
The committee recessed from 1203 to 1336.
SAULT STE MARIE WOMEN TEACHERS' ASSOCIATION
The Vice-Chair: The first presenter this afternoon is the Sault Ste Marie Women Teachers' Association with Gayle Manley as president. Welcome to our hearing.
Mrs Gayle Manley: Thank you very much for -- it's not an invitation; I guess it is an invitation -- allowing people to present. I know it must be a weary three weeks you've all been through and today is the end of it. I see you with your bags in the lobby and ready to go.
I'm Gayle Manley and I'm the president of the women teachers' association of Sault Ste Marie. I'm a teacher. I've taught for 24 years.
Mr Patten: Are you John Manley's sister?
Mrs Manley: No, nor Elizabeth Manley's cousin either, I might add.
To my right is Agostina Patterson. Agostina is an FSL teacher. She is on my association executive and also a mother of a future JK student. Also with me, who is paying the bill for our lunch, is Miss Emily Noble. She's a principal in Sault Ste Marie and also on my executive.
I've provided a brief. It's a nice bright yellow, so after a big lunch, maybe that'll help you wake up a bit.
The Sault Ste Marie Women Teachers' Association represents 320 women teachers in the public elementary system. Daily, these women see the effect of the cuts to social programs and education that the present government is exacting on the people, in particular, as we see it, the children of Ontario. A recent ad from the Ontario government in the Sault Star was titled, "Doing Better for Less." It is our opinion that many of these cost-cutting measures enacted through Bill 34 will not create a better education system but one which will be accessible for some members of our community and not for others, as in the case of adult education. The advantages of early childhood schooling through junior kindergarten will be available for some communities in Ontario but not for all four-year-olds. The actions of the provincial government to reduce education spending seem to be designed for short-term savings; unfortunately, these cuts will have serious long-term effects.
It is ironic that the premise of overspending in education which has prompted some of the measures in Bill 34 is based on an incorrect use of statistics by the Minister of Education and Training. According to the Minister of Education and Training, we are spending about 10% more per pupil than the average of the other provinces. From this comes the figure of $1.3 billion a year in overspending. However, if one uses StatsCan figures, we are behind Quebec, Manitoba and British Columbia in per-pupil expenditures. According to StatsCan, Ontario's average expenditure is $6,961 and that is 2.4% above the Canadian average of $6,796. However, on considering these figures more carefully, it was found that the data used by the government included federal and private schools in Ontario. The data also entailed kindergarten expenditure but not kindergarten enrolment. This would definitely increase the cost per pupil and create a crisis in education.
It is important for the parents, children, teachers and education workers in Ontario, and specifically Sault Ste Marie, that the social development committee give serious consideration to the global issues which the changes proposed in Bill 34 will entail. Accessibility and quality education must be priorities.
Addressing junior kindergarten as an optional program: What we've done in our brief is to hit a few things that we think are important. I know some of the presenters this morning just did junior kindergarten, so we've done a little bit on each.
Removing the mandatory requirement that school boards operate junior kindergarten combined with the cuts to school board grants means that school boards have few options but to cancel junior kindergarten programs or make significant changes that would compromise the quality of the program. Option implies choice; however, the boards of education in this province which have had to cancel junior kindergarten had no choice.
It is interesting to note that a Conservative government in 1944 led by Leslie Frost announced the first provincial plan to provide junior and senior kindergarten. Is it not ironic that the current Conservative government, using the motto "Common Sense Revolution," wants to eliminate a program that makes valuable early education equally accessible to all?
The Minister of Education and Training has indicated that a complete review will be made on the impact of junior kindergarten. Why is junior kindergarten to be made optional in Bill 34 before the results of this review are known? One might also ask, what is the government's intent in this review? To look at the costs of junior kindergarten or its program value? What are the details of this review? If Sault Ste Marie junior kindergarten classes were to be under this review in 1996-97, one would not be observing a program as it was originally intended but blended JK-SK classes designed to meet the demands of reduced grants. Would this be a fair review?
There is a vast amount of research available to show the benefits of early childhood education: a sound foundation for future academic growth, stimulating age-appropriate programming, access to school facilities, resources and support services for all children and parents, and you saw the value of a program this morning with one of the presentations. The 1985 Early Primary Education Project from the Ministry of Education acknowledges that a child's fourth year is a period of rapid growth and that junior kindergarten benefits all children, not just the disadvantaged. The Perry Preschool Project, initiated in the 1960s and concluded in the 1980s -- and I've included a chart in the appendix that looks at the study -- found that children who have a good early education starting at age 3 have fewer learning problems, less delinquency, more self-sufficiency, higher employability and greater productivity. For every $1 spent on early education for young children, society saves, according to this project, $7 later on because problems can be prevented rather than treated. The benefits definitely outweigh the costs. The Royal Commission on Learning, published in December 1994, one of the most extensive consultations about our education system, emphasized the need for early childhood education as a good start for all children, no matter what their socioeconomic background.
This is what Mrs Judy Williams, a parent in Sault Ste Marie who cares deeply about what happens to her child in school and in his future, has written about her son's experience in JK: "Junior kindergarten is a wonderful program. It teaches children to share, listen, cooperate, communicate, responsibility and to get along with others. Children of this age learn so much. I have found JK has had a positive influence on my son. He has gone from a shy child in September to an outgoing, eager-to-learn pupil who enjoys being with his friends. I feel that Jordan has learned a great deal this year from counting, writing his name, to thinking about the world around him. He always has many questions and I enjoy listening to his tales of his new-found experiences. I feel it would be a shame to lose this program."
In Sault Ste Marie, junior kindergarten has been successful. Parents have continued to be positive and supportive. Enrolment has increased since its first years in the Sault. Because of junior kindergarten, early identification has resulted in early intervention for children with difficulties observed in the areas of speech and language.
After many hours of budget deliberations, the Sault Ste Marie Board of Education has chosen to continue junior kindergarten because it believes in the value of this program for the parents and the children of our community. Unfortunately, to retain junior kindergarten a price had to be paid. We will be blending JK and SK classes, making classes with three-, four- and five-year-olds together. There will be a higher pupil-teacher ratio and no teaching assistants. How could it be said that cost-cutting measures have not affected the classrooms of Ontario? We urge you to reinstate the mandatory nature of junior kindergarten as an investment in Ontario's future and our children.
We all recognize the value of education and we know that learning is a lifelong, continuous process. Many adults are increasing their knowledge and skills through various courses; many are returning to school to obtain a secondary school diploma, often working and supporting a family at the same time. If courses are only available through continuing education and at a cost, then access and opportunity will be greatly limited for many people, creating a two-tiered system of education: one for those who have the ability to pay and one for those who do not.
It will be a challenge for single parents -- mainly women -- to balance the responsibilities of parenting and wage earner plus upgrading their skills. The current adult education programs give flexibility of timetabling and courses. Under the government's proposal in Bill 34 to direct adult pupils to continuing education credit courses, there will be no option for many adults but to drop out of school again. In the aforementioned ad in the Sault Star, the Ontario government stated that:
"Doing better for less in government is a key part of our plan to reduce costs, balance our budget, improve the investment climate in Ontario, create jobs and" -- last but, in my opinion, not least -- "to restore hope and opportunity."
Will this plan for adult education restore hope and opportunity, let alone lead to a better-paying job, for many of these adult learners? We think not.
Bill 34 removes reference in the Education Act to the number of sick days to which teachers are entitled, effective September 1, 1998. Removing this reference will put a great number of local collective agreements across the province at risk. If it is the current government's intention to place boards of education and teachers' groups into adversarial positions, this will be achieved. Approving this amendment will have two major effects: (1) weaken the collective bargaining process and (2) leave teachers in a position where they do not have the same provisions that many other groups of workers have. Is this fair to our students, that their teachers who would have no right to sick days would have to teach in a less than optimum condition to provide learning?
Basically, removing the sick leave clause in the Education Act will not save any money for boards of education. However, a secondary issue, that of retirement gratuity -- or what most other professions call severance or departure packages -- is what is the true target of the bill's amendment. These sick leave benefits have been negotiated in good faith with boards of education. A deal is a deal, but it appears that the provincial government is using this legislation to cancel out deals which have been negotiated in the past.
The purpose of cooperation between agencies and boards of education should be to better serve the students and the community, not just to achieve savings. It is to the credit of our board of education in the Sault that it has been proactive in the area of cooperative measures as they work out a joint transportation policy with the separate school board of education.
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We work together with a number of agencies responsible for children in the area. Our northern schools are also part of a cooperative initiative with the ministries of education and training, health, community and social services and northern development and mines for the provision of assessment and treatment services called Integrated Services for Northern Children. We believe in the importance of sharing services in the north, where distances are great and funds are often low in some areas. The spirit of this particular amendment to the Education Act is commendable and confirms many partnerships already in place. It is critical, however, that the reason for cooperation not be just "to do better with less," but rather to integrate to better meet the needs of our children.
When the Minister of Education and Training tabled this bill on March 28 of this year, he said, "Our government is committed to developing an education system that is based on excellence in student achievement as well as accountability to, and affordability for, all Ontario taxpayers." What the minister omitted from his straight A report was another A: accessibility. Both amendments regarding junior kindergarten and adult education deny accessibility to education for all learners. Universal education is an ideal championed by all civilized nations. As teachers, we want to ensure that all our children have equal access to a quality education and the opportunity to achieve their full potential. We urge the government to consider this a priority as well.
Moreover, these cuts to education funding have severely affected the classrooms in our province. These are cuts based on tales of overspending when we are in reality behind Quebec, Manitoba and British Columbia in our per-student expenditures, according to StatsCan figures.
In his speech on March 28, the Honourable Mr Snobelen also said that "while it is urgent to address these matters, we must allow time to ensure we maintain quality programming for our students." If they are to allow time to maintain quality programming, why is it the government intends to make JK optional before its impact has been reviewed? Why is the government so ready to extract $1.3 billion in such a short time frame? Why is it we in the education community hear so little from the ministry about curriculum initiatives for the past year? The business ethic seems to dictate what is done in education these days, not the real reason for us all being here, the children.
What follows are three recommendations, as you can see: (1) that junior kindergarten be restored to being a mandatory program and, with that, appropriately funded as a category 1 grant; (2) that adult students have access to both continuing education and regular day school programs for credit courses; and (3) that Bill 34 be amended by deleting the sections relating to sick leave for teachers. We hope you consider these suggestions. Thank you.
Mr Wildman: Thank you for your presentation. I'd like to look at page 9, where you say at the bottom, "It is critical, however, that the reason for cooperation not be `to do better with less,' but rather to integrate to better meet the needs of our children." I think that's really central to the whole issue before us, whether we have a child-centred education system or whether we simply look at it as a way of saving money.
Where you say "doing better with less," quoting the government ad, wouldn't it be better to just be honest about it and say that what is being expected, if you're going to take $1.3 billion out of the system, is that we will do less?
Mrs Manley: I don't think it's totally hidden. To most people, they can see what is evident, so I would agree with you, but then I did vote NDP -- excuse me.
Mr Wildman: Actually, I understand your remark, but I don't think this is a political issue in that sense. We all have to look at how we're going to serve the students better.
Mrs Manley: Many people get accused of being special-interest groups. That's an obvious thing for teachers, that we are interested in children and quality education.
Mr Wildman: In terms of the review of JK, you raise a very good point: Why would we make it optional and cut the funding and then say after that we're going to do a review? It's sort of putting the cart before the horse. In terms of the review, has FWTAO been contacted by the ministry about this review, and have there been any requests for input from your federation into this review that the ministry says it's going to do?
Mrs Manley: I gather that they have met, and that's when we were informed about the review. But since that meeting, I don't think there has been. FWTAO has offered to give input to the review and help in that matter.
Mr Wildman: But your concern is that if they do the review now, you're going to be reviewing a program that has significantly changed from the original program and that is not going to be able to serve students as adequately as it has in the past.
Mrs Manley: In Sault Ste Marie, you wouldn't be reviewing a JK program.
Mr Wildman: You'd be reviewing a blended SK and JK program, yes. Are the class sizes increased in this program?
Mrs Manley: Yes.
Mr Wildman: Do you have the numbers?
Mrs Manley: They haven't stated, the board of education, in doing their figures. Emily, as a principal, you might be able to address that.
Miss Emily Noble: Certainly in terms of if we had a straight JK, an example would be at our school the enrolment for the senior kindergarten as of September 1996 will be approximately 30 students; we have enrolled in our JK approximately 12. What we have to do is blend those two. So you've got six in one class with 15 SKs, which is about 21 or 22. We currently, in the one class, have 19. We're looking at an increase of at least three to four students per class across the system if the stats that I have from the board are correct.
Mr Wildman: Are you losing education assistants for special ed?
Miss Noble: We will be losing our teaching assistant and educational assistants for kindergarten. In special education, they're downsizing significantly. There may be some, depending on the need, yes.
Mr Preston: We've heard a lot of presenters tell us about ECE. I happen to be a believer in ECE, and I don't see how anybody else who is on this committee can not believe in it. But detection of physical problems and learning disabilities starts at almost six months, with lack of recognition, lack of eye contact, motor skills. At what point should a municipal, regional, provincial or federal government, at what point should a government, start funding early childhood education?
Mrs Manley: As teachers, we respect the ECE program. We've always talked about the importance of working with ECE workers. Within the formal education system, certainly that could be possible at JK, at age three or four. I don't know what intention -- your government's already taken money away from some of the day cares, which would be ECE workers as well.
Interjection: I thought we increased it.
Mr Wildman: You took it away, and then you put some more back in.
Mr Preston: We could have taken it and kept it; we didn't. Maybe my reputation precedes me, because I didn't ask you that question, but I'm glad you gave me the answer, that you are happy with ECE teachers.
Mrs Manley: ECE workers, not teachers. They're not teachers.
Mr Preston: All right, educators. How far down the road do you consider we should start funding it? At three years of age? Is that what you're saying?
Mrs Manley: You mean funding junior kindergarten?
Mr Preston: No, early childhood education. I differentiate between the two.
Mrs Manley: Yes, I understand that.
Mr Preston: Where do we start funding this very important early childhood education?
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Mrs Manley: Obviously, schooling itself begins, at the moment, in our systems at age three. There can be three- and four-year-olds going to JK, so I obviously think that's a point where we should be funding formal schooling.
Mr Skarica: I just wanted you to listen to a couple of figures here. I have the business and general administrative expenses of the Sault Ste Marie Board of Education. For elementary it's $111.59 per student; Sault Ste Marie, it's $198 and $100, so approximately, for elementary, it's $170, and for Sault Ste Marie it's approximately $300.
The board I'm from, the figures are this: business administration, $54; general, $39; Wentworth county board secondary, $97.69, about half of what your board is spending administratively. So there's room to move in your administration. Have there been any attempts to make administrative cuts in your board, and if so, what's happened?
Mrs Manley: I'll let Emily speak to that too, but our board has been downsizing over the last few years. We had a superintendent retire and they didn't fill that position, so they have been working on it, and even in their present budget. Actually, they're doing a presentation later on, so you could definitely reserve that question.
Mr Patten: Thank you for this presentation. We've heard from some of your sister chapters as well around the province, a number of times, so it's like running into a family.
Mrs Manley: It is a family.
Mr Preston: A large family.
Mrs Manley: It is the largest one.
Mr Patten: You will be pleased to know -- you may not have picked it up, but during estimates the deputy minister confirmed that the comparisons between the different provinces really were not justifiable in terms of making various comparisons with different criteria. In fact, he made a pledge that he would come back with something that did truly compare apples with apples.
But one overall statistic that we found useful was that 41% of the students in elementary and secondary in Canada come from Ontario, and Ontario has 42% of the expenditures. So if you just think in those terms, we're hardly out of whack, especially when you look at the urbanization of Ontario and its multicultural nature.
Mrs Manley: Its diversity.
Mr Patten: Its expenditures are higher than in most other provinces as well. I just thought I would mention that.
Actually, I must tell you, I feel sorry for my colleagues across the table because people are coming in here making comments related to the validity of the programs that are affected and the classrooms that are affected, and there really is no comeback on the government side in terms of challenging the validity or value of the program. The reason for that is because, in my opinion, this is a money bill. The Treasurer has asked the education minister to find X amount, or it's been offered or whatever, and that money is taken right out of the system.
The public school board association suggested: "Listen, if you wanted some money, why didn't you work with us and the bodies? Let us find the cuts. If you're looking for money out of education, let us make the cuts, because we know how our systems are affected and what will minimize truly the impact."
I think the government got themselves into a rat hole by targeting specifically to reduce the definition of the classroom, because they affected two classrooms: JK is a classroom the last time I recall, and the adult education, another very important classroom. So they shrank both ends and said, "That's your new definition of the classroom," to be compatible with their campaign pledge. But as you say, most people see through that.
On the adaptation model that you put forward, which is commendable to try to protect, to save the program for JK, I have two quick questions. One is, what is your prognosis for next year? Because when the cuts become annualized, it will be even more. And what, in terms of adult education, do you see in the future as well?
Miss Noble: In terms of the cuts to kindergarten, I think the boards are taking a serious look, and I think you're perfectly correct: The boards have some really, really tough decisions next year and the year after. The money will not be there. The government has said so. If the government has made those programs optional, then I think the boards, and certainly northern boards, being familiar with a couple, the finances are not there and they have to seriously look at the dissemination and destruction of programs.
In terms of adult education, I'm an elementary school principal and I see the parents in the school who come in with their students. These people are in adult education programs, they're hoping to get jobs, and the reality is that they will not be there. If the boards don't have the finances or the options, they just can't be there. They talk about hope in our brief, and that translates to the kids and affects, in turn, the classrooms we deal with at the elementary level.
The Vice-Chair: Thank you very much for your excellent presentation. We appreciate it.
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ONTARIO SECONDARY SCHOOL TEACHERS' FEDERATION, DISTRICT 30
The Vice-Chair: Next we have the Ontario Secondary School Teachers' Federation, District 30, Wayne Jackson, president, and Geoff Shaw, vice-president. Gentlemen, welcome to our hearing.
Mr Wayne Jackson: I'm Wayne Jackson, president, District 30, OSSTF.
Mr Geoff Shaw: I'm Geoff Shaw, president of the Sault division, OSSTF.
Mr Jackson: Thank you very much for finding a space on your agenda to hear our brief. You have a copy of our brief in front of you, I notice. It's not my intention to read through everything there, but certainly I would wish to take some of your time to flag what my members believe to be areas that warrant considered reflection.
The executive of District 30, Ontario Secondary School Teachers' Federation, welcomes the opportunity to address the social development committee. Our members have grave concerns about certain provisions of Bill 34, An Act to amend the Education Act.
District 30 is the organizational unit of the Ontario Secondary School Teachers' Federation that represents the professional and occupational interests of some 473 teachers employed by the Michipicoten, Central Algoma, and Sault Ste Marie boards of education. The membership of the district is divided into three divisions: Central Algoma division, Michipicoten division and Sault Ste Marie division.
At the outset, let us communicate to you the fact that our members are very bitter about the way in which the current government and its predecessor have treated education and education workers. Our anxieties are aggravated by actions and approaches of the current government that suggest a very serious assault on Ontario's system of public education.
Bill 34 emerges in the midst of the most determined cuts to its funding that Ontario public education has ever experienced. Over $1 billion will be removed from elementary and secondary education over the next school year. These cutbacks follow the three years of the social contract that themselves cut our educational spending by over $1 billion. As a result, during a period of sustained enrolment growth in the province that has the highest per capita income and cost of living and the province that welcomes the greatest number of immigrants, our per-pupil expenditure will fall below the national average. No one in this province concerned about the future of our province can be secure in the face of this reality.
Ontario's public education system from the very beginning has been the foundation of our province's social, economic and political development. Our form of democratic representative government, which stresses the participation of all citizens, relies on an educated populace. In a multi-racial society that continues to welcome immigrants, the role of education in bringing together citizens from other cultures and societies has been all the more important to our provincial wellbeing.
As Ontario grew and developed, so too did our school system. The relatively brief common education that met the needs of an agrarian society has evolved into a complex system teaching the skills necessary to survive in the post-industrial information age. Adding to the challenge was, and remains, the need to ensure equality of opportunity for all students, no matter where their location in the province, no matter what their ability level or social or economic standing. The steady improvement in the graduation rate from our elementary and secondary schools since the Second World War attests to the success of our local school system. We are the envy of many in the world in this regard.
Even more than in the past, we have to provide a level of education to all our citizens that allows them to participate to the fullest degree in the global economy. Our investment and your investment in education will be the key to employment opportunity and ultimately to our collective economic survival.
Funding our school system adequately, with an acceptable balance between the contribution of the local property taxpayer and the provincial government, is thus essential to the wellbeing of all citizens of Ontario.
Good government, constitutional liberty and economic security: The mission of Ontario education is every bit as important today as it was when Egerton Ryerson first enunciated it.
On page 3 you will find an enumeration of the items we find of particular interest. I draw your attention to adult education, school organization and reform, junior kindergarten, financing education and cooperation, and sick leave. We will address elements of each of these to one degree or another. I would ask that you review the brief following our presentation of each of these.
Mr Shaw: I'll comment on adult education, beginning on page 4. Some of this material you have seen before, I'm sure, from other OSSTF presentations, but there are some comments that are different.
Currently, resident adults are guaranteed seven years of secondary education under the Education Act, and those adults comprise about 20% of our secondary school student population. Our adult education programs are a great success story: 83% of adult students get a job or go on to further education after leaving our programs. Adult students stay in our schools, on average, less than a year, because full-service programs such as cooperative education and the recognition of past academic and work experience for equivalency credits can meeting their twin needs of getting a diploma and obtaining job skills.
The result of the funding cuts will see most small and medium-sized boards switch all adult education to their continuing education departments. That certainly applies to Sault Ste Marie. Students will continue to achieve credits and to graduate -- that will certainly happen -- but they will not have access to the services available to them in a high school setting, services which can make an enormous difference for young people at a crossroads. We hope the price of these cuts will not be a dramatically increased dropout rate.
These students are often trying to make real changes in their lives. That's what they went back to school for. They're young people in transition. The decisions they make at this point could well determine whether they will become productive members of society. To help them make these momentous decisions, the high schools can provide guidance, career and lifestyle counselling, job shadowing, job search programs and cooperative education programs. Very little, if any, of this is available in a night school model of delivery, yet this is what boards will be forced to do. Does this government really want to put in place a system that discourages adult learners and is loaded with disincentives for positive change? These students want to get off welfare. They want to improve their opportunities for employment. That's why they're in school. One would think that a program that helped them to do so would be applauded and encouraged, not gutted.
At the bottom of page 4 and the top of page 5, you've probably seen some of this, but I would draw your attention to the bullets at the middle of page 5, the stats. Those are provincial statistics about success of adult high school students. Locally, our statistics are within one or two percentage points of those; it's remarkable how close they are.
Until this year, Sault Ste Marie, Michipicoten and Central Algoma offered adult programs which led to a secondary school graduation diploma. Many of the students from these programs went on to post-secondary education or to the world of work. In fact, the success rate, as I said, locally mirrors those provincially. These programs work.
The drastic cut in funding of education for students over the age of 20 is having devastating effects on the students in many boards who are losing access to local day school programs. The specific barriers to students 20 and over contained in the regulations and legislation could well be a case of discrimination on the basis of age and might well be violations of both the Human Rights Code of Ontario and the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The only way that will be decided, of course, is by a court challenge.
While some boards such as Ottawa, Toronto and Kingston have seen the wisdom of maintaining much of their adult day school program, others have not; and the decision is often directly related to the size of the board. Small and medium-sized boards cannot make up the funding shortfalls elsewhere. The result is a two-tier system of education -- people living in the large metropolitan centres will have a major advantage.
The funding cuts make it impossible for small boards to offer a day school adult program. The resource base of the large urban boards allows them to fund it on their own. Since we're here in northern Ontario where no boards are considered large boards, we're into what can only be called geographic discrimination. If you live in northern Ontario you know what I'm talking about; it doesn't happen only in education.
On page 6, we go on with other comments about what happens if the programs aren't offered. If they're not offered in the local high schools, you're going to see federal retraining funds from Human Resources Development Canada, Workers' Comp and UIC going to private providers, and they charge fees as high as $400 for a career counselling session and $2,500 for a battery of aptitude tests. The attack on adult education can only be called fiscally shortsighted. I think "shortsighted" shows up in our brief at least six times.
Adding to our concern is the recently announced business plan for the Ministry of Education and Training which called for the abolition of the Ontario Training and Adjustment Board. Such an action will create a training vacuum in the province that private for-profit groups will rush to fill. It would be a sad state of affairs if students or governments -- local governments, provincial governments -- were forced to pay exorbitant fees to these groups while public high schools with a tradition of excellence in adult programs in virtually every community are forced to turn them away. Neither students nor taxpayers benefit from such an arrangement.
The consequences of this government's action is to deny access to quality education to some of the most vulnerable members of our society. The proposed changes to the Education Act, made in the guise of offering flexibility to boards of education, will establish a two-tier secondary system in the province of Ontario. Those over 20, including single parents on family benefits, immigrants who need upgrading and anyone who did not make it the first time around, will be denied access to the day school programs which have had such resounding success rates and directed to severely underfunded con-ed programs. This is not common sense, no matter how you cut it.
The government's goal should be to allow school boards to continue to meet the needs of all residents of the community. The most enlightened approach it could take would be to keep its hands off adult education if it's not ready to enhance its effectiveness.
You see, following on page 6, four recommendations, which I leave to you to read.
Mr Jackson: If I may draw your attention, members, to our reflection on school organization and reform, it's on page 7. The force of the change to regulation 298 is to remove the requirement that school boards organize secondary schools by departments or other organizational units. Boards are no longer prevented from appointing a teacher to direct or supervise more than one organizational unit in their secondary schools. As well, boards are no longer required to appoint a teacher with specialist qualifications to direct or to supervise a department.
These amendments strike at the very heart of the quality of the education we offer in Ontario's secondary schools. The Ontario government imposed in the past such requirements on boards to ensure that schools in all areas of the province had the benefit of a structure that gave coherence and support to the subject disciplines that made up the school's program. This action ensured equality of access to education for all citizens of Ontario. An integral part of the structure was of course the department head or director whose specialist qualifications ensured there was a high level of competence in the subject areas offered within particular departments.
The foresight of previous governments has given Ontario education an excellent quality throughout the province. From one corner of the province to another, from large boards or small, rich communities or poor, Ontario's students were prepared for the world of work and for further education at college or university. There is an equity issue involved here.
Department heads and directors constitute a cadre of expert and committed school leaders who work with the principal and vice-principal to develop and administer each school's curricular and extracurricular programs. Visitors from other jurisdictions are invariably impressed with the quality and the richness of Ontario's school life and frequently remark on the collegial model of leadership that makes it possible.
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There is, however, an ominous shadow of additional far-reaching reforms to the secondary school program now beginning to emerge. The outrage of teachers over the savaging of the public school system is going to be further aggravated by yet another round of curriculum and program innovation.
If the government thinks these reforms that are about to befall can be managed without the active leadership of department heads and directors, it is sadly mistaken. Ontario schools have dealt with change in an effective manner, in a proven manner as well. During the past three decades we've seen reform follow reform in a seemingly endless procession. The key to our success in implementing these changes as well as we have has been the existence of this expert cadre of leaders within each school, the department heads and the directors.
Preliminary drafts of the reforms suggest that the government is poised to radically transform Ontario's education system. Should the draft or a variant of the draft become policy, I fear public schools will be forced to abandon their broad-based and intellectually enriching mission in order to adopt one that is narrow, centrally controlled, skill-driven, with a single focus on our preparation for work.
Among the proposals is an increase of co-op work experience and credits for student jobs outside school. Indeed, the proportion of work experience required of students in what is called the "work pathway" as opposed to the "university-college pathway" is somewhere between a minimum of 20% and a maximum of 40% of a program over two years. Such work experience will include a whole variety -- a hodgepodge, if I might say -- of school placements, school-arranged experiences, student-arranged experiences, part-time paid employment, volunteer work, summer employment, community service and other contrived experiences.
There's no indication that any of these placements will be supervised and monitored by certificated teachers. Education will be oriented to job training at a time when the future appears to be one of high unemployment.
The only benefactors of such disruptive changes will be the small élite of work track graduates who are fortunate enough to find employment in the ever-shrinking and diminishing group of highly technical, interesting, secure and well-paying jobs. The mass of work track students, regrettably, appear destined to spend their adulthood underemployed in mind-numbing, insecure, underpaid jobs, mostly in the service industry, without the benefit of an understanding of the economy, politics, arts or the role of good citizenship.
The proposed curriculum in a time of rising unemployment will be about as useful to this province's graduating youth as bits of cake were to France's 18th-century poor.
Overall, the changes in credit requirements will result in a narrow, inflexible education program. The increased number of compulsory credits and the reduction in English credits will have a disastrous effect on humanities education. Students will be denied opportunity to develop a facility for critical thinking and will be prevented from exploring areas such as the arts -- including music, visual arts, dramatic arts -- history, geography, family studies, technical education and even business.
The fundamental concern that the OSSTF has, members, is that through these proposals the system of public education will bear the responsibility for unemployment levels in this province. At a time when they need fewer and fewer workers, business has shifted the spotlight off themselves and on to the schools as the cause of this unemployment. Yet employment or unemployment is, quite properly and most naturally, the responsibility of the government, of business and the corporate sector.
OSSTF believes that public education's focus is to educate the student for employability by means of an integrated approach that incorporates social and scientific understanding, work and citizenship. When compared to today's graduates, those students who complete the truncated program that awaits, proposed by the minister, would be undereducated, less academically rounded, less capable of competing on the international stage and less able to participate in today's society or to exercise a role as a competent, informed, tolerant citizen. The government's shortsighted cost-saving obsession is an irresponsible gamble with the futures of the students in our elementary and secondary schools.
I turn now to junior kindergarten. I was in attendance this morning, and I am sensitive to the fact that a number of my colleagues and advocates, both in schools and outside schools, have made a very thorough treatment of this subject. I was particularly touched by one that I found especially poignant. I don't intend here to revisit ground that has been trodden over many times, no doubt, during your hearing. I would, however, draw your attention once again to a reiteration of Dr Fraser Mustard's position, Cameron Smith's analysis of it on page 10, and on page 11 the Perry Preschool Study, which has figured prominently in a number of the presentations here.
However, I would ask that you turn your attention to page 10 and indulge me with your attention for a few brief comments.
Nothing can be more basic than the way a nation cares for its children. Hillary Rodham Clinton drew on the African proverb, "It takes a village to raise a child" for the title of her recently published book, "It Takes a Village: And Other Lessons Children Teach Us." The village of the present is not the suburb or small town of memory or nostalgia but the global village: "the network of values and relationships that support and affect our lives." In response to the book on race and intelligence, The Bell Curve, Hillary Clinton cites the Abecedarian Project led by the University of North Carolina psychologist and educator, Craig Ramey and begun in the 1970s. I leave you with the summary of the findings there.
Skipping down to a summary statement by Mrs Clinton: "Bear this research in mind," she implores the reader, "when you listen to those who argue that our nation cannot afford to implement comprehensive early education programs for disadvantaged children and their families. If we as a village decide not to help families develop their children's brain, then at least let us admit that we are acting, not on the evidence but according to a different agenda."
Turning to page 12: We also don't intend to revisit the arguments that have been raised regarding funding education. I would draw your attention to several points here, however; the third paragraph.
There is a perception, and we find it far too often repeated, and a number of our colleagues have pointed out that there is a problem with the calculation of the expenditure. I don't intend to reiterate that here, but I would note that the perception of Ontario as the fat cat of Canadian education needs to be placed in a much broader context. When compared to our NAFTA partner, the United States, we find little fat on the Ontario cat. I quote from an article in the Toronto Star just two weeks ago: "[A]ccording to 1994-95 figures, Ontario ranks 29th in level of support compared to US states. All states north of North Carolina and east of the Mississippi offer greater per-pupil support than Ontario does."
Turning to page 13, you'll find some discussion of the funding issue continuing there. I would draw your attention to my conclusion.
Public education has become simply another victim of the neo-conservative agenda. Cuts to social programs and education are being made at a cost to the society which is hidden and long-term.
It's not a recession that is at the core of the revenue problem. It is not the broader public sector that is at the core of the revenue problem. It is not the welfare parent nor the marginalized that are at the core of the revenue problem. Rather, it is the implementation of an economic agenda that is shifting wealth to the corporate world where it is taxed very little, if at all, and where it does not contribute its fair share to the wellbeing and social fabric of the province of Ontario.
Drawing your attention to the recommendations, of course, but also to page 15, I turn to my colleague Mr Shaw.
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Mr Shaw: Our last comments are on the sick leave provision, the change in the regulations regarding sick leave. If you look at page 15, the first half of that page, I think you've seen much of that material before, the comparisons with other professions and so on. I'd like to draw your attention to the material on the bottom half of the page. There's another twist to this. In many other areas aside from those listed there, the sick leave provisions can be quite different, and they even make reference to this magic number of six that I keep hearing about. I keep hearing rumoured, "This should be the number of sick days teachers get so you're just like the rest of the corporate world." Let's do a little examination of this.
One of the major employers here in the Sault does indeed provide six days of sick leave per year; that's six days at full pay. But after that, the employer pays 75% until LTD kicks in, so it's not quite just six days. Then add to that that the employee has the option of topping up the 75% with holiday pay. This is not, however, an option open to teachers because, whether or not you realize it, teachers don't get holidays. I know, we get all this time off, but we don't get holidays in the sense of the Employment Standards Act. In fact, the act specifically excludes teachers from paid holidays, holiday pay, overtime pay and paid statutory holidays.
Teachers thus do not have the fallback support that many other groups in society have in times of serious illness. It's nice to think we've got two months off in the summer, but if we're not sick in the summer that doesn't help much. If you're sick in November, you need the time then, and we don't have the option of shifting it around. This is due simply to the historical evolution of the education system in Canada. To change the sick leave provisions to match some other practices in the province would require many other changes; otherwise there would be an undue burden imposed on one group. Teachers don't have that option of switching holidays. They don't have the option of drawing on some other bank of days to maintain an income when serious illness strikes.
To conclude, the existing system of sick leave is reasonable. It addresses effectively the real need that led to its creation and it should be preserved in the interests of boards, of students and of their teachers. As such arrangements are common in the public and private sector, there is no possible reason to discriminate against teachers, except perhaps to go back to what Mrs Manley said, that there's another agenda at play here. Again, the recommendation is there.
What follows in the last two pages is a summary of our recommendations and I would leave you with that. The last appendix, the last page, is a little out of date now. These were the boards that had slashed adult-ed programs at that point.
Thank you very much.
Mr Skarica: Going to page 15, I've seen that chart many times; in fact your umbrella organization gave it to us as well. I'd like to refer to a presentation this morning from another teachers' group. They made an interesting observation that nursing, at the top of the list there, has two fewer sick days per year than you have, but they have an absence rate of 19.6 days per worker per year, which is more than double what yours is, yet they do with two days less, and their accumulation is 120 while yours is 200.
My simple position is, why can't the board just negotiate, with you, sick leave provisions? According to your own charts, you have substantially more than nurses, who are dealing with ill people basically year-round. Why can't that just be a matter of negotiation, depending on the board's financial position and yourselves?
Mr Shaw: Quite frankly, if it becomes a matter for negotiation, you're going to see a patchwork of practices across the province and I just don't see that as being a valuable step forward. Essentially, I think the summary of what I said was, if it ain't broke, don't fix it, and the system doesn't seem to be broke.
Mr Preston: "Broke" is a good word.
Mr Shaw: Going to some other system is not going to save you any money, and if you think it is, then you're listening to the wrong people.
Mr Preston: I find it very strange. If my wife doesn't get any holidays, she's staying away from school an awful lot, because there's a lot of time in the summertime she doesn't go to school, and Eastertime and March break. So if she doesn't get holidays, I've going to have to talk with her.
As representatives for the teachers' federation, how do you feel, if quality is maintained, about differentiated staffing in junior kindergarten?
Interjection.
Mr Jackson: Yes, that was exactly going to be my comment. You will appreciate that we are secondary school teachers and our --
Mr Preston: I'm asking you as union reps, not as teachers.
Mr Jackson: As a teacher and as a stakeholder in Ontario's education and as a representative of teachers on our affiliation --
Mr Wildman: And a parent.
Mr Jackson: And a parent -- I see the two roles as being really quite different. They do different jobs and I can't imagine equating one with the other to try to determine a sense of equality. Equal in what sense? They do different things. The pedagogical planning?
Mr Preston: All of it.
Mr Jackson: It seems to me, then, that you're going to have to have an early education worker who has a teaching certificate if they're going to do the pedagogical planning that I think most Ontario parents require of their school system.
Mr Preston: That's 30 out of 30.
Mr Patten: I appreciate your brief. It differs on a few points from some of your brother chapters.
Mr Skarica: Or sister chapters.
Mr Patten: Or sister or whatever. Because of time, I would like to ask you one thing, and that is, in many of these models that are affected -- junior kindergarten, adult education, and then the leaked draft of secondary reform talking about a massive program of co-op that would take years, it seems to me, to have any true educational value -- in my opinion, this is all based on an urban model. It may apply to Toronto, because you've got all of these companies and you've got a lot of services and this sort of thing, but when you try to apply this in a school board that has schools in a lot of tiny towns, in many cases, with one business or a one-company town or no companies at all, because it's agriculture or mining or whatever it may be, or forestry -- in other words, the range is not there -- coming from the northern part of Ontario, what's your reaction to this?
Mr Jackson: I question the efficacy and the practicality of the reforms regardless of their location. I don't think they're going to work in Toronto, they're not going to work in Hamilton and they're certainly not going to work in a Desbarats or in a Sault Ste Marie. I don't wish to leave you with the impression that we're opposed to or in any sense critical of co-op work experience. In fact, we have been leaders as an affiliate in planning cooperative work experiences for our kids. We have commissioned studies at our expense just to put those programs in place. I'm thinking of the Alan King projects and studies that are given international significance.
In terms of the type of co-op and work experience and the time that is given them in the draft document, it's going to be at the expense of other classroom activities, other school-based activities. It's not going to be under the monitoring of our co-op monitors, as we understand, the certificated teachers. They would be more appropriate, I suppose, 20 years ago when jobs were available. We're in a changing, shifting economy, and I'm not quite sure what the work experience is going to be for at that level.
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Mr Wildman: Thank you for your presentation. It's very comprehensive. I would like to deal with a number of things. First, on page 13 of your brief, the last paragraph, you talk about the revenue problem. I just would point out to you that as far as the government is concerned, and they've reiterated this many, many times, we don't have a revenue problem; we have an expenditure problem. That's what Bill 34 is about: cutting expenditures, taking money out of education. It's not a revenue problem as far as the government is concerned. This is a money bill; it's not an education bill. It's about taking money out of education.
If you look at page --
Mr Jackson: If I may interrupt, I am sensitive to the subtlety and in fact I don't call it a debt problem because I didn't want to give currency to what I think is a fabrication.
Mr Wildman: I take very seriously your concerns about the work-related curriculum and the leaked document, but I would like to move to adult education, page 4, where you say students will continue to achieve credits and graduate but there may be a dramatically increased dropout rate.
We had in Thunder Bay a presentation that was made by principals who indicated that in small towns where there is only one high school -- and I know in Central Algoma where you represent or Michipicoten, there's only one high school -- if the adult education program is ended, there are no options for people. They can't go anywhere else.
Why do you think there's going to be a greater dropout rate if they're directed to continuing ed? The minister says that, after all, these are adults, they're more mature, they don't need the kind of supports that adolescents have so they should be able to achieve without the kind of counselling and assistance that day programs make available to adults during the secondary school.
Mr Shaw: May I comment on that? These adult students are back in a high school setting because they couldn't succeed in a high school setting. For whatever reason, they didn't finish high school. Mostly they couldn't fit into the -- again, there are hundreds of reasons why hundreds of people don't finish high school, but to say that they're adult now, because they're 21, and they don't need any support system is nonsense. It is complete and utter nonsense. They came back because they can find a support system that will help them make some decisions in their lives.
Not everyone comes from a nice, straight, middle-class background and has lots of family support and has lots of other support structures out there. Some people in our society need assistance, and many of these students do. Now, there are those who are back just to get a credit here and a credit there. That's fine. The system can provide for that. But there are many others who need help and the school system can provide it. What you're doing here is denying them that help, that assistance.
The Vice-Chair: We'll have to leave it that. Thank you both for your presentation.
This morning, Mr Wildman, you asked a couple of questions of legislative research. Does the ministry have a curriculum for JK in French and English?
Mr Patten: No, I asked that question.
The Vice-Chair: Oh, Mr Patten. There was also one dealing with the continuing education. The answer to that one is, not at the present. The minister is in the process of preparing a curriculum for kindergarten which will also be useful for JK. Curriculum for JK and kindergarten was previously done at the school board level. Then there is a lengthier answer with respect to continuing ed classes being offered in French in northern communities.
Mr Wildman: That was my question.
The Vice-Chair: I'll pass this on to you and you can determine whether you're satisfied with the answer and take it from there.
SAULT STE MARIE BOARD OF EDUCATION
The Vice-Chair: Next we have a presentation by the Sault Ste Marie Board of Education. We have presenting on behalf of the board Frances Sewards, chair; trustee Don Edwards; the director of education, Ray DeRosario; and Bert Campbell, the superintendent of business. Welcome to our hearing.
Mr Wildman: Mr Chair, if I could interrupt just for a moment, this came from the ministry and it doesn't even approach answering the question. I asked a very simple question: How many communities in northern Ontario provide night school in French? Give me the answer. This just keeps saying they can take classes in continuing education. That's begging the question. The question is, what continuing education programs are provided in French? How many boards provide them?
Mr Skarica: I didn't table it.
The Vice-Chair: It came from legislative research. It's a fax from Toronto, I take it.
Mr Wildman: I'm not being critical of him just giving me what the ministry provided him.
Mr Skarica: Maybe we can look into this and get back to you later on that.
The Vice-Chair: Welcome to our hearing. If you could identify yourself for the purposes of Hansard, we look forward to your presentation.
Mrs Frances Sewards: My name is Frances Sewards and I'm the chair of the Sault Ste Marie Board of Education. On my left is trustee Don Edwards; on my right is Ray DeRosario, who is our director of education; and on the extreme right Mr Bert Campbell, who is our superintendent of business.
I don't think we're going to need all that time. As you can see, our presentation is very short. We've even single-spaced it in the effort to save paper. We are being very cost conscious in our board and have been for some time. I'm the only one who gets double-spaced programs. Anyway, thank you for agreeing to see us.
The Sault Ste Marie Board of Education is in agreement with the submission already made by our trustee association, OPSBA, to the standing committee on social development, so we haven't gone through them all item by item. We're in general agreement with all the positions that our association takes. We'd like, however, to highlight some of the board's particular observations and concerns.
Our first one will be related to junior kindergarten. One of our concerns has been with the province's attitude to junior kindergarten, and we regret that provincial funding for this program was reduced before the results of the government reviews are known. Our board's JK program is an integral part of our primary program, and our primary teachers are highly trained professionals in this area. The curriculum has been developed specifically to provide our young students with the best start in school possible and to improve our primary programs from the beginning. The program provides staff with opportunities to observe and assess students and, if necessary, intervene early. This helps to avoid expensive later intervention, maintains children in the mainstream, and research clearly shows it reduces later expensive problems for society -- and it sounds to me as if you've had plenty of people telling you that today. It's our board's recommendation that the government should take no further action until its reviews of this program are completed and full consultation has occurred. In the long term, we think it's a big mistake to affect those programs.
We're very concerned about the suggested changes to adult education and the current funding changes and reductions relative to the same. Accessibility to all schools is important to students of all ages in a community such as Sault Ste Marie where all major employers, such as Algoma Steel, government ministries and many others, have been downsizing and therefore employees are forced into retraining. These adults must be able to access all schools as they upgrade their education to complete their secondary diplomas. Accessing the broad-based technology programs, for example, as well as English, math and science credits, is just as important for returning adults as for teenagers. Our composite schools tend to specialize in the various areas due to the expensive equipment and the expertise of the staff. It's our board's recommendation that all our schools should be available to students of all ages and funded at the same level.
With regard to cooperation between school boards, the Sault Ste Marie Board of Education has always supported this concept. However, in practice it can be difficult and time-consuming to achieve major savings. There are many irritants on both sides. Our board believes that cooperation between boards is necessary even if it requires legislation to accomplish it, and we agree with the amendments suggested in OPSBA's presentation. Financial incentives and making sure that potential changes in board geographical areas lead to more coterminous boards, rather than less as in the Sweeney commission's recommendations, would also encourage more cooperation and reduce costs.
With regard to extractions from negative-grant boards, the Sault Ste Marie Board of Education is adamantly opposed to the basic principle of handing over local education taxes to the provincial government. This undermining of local accountability is potentially very dangerous for the whole principle of local governance. If and as the trend to lower and lower provincial grants continues, a majority of boards in the province could therefore be in that negative-grant situation and be required to forward local taxes to Queen's Park. We absolutely agree with the statement in OPSBA's presentation that the province should negotiate with the boards presently affected. The sections requiring this handover must be deleted.
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In general, and taking the liberty of wandering from the particulars of Bill 34, the Sault Ste Marie Board of Education is very concerned about the severity of changes that we feel will undermine the ability of our board to prepare our children in particular for the future, when a superior education is a necessity and not a luxury.
Our board is of the opinion that there is not a lot of fat in our education system and that there is not too much spent on administration. This attitude should not apply in northern Ontario. In areas such as ours, badly hit by economic stress and high unemployment over many years, we have been reducing costs by closing schools, reducing supervisory, classroom and support staff and minimizing repairs, maintenance and all other costs. We have absorbed continual provincial cutbacks in transfer payments and provincially mandated expenditures not generally related to education, as well as sharing more and more of our assessment base with the separate board and not being compensated, all the while keeping our taxes to a zero increase three years out of the last five.
These actions reinforce our opinion that local governance and local accountability close to the people are responsible and responsive. We are very concerned at what appears to be a trend towards reducing the role and the responsibilities of local government. The recommendations by the Sweeney commission to elect trustees based on student numbers and not taxpayer population show a lack of awareness of the basic principles of democracy.
In conclusion, the Sault Ste Marie Board of Education warns that no more money can be removed from our system without further adversely affecting the classroom. Today's teachers need support -- in-service and additional support staff -- to assist in dealing with changes in curriculum, additional students with special needs in their classrooms and more students who are hungry, stressed and affected by family trauma. No change and improvement can occur if that support is not provided to staff.
We are spending more wisely and achieving more efficiencies, and we hope to do more through sharing and not duplicating. However, bringing about change takes time -- time to work with our staff and other organizations to achieve changes in classroom education and financial efficiencies. Further removal of money from the system by the provincial government will definitely hurt students more in the classrooms and have a further negative effect on local taxation.
Thank you for the opportunity to make this presentation and explain our board's concerns. We'll be happy to answer questions.
The Vice-Chair: We have a good bit of time left for questions and answers.
Mrs Sewards: I thought it might give you a chance to catch up if you're a little behind in your schedule.
The Vice-Chair: No, that's not a problem. Five minutes per caucus.
Mr Gravelle: Thank you very much for your presentation. Just for my sake, how large is the board -- how many schools, the number of students -- in terms of the number you administer in the Sault Ste Marie board? I'm just curious about numbers.
Mr Ray DeRosario: We have about 35 schools, I think, in total and approximately 11,400 students.
Mr Gravelle: That's pretty big. In terms of layoffs -- it's a question they're going to ask you on the government side anyway, I just know; it's been a consistent pattern emerging and it's a fair question. You had some school closures. Certainly being from Thunder Bay, we're going through the same thing as well, and it's happening all across the province. I think people don't recognize, generally, when we've been sitting in this setting, the trauma that's involved when that is happening in terms of everybody who's involved, including the parents and the children themselves. In terms of the cutbacks and the things you've done to reduce costs and everything else, in terms of administration, can you tell us what changes you've made on the administrative level?
Mrs Sewards: Do you mean recently or over the last five or 10 years?
Mr Gravelle: Give me the last five or 10 years. Again, it's always forgotten that what's happened in the last five years is incredibly significant. We're not just talking about the last year or as a result of what you've had to do in this past year.
Mrs Sewards: I think that's the point of what we are trying to say. This is cumulative in this part of the world. We didn't have the fat, we didn't have the good years in the 1980s, so we have been doing that over time. Maybe you've got some information on the numbers we've cut.
Mr Gravelle: It's worth putting on the record, I think.
Mr DeRosario: I think it is important to appreciate that we're not talking about a year in isolation; this is something we've been going through for several years. I guess, from an administrative point of view, that's one of the frustrations one can feel with respect to different budgets coming out each year.
One of the things we had hoped is that in the course of development, in terms of planning and changes in education, that there was going to be an effort to recognize the changes or the responses that boards have already taken. That's something we certainly haven't seen reflected as much as we would like to. But over the last five years, for example, we have reduced our operation by approximately 180 positions, right from administration down. Just within the last 12 months we've cut a superintendent and a supervisory officer's department out and restructured accordingly so that what we have left we direct as much as we can to classroom support and make sure it's being used efficiently.
But that kind of thing has gone all the way down the line. We have eliminated supervisory positions, we've eliminated confidential secretaries' positions, we've eliminated management positions in our computer services department, and there are others as well that don't come to mind immediately.
But also, administration in the sense of school administration -- because in an effort to try to reduce our operating costs we went through the very painful exercise three years ago of studying all of our schools and, as a result of that, we closed five of our elementary schools, so now we have 28 elementary schools. We were able to do that without changing the program we were delivering to students by making more efficient use of the space we have in the system. But as a result, we lost a certain level of supervision there. Just in the last two years, we've gone through -- again it's a painful exercise, but education shouldn't be expected to be protected from some of the things we're all going through in society.
Relocation of some of our programs: We found that we were able to relocate, for example, our French immersion program. Again, our basic goal was to try not to have a great impact on the program that was being delivered but the way we were delivering it. We were able to relocate our French immersion program and relocate our adult education program and, as a result, reduce our operating budget. If you take all of those collectively, I think we reduced our operating budget in the order of $1.25 million a year without changing the program that our students were receiving.
Mr Patten: I agree with your statement here where it says, under junior kindergarten, "One of our concerns has been with the province's attitude to junior kindergarten." I agree that the government has an attitude problem in relation to junior kindergarten and adult education and of course, the rationale you've heard for it, which doesn't stand up to the testimony that we've heard throughout here.
One comment under the cooperation section. It seems to me -- and this also happens in the health care sector -- that hospitals that foresaw the austerity programs that inevitably would take place and school boards that likewise had some foresight and therefore took immediate action now are being jeopardized somewhat, or penalized, for having had the foresight to exercise the kind of restraint or cutting to try to be as frugal as possible. It sounds to me like your board is one such victim.
In both areas, health care and education, the government says that -- at least, in the campaign they talked about incentives. I would like to hear from you, because I don't see the incentives for any boards, other than survival, I suppose. What kind of financial incentives truly might a board have that would enable it to objectively and honestly take a look at its administration and possible areas of increased efficiencies?
Mrs Sewards: Can I refer to your reference first to the attitude? I think to be fair we should say that's an attitude that is prevalent in quite a lot of sectors of society, and there are groups in our town who feel the same and people on our board who feel the same. There's this attitude to children and to junior kindergarten and things like that as being babysitting. As board members and an education community, we need to really point out the necessity and the value of these good programs. It's not just a government attitude, it's out there in society. That's one thing.
Incentives: I think the kinds of things we could do with, and I'm sure the others will want to make a comment on that too, are money that would assist us to make change. In the past, various governments have provided incentives occasionally on things they have wanted to do -- employment equity, all those kinds of things. I'm not arguing the merit of them, I'm just talking about the kinds of things that you need to do. We need to provide time and space for our administrators and our teaching and working staff to look at different ways of doing things. That does take time, it takes training, it takes in-service. You can't do that and teach in front of a class or carry a full day's workload and often into the night. Most of our staff are working far beyond the regular day's workload now and it's beginning to show. Do you want to add to that?
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Mr Don Edwards: Just one other thing. The block grant for transportation is an incentive because it helps boards to cooperate a little better and save on transportation.
Mr Wildman: Thank you very much for your presentation; just a couple of things. On junior kindergarten: As you might expect, we've received a lot of input on that from teachers, boards, parents, and some very good presentations. I really agree with your view that it doesn't make sense to make optional and change the funding for a program and then to announce afterwards that you're going to have a review. It would be better to do the review first. If the government proceeds with a review, is it not going to be now reviewing a much changed program in many boards? For instance, in your board, are you not blending SK and JK --
Mrs Sewards: Yes, we are.
Mr Wildman: -- on alternate days?
Mrs Sewards: Not on alternate days yet. We are going to be forced to look at that and we've been talking about discussing that with the separate board. That would help us with transportation savings particularly. I don't think anybody thinks it's desirable to have junior and senior -- well, the very best way pedagogically, because we didn't do that in the beginning, but we can still offer a good program. I guess there are going to be boards which aren't offering it at all, so they'll be going in and out, and if they do start it again children will be less well prepared.
Mr Wildman: But it won't really be a review of the program as it was, will it?
Mrs Sewards: For our board it probably would be. I wouldn't be in a position to speak for other boards. It's just a way you deliver it. Ours, as I said, is an integral part of our primary. We used it in the late 1980s to improve and train and do a lot of things, so hopefully we won't have to change it very much. We'd be very worried if we had to remove it.
Mr Wildman: The ministry and the provincial government take the position that it isn't the ministry that is changing or making determination on whether or not to eliminate JK, it's the boards.
Mrs Sewards: I would say for financial reasons.
Mr Wildman: And the financial reasons relate to the 16% cut in the general legislative grant.
Mrs Sewards: Yes.
Mr Wildman: And the change in funding for JK specifically.
Mrs Sewards: I would agree with that.
Mr Wildman: The other question on adult education: Under the legislation as it is worded now, if a student has left school at 16 and has been out of school for four years and is over the age of 21 and then wants to return, they won't be able to participate in the day program. Doesn't that strike you as age discrimination and a matter for the Human Rights Code?
Mrs Sewards: We were looking at it from a program delivery point of view and what our students need but, yes, you're probably right.
Mr Edwards: Mr Wildman, we believe that all our schools should be available to all students of all ages.
Mr Wildman: I really am concerned about your conclusion where your board "warns that no more money can be removed from our system without further adversely affecting the classroom." The government, the minister and the Minister of Finance have repeatedly said: "Look, the cuts only amount to 2% to 3% of what is expended on education in Ontario. Surely, any institution should be able to find 2% to 3% savings in administration without affecting the classroom." Why can't you?
Mrs Sewards: It depends, I think, on what's gone before. We say we don't have that kind of fat any more and we do need to provide support for our teachers in the classroom. We have been taking out, this year, for instance, aides. Maybe I'll ask Mr DeRosario to talk a little specifically to some of the things that will affect the classroom this year. It's hard to say because we won't know until September and probably by the end of the year when the parents start telling us what they think about what's happening and the teachers start telling us about what they think is happening. We've taken aides out and things, haven't we?
Mr DeRosario: If you want to talk about specifics in terms of how we responded to the budget challenge this year, our priority was to try to protect the pupil-teacher ratio in our classrooms, and we feel we have been very successful at doing that. We haven't really changed to any significant degree at all the size of our classes. But will it impact on the classroom? Certainly it will, because the support services there for the classroom teacher are not at the level they used to be, and there are many different ways that manifests itself.
In our kindergarten program we had a second adult in many classes, based upon need and based upon the size of the class. We're not going to have the second adult in the class any more because we can't afford to do that. But we still have the class, and we're hoping to keep the sizes about the same as they are now. We don't have the kind of library teacher support our classroom teachers are used to. We still have some, but it's very minimal now and it's not, from a program point of view, what one would want to have, but in terms of where you try to minimize the impact, that was one of the places we went.
In terms of hard supplies our classrooms would normally have to support program, they won't have it to the levels they've had it before -- that kind of thing. It's the same thing with respect to the kind of cleaning we're doing in our schools; we've reduced some of that. We tried to find those areas that stay away from the classroom as much as we can, but they will certainly be impacting, perhaps not as directly as the case in some boards and some responses. I don't know.
Mrs Sewards: We're taking out teacher aides too, in terms of teachers being now required to provide more services. As we integrate students with special needs into the classroom, which we've been doing at the direction as well of the public and the governments of the past and the present, and we've reduced the number of teacher aides, that kind of support is not going to be there. If you've got a big class, at the maximum we think is desirable and can support, with all these children with different requirements -- and as we said in our presentation, there are many more now: all the social issues and the difficulties related to unemployment and change and structural things in the home. That is definitely going to be affected. That kind of support is what we're talking about.
Mr Skarica: I reside where there is a board that has administrative expenses of half yours, and Mr Preston is going to point out his board because he's a neighbour of mine and his board is very similar to this area, and their administrative expenses are half yours as well. But there's another area I'd like to ask you about.
We've heard disturbing evidence that over the last 20 or 30 years, there's been a piling up of an unfunded liability for the retirement gratuity for teachers. We've heard it's up to $10 billion now, and the boards, even though they agreed to it in the 1970s, have not been setting money aside. I look at the figures for your board and I see approximately a $15-million unfunded liability for that retirement gratuity. It seems to me the taxpayers of today are going to pay for that retirement gratuity in this jurisdiction for a liability that has been piling up for the last 20 or 30 years; indirectly, the taxpayers of today are going to pay for Mr Wildman's education many years ago. How do you propose to fund that?
Mrs Sewards: Can I answer that generally, and then Mr Campbell will probably speak to the numbers. I've been on the board a long time, and when I was first on the board we were advised, I'm not sure whether by the ministry or staff at that time, that boards were not allowed to fund them, so we didn't. Over the last, I would say, 10 or 15 years we have in this board been attempting to fund our retirement gratuities as much as is feasible each particular year, and we have started to do that. Mr Campbell will tell you where we are with it.
Mr Bert Campbell: The liability is the amount that's owed based on the accumulation that staff currently have, but of course, as you are aware, won't be payable to them until they reach their normal retirement age, which is some years into the future. We've done some estimation on what that cost is and we've made some assumptions around interest rates and inflation, which probably aren't quite accurate at the moment, and we are allocating amounts to reserves annually in our budget to provide for funding those amounts.
If the plans of the government and the teachers and so on change in terms of when people can retire, that will affect those projections. They're not absolutely perfect, but it is a plan to be putting aside some money each year so we won't eventually have to pay -- what can I say? -- an unreasonable amount in one year and minimal amounts in others. We're trying to smooth it out over the life of the service of the teacher.
Mrs Sewards: We should also add that we have controlled our costs. They are controllable now. In one panel they are capped; in the other panel there are none.
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Mr Preston: Two very short questions. Yes, my board is very much like your board, and it's operating at about half the cost. I'd like to know the reasons for that. And if for some reason we did get an agreement with OTF about the pensions, what would happen if it went down to 85? What would happen to your board? What is your age situation?
Mrs Sewards: I think it's the same as any other board. We have a large proportion of older students and the administration will --
Mr Preston: No, teachers. Don't pension off your students yet. They pensioned off students.
Mrs Sewards: I meant teachers. That was a slip of the tongue. I got excited. I thought he was asking me my age for a moment.
Mr Preston: Oh, no. You're about the same age as my wife, very young.
Mrs Sewards: I think it's also the definition of adminstration, so I'll ask Ray and Bert to answer those questions.
Mr Campbell: In terms of how one board's costs are half that of another, I'd be amazed if that's the case, but maybe it is. In northern Ontario costs are higher, and we don't view our board as being unusually higher than any other board about our size.
Mr Preston: Why higher?
Mrs Sewards: What definition are you using for administrative costs? We need to discuss that.
Mr Campbell: I thought he said total costs.
Mr Preston: No, administrative costs. Your administrative costs are $111 per --
Mr Wildman: Those are Sweeney's figures.
Mr Preston: Sweeney's? I don't know. He gave them to me. He's the boss.
Mr Edwards: We're aware of Mr Sweeney's numbers.
Mr Preston: They're the same as mine, so they're relative, aren't they? If they're 50% out in your case, they're 50% out in mine.
Mrs Sewards: We looked at Sweeney's numbers because we were concerned too, our trustees were concerned about it. We went and analysed the whole thing and came to the conclusion that they were including different things in different places.
The Vice-Chair: But Sweeney's numbers came from the ministry, though, didn't they?
Mr Skarica: The numbers I have are from the ministry.
Mrs Sewards: It's what they've put in, I think, in different places.
Mr Campbell: Actually, these are not Mr Sweeney's numbers. These are from the survey the Ministry of Education does based on our financial statements, and there are a number of differences in terms of definition that's used by boards, it seems. OPSBA recently did another survey with a different definition -- that's our trustee organization -- in conjunction with school business officials, but I'm really not in a position here to tell what ours are compared to yours. Boards do vary significantly in how they interpret what goes into those categories.
Mr Preston: If these are all wrong, we need new ones.
Mrs Sewards: We'd be happy to send you --
Mr Wildman: The problem is we need a basic, simpler definition that we all work on. That's the problem.
Mr DeRosario: Could I make a comment on that? That has been a real source of concern for us. The number of different organizations making definition of what's inside the classroom or outside the classroom, or what's administrative and what isn't administrative, is a great source of concern and frustration. Having said that, I don't want to be misinterpreted to present the position that we're not prepared to have some relative costing done. We should have relative costing done across this province in every school board. But my goodness, there's so much confusion now. Appendix F in the Sweeney report has errors in it for our board. If it has errors for our board, we are suspicious of using that in any kind of rational way to do any kind of comparison.
But should we have some kind of group -- and I don't presume to know what the group is. The best ones I've seen are the OASBO definitions. But we certainly do need provincially some group to stop the numbers game and the redefinition and come up with something we can all agree upon. We certainly wouldn't shy away from any kind of comparison like that.
The Vice-Chair: Thank you very much for your presentation. You've certainly added something new.
Mr Edwards: As to Mr Preston's question about the lowering of the retirement age to a total of 85, there are considerable savings involved in this, as you well know, of teachers who retire at 84 max and others who come in. If that's not figured in the factoring, it should be.
Mrs Sewards: It would help us, because the other issue related to that is the fact, if you look at the 4.75, we had to reduce our staff in the last two or three years of the social contract. What's happening now is that we're not having any young teachers coming in, and that's a concern for all teachers.
The Vice-Chair: That's been a problem we've heard about in other places as well.
Mrs Sewards: It's not just an employment issue. It's what's good for education, and we need that energy.
The Vice-Chair: Thank you. We'll have to cut it off.
Mr Patten: I just want to put on the record that Sweeney's report on administrative support costs show a comparability of all three boards in terms of their expenditures, especially if you take into consideration transportation costs, which are unique to the northern board.
Mr DeRosario: We are still uncomfortable with them.
LORNE CARTER
The Vice-Chair: I now call Lorne Carter. Welcome to our hearing, sir.
Mr Lorne Carter: Mr Chairman, ladies and gentlemen, I'm going to take the hearing out on the street, so to speak. You're going to get the opportunity to talk to a parent, someone who's gone through the system, the system that for me started back in the 1950s, and we'll see what we can muster out of the conversation.
I'm pleased to have this opportunity to speak to the standing committee on Bill 34 and the processes it's dealing with. Just to give you a brief introduction to myself, I am very definitely a northerner. I've lived in Sault Ste Marie, Thunder Bay, Sioux Lookout, Fort Frances and Kenora, Ontario. Bud would know where all those spots are, and I'm certain most of you have found out where they are now if you didn't know before.
I'm a parent -- I have a daughter at university and I have a son in the school system here in Sault Ste Marie at present, a grade 10 student -- and I've been a past school board trustee in Kenora, so I'm familiar with some of the processes and the pains that go on at board meetings.
Personally, my education is that I have a community college diploma which was achieved here in Sault Ste Marie -- I won't say when -- a few years ago, and I have a master's of business administration degree.
My focus today is to provide a personal perspective on the bill that's being introduced. Excuse me for a moment; age requires me to change my glasses at this point.
The process of consultation throughout the communities in Ontario is a system we welcome with open arms. It's getting down to the grass roots and finding out what the people on the street really feel about things, a process, I might add, that was not necessarily the case in past governments. While special-interest groups were always heard in the past, and should continue to be heard, I might add, it is refreshing to see the silent majority have the opportunity to address the issues which will touch everyone in this province for decades to come.
We are presenters, a focus group gathered together in the different communities across this province in search of the right and the wrong way to make the system a better place to live and grow.
Recently I overheard a question posed that we as Ontarians should compel our government to fix the systems, education included, for all time, to last for decades and decades, to present a solution forever, so to speak. I reflected on the comment and realized that someone was speaking on behalf of our society, perhaps the majority of our society. We have grown too complacent, comfortable, apathetic and generally averse to any changes in the way we do things. The situation posed of course is impossible; the question was impossible.
In our system of government, changes have to flow with the wishes of the electorate. Changes will always be made, no matter how significant or crucial they may be. It's the system of democracy. This standing committee is here today to listen and note the changes we in Ontario feel will fix the system for this time. I, as a part of Ontario, welcome the opportunity to address this standing committee.
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Effectively implementing efficiencies in our system and our government is the current focus of government and should be that of each Ontarian. Things are broken, in a mature state, so to speak, and are not in tune with the times. We, as Ontario, have to break out of our paradigms, the little boxes we live in. We need to get constructive, be our best critic and do away with the attitude that "We need changes, but not in my backyard." The education system is no different, and in a changing economy it should be the first place for change, as it is their job to educate people for tomorrow.
The web of society has become so interwoven that we cannot change one aspect without upsetting the balance of others. It is not an easy task to re-engineer, downsize, rightsize or make efficient. The change merchants will tell us that making changes requires the input and buy-in of those being affected or it will not work. This is an important message, of course. Private and public industry alike are feeling the effects of this each day. Education is no different, and perhaps it touches more of our population than any other system we have. The best and smoothest changes come from within. That's a good note to make. No one knows the system better than those who work in it each semester.
It is our job to provide input in order that a policy framework, conducive and workable within, can be struck. In short, we are only as good as the people we put in place to run things or empower to proceed.
Under "Considerations" with Bill 34 is the junior kindergarten option, the directing of certain adult persons as to enrolment, school board cooperative agreements, school board equalization payments and teachers' entitlement as to sick leave, as I've read it.
I'm going to briefly touch on the kindergarten option and spend most of my time on cooperative agreements. The other items are not within the realm of my expertise or research I've done, and therefore I wouldn't want to express an opinion on them unless I had done so.
First is the junior kindergarten. There appears to be somewhat a duplication in the efforts operating within our communities today; on one hand the junior kindergarten, and on the other hand the day care systems. However, there is no doubt as to the necessity for preschool training of some sort.
I submit only this particular projection on kindergarten because, once again, perhaps the in-depth study required to decide on the educational processes, and that sort of thing, that has to be there is not within my realm of expertise and therefore I'm not going to reflect on it any more than that.
However, I would like to make the observation and comment that in rural and smaller communities a duplication of the services leaves each inefficient and is a costly process. Every effort should be made to cooperate collectively and deliver the service in an effective manner. The government should have the power to negotiate an amalgamation for the community's best interests and, of course, the public purse. Discretion of the school boards, as indicted within the bill, is certainly welcome.
Next, and perhaps the most serious issue before us today, is the issue of school board cooperative agreements. Figures suggested recently to me noted that 47% of education costs are not spent in the classroom. If this were private industry, the result would be ruinous. Our education system has become top-heavy with administration. The alarm has sounded. We have to react before these costs sink the system. The amendments suggest that cooperative agreements are the answer. I agree. It is a very commonsense approach, and it requires some structure to be successful.
A simple approach to our education process is perhaps the best. Ask yourself, what do you want our children to achieve or receive in the education system? The answer, in the majority, would go something like this: We want our children to receive an education that will prepare them for advancement into a career of their choice so they can lead a good and reasonable lifestyle thereafter. There's no mention of geography, race, religion, creed, colour or special needs in this simple response. We should focus our school dollars in delivering this promise efficiently to this generation of students and to those who come after.
A fair and equitable analysis suggests the following headings or divisions for cooperative focus. For the purposes of my presentation, I've broken it down under structure, amalgamation, rewards, capital investment and standardization.
Under structure: It makes good economic sense to structure a transportation system for transporting students and pupils with the emphasis on the total applicable community school population rather than by school board jurisdiction. Let's go one step further. Cooperations could be further made within the municipal transit systems for senior students, providing a safe and efficient service which would lead to improved transit systems for the community based on better revenues. I can think of one such instance in northern Ontario where, had this transit system idea been instituted, the transit system in that particular community would have survived. Unfortunately, it didn't. It died due to low, uneconomical passenger counts. This can only be a win-win situation for boards and other partnering arrangements such as municipalities.
Further, the use of common facilities between boards, including equipment and buildings, can certainly be scheduled to meet the needs of all within the community. We could start with a simple common boardroom and meetings of each board within the community on a staggered schedule. To take this one step further, perhaps that facility could be the municipal meeting chambers or the local armouries. This suggestion reduces the cost needs by possibly two thirds. It's simple stuff we're talking about here. The use of school buildings considered surplus should have a definite priority over other school board capital schedules. Remember, the owners of these buildings are the taxpayers of the community, and the total community student population has to always be in the facility equation.
Building in the past has been the sole responsibility of each board, and I can think of at least three instances where schools for both the public and separate school board systems were built within 100 yards of each other. Would it not have been more efficient to combine the buildings for service efficiency and even support staffing? Cooperation could have reduced capital costs by possibly one third and perhaps a 10% saving on support costs could have been achieved.
Amalgamations: This is a hot topic, and it's between the public and separate school systems normally. Let us return to my comment above wherein I talked about the simple explanation of why the education system is there, that is, for our children to receive a good education. Let's not lose focus of our educational purpose. Cooperations could lead to amalgamation of boards, administrations, student populations and facilities. That's not too farfetched. We don't have a lot of things that would stop us from an amalgamation scenario.
Who would ever have bet on the European common market coming together? There were an awful lot of differences that had to be overcome at that particular point. I know I was absolutely struck when I found that their major goal is to get down to one language within the common market in terms of trade and commerce. They certainly have an awful lot more things to overcome than us just amalgamating a couple of boards or whatever the case may be in the community.
Surely common ground, in a sound business fashion, can be sought which preserves the ideals of both or the ideals of all. Smaller communities struggle greatly under this two- to threefold system, and I suggest the ministry could study and negotiate the amalgamation of small boards in the best interests of the student/pupil populations.
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Incidentally, I noted earlier that I'd lived in quite a few communities in northern Ontario. My children attended both public school systems and separate school systems. It was usually based on what was most convenient to where we were living at the time in the community, and we didn't notice any difference in the education they provided one over the other, so I don't think there's a lot of difference in that particular aspect.
It may be ideal of me, but I believe the Sault and area lends itself well to combining efforts -- cooperative -- and the future could spell combinations that could serve as a model for the rest of Ontario.
I felt if we were asking boards of education or regional groups to become more efficient in their dollar spending, then perhaps a reward system of sorts would have to be introduced. In reviewing the reporting concepts in the bill, I salute the accountability built into that particular system. I suggest that a system of rewards be built into the cooperation process for those who have made good progress and created measurable economic results. This could be jointly held discretionary dollars or a system of school area recognition/status certificates. That's just to name a few possibilities under rewards. I'm sure the list would become endless if we were to do a focus group on it today.
Capital investment: Our dollars are becoming scarce as we fight the deficit and correct the loose spending of the past. We have to preserve what little there is, and cooperative efforts, as I suggested above, have to be the foremost focus. Keep in mind that we have to maintain, even improve, the education we are delivering to the students/pupils across Ontario.
What is meant by Mr Carter's standardization? This may be a northern problem; however, I don't feel that way. Areas I would like to see standardized across the province include testing, teacher salary grids, administration salary grids, board remunerations and school operations.
Student standardized testing across the province will provide our students with the best hand up we can offer for their future success. A solid footing in education fundamentals increases their options and develops cornerstones for a good life. The salary and operating issues are self-explanatory and reflect on the efficiencies of the system for better costing formulas.
Generally speaking, it is okay to speak of change in our school systems, but proper standardized guidelines have to be established to make a common smooth transition. As an example, I observed that the grade 9 transition a few years back produced variations in boards across the province, each school system, and even in some schools separately and sometimes at the discretion of each individual department. It surely served to confuse the teaching staff and, from a person experience, it did not have the support of those served with the task of implementation.
On the point of governing the co-op efforts of all school boards, it is suggested that a mediation system perhaps be introduced to resolve and trouble-shoot the process. It is further suggested that this mediator be an unbiased third party rather than the ministry, thus removing the funder from the equation.
In conclusion, I thank you very much for this opportunity to express my views, which I believe are the common views of a great many Ontarians. Observations over the last few years of our systems has left me with more and more doubt as to the capacity of our system to function with the massive changes required to focus on education for the future of Ontario. Ontario was and still is a great place to live. Let's renew our focus. Let's renew the way we deliver education. Let's think of the future and our youth.
Mr Wildman: Just one comment, in terms of your suggestion with regard to standardized tests. You may be aware that the provincial government has moved in that area. The previous government brought in a commitment to standardize testing and this government has continued it, although cut back the funding somewhat for the testing and the frequency of the tests. So there is that effort to bring that forward.
Just in regard to your brief comments on junior kindergarten, as someone who represents a large number of small, rural communities, I would point out that in many of the rural communities there are not adequate child care programs available to parents who need them. In that sense there isn't a duplication and the junior kindergarten program in Central Algoma, for instance, has almost 100% usage by parents with their students, even though it's optional for the parents to use the program, partly because of that.
I think it's more than that, though. I think because junior kindergarten is a pedagogical experience as well as a nurturing child care experience, there is an additional reason for parents to choose junior kindergarten. But having said that, I'm wondering why you think that northern boards face more of a problem with regard to the other aspects of standardization that you've addressed than, say, other parts of the province.
Mr Carter: First of all, I thank you very much for the information on the kindergarten-day care scenario. That's duly noted. Then I'm going to ask you, are you using a specific reference under standardization?
Mr Wildman: Under 5.5 you say, "Standardization: This may be a northern problem." I'm just wondering why you think it might be more of a northern problem than it is throughout the province in terms of teacher grids, administration costs, board remunerations and so on.
Mr Carter: I suppose what I was doing there was reflecting more on the standardization of testing across the province or where our children stand in the spectrum of things. I'm aware of a lot of young people who finish up their school days here in Sault Ste Marie or wherever in northern Ontario and move on to the big university bin down in southern Ontario, and the failure rate, for whatever reasons, seems to be extremely high.
I don't have any statistic to do with that, but you talk to this parent and that parent and there are a lot of situations involved where the children had an awful lot of problems during the very first year. It might have been just a long way from home that had a lot to do with it or it might have been the fact that our grounding may not have been quite as great as greater Toronto, Hamilton or one of those particular centres.
Mr Wildman: Now I see what you mean.
Mr Carter: That's really what I was reflecting on, plus the fact that I don't have any problem with standardized testing. I went to school in Manitoba and we had standardized testing there.
Mr Wildman: All three parties are in favour of it. It's not a problem.
Mr Carter: Exactly.
Mr Skarica: I just have one comment and one question and maybe you can just give me your views on this. I don't know if you were here for the last presentation.
Mr Carter: Part of it.
Mr Skarica: One of the difficulties in dealing with education is trying to figure out how dollars are being spent, where they're being spent and so on and so forth.
I have a survey here and it has general administration and business administration as prepared by the Ministry of Education and Training and now when we're trying to compare boards to boards, we find out that what's a general administration expense in one board is defined differently in another board and the same thing with business administration etc. It's almost like a system where you try to grab it and, like mercury, it squeezes out one side ot the other and through your fingers and at the end of it you throw up your hands and ask what's going on.
Mr Wildman: Like nailing Jell-O to a wall.
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Mr Skarica: Yes. Even the Sweeney report supposedly is trying to compare them board to board and we heard, "Well, no, that's not right either." What's your feeling as a taxpayer to hear that kind of information?
Mr Carter: First of all, I suppose what we should do is we should standardize accounting. That would be perhaps a good idea.
Mr Skarica: Yes. Can you believe we spent $14 billion a year for I don't know how long and it hasn't happened yet, in 1996? It's hard to believe.
Mr Carter: Exactly. Yes, I agree.
Mr Preston: You don't have any statistics and I guess nor do we.
The Acting Chair (Mr Michael Gravelle): A little late in the day to discover that.
Mr Carter: I thought I was going to learn something here today.
Mr Skarica: Thank you. That's my only comment.
Mr Patten: You've put your finger on an issue where we have a variety of definitions of what constitutes the classroom expenditures and support and what is administrative. Hopefully, we will arrive at an agreed-upon figure so that we can do some fair comparisons, because many of the boards of course say their administrative costs are 9% or 5% because they're just thinking at board level, not at the school level, but someone else says, "Oh, no, administration is your principal, your vice-principal and your department heads."
Mr Carter: Partly.
Mr Patten: Another says: "No, no, not really. The department heads teach." It just goes on and on. So you're right. You've put your finger on something that's important.
One little thing is that very often in comparing, my learning as a result of testimony from many, many people here in these hearings has strengthened for me the considerable difference that is offered in terms of junior kindergarten and general day care. Not to be disparaging about either one, but there is considerable difference, and of course one is that junior kindergarten is half-day and two working parents need some support, usually in the afternoon, which the other day care picks up.
But I would like to engage with you for a moment on the amalgamations. My bias is that I begin with the assumption that bigger is not necessarily best. I could go into the industrial world or into the commercial world where I think there's a recognition that having built up these huge centralized systems has not worked and been in the interest and in fact too much "support and administrative costs" took away from the capacity of people who knew their local customers. You see that in IBM, you see it in General Motors, you see it in a lot of multinational corporations.
My feeling in some of the research I've been doing because of my interest in education now has led me to discover that OISE, for example, the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, has said: "One of the things we have done to ourselves in the past in having built these very large school systems, especially at the secondary level, polytechs or very, very large high schools, is robbed ourselves of quality of learning for the individual student because we forgot that the human dimension, the person as a growing individual, is such an important aspect in the learning process." Part and parcel of what it means to be an educated individual is the growth of values, the growth of sensitivities, the growth of social skills and capacities.
So I would be one who would always say in these amalgamations -- I must tell you that our party has a very simple criterion. We say, "If you want to amalgamate two school boards or three school boards, show me where this is going to be more effective." It's very easy under the school board reductions, because that was the mandate: not whether it makes sense, but if you had to amalgamate and reduce the school boards by half, how would you do it, not whether it's wise to do it in some cases.
I have a situation in Ottawa where we've got one tiny, little school board called the children's school board, which essentially is a treatment centre for kids who are going through therapy. They have an arrangement with another board that provides teachers with special training to work with these kids at the same time, and they're in a very special situation. "We'll just amalgamate the two." This is a giant versus another very, very small unit. On paper it may make sense, but inevitably the smaller units have better quality. When you amalgamate them, in my opinion, they tend to get killed in just the enormity and the volume of the anomy that exists in the institutions. Maybe you have a reaction to that.
Mr Carter: I agree with you that biggest is not necessarily the best way to go at things. However, in the business community what I've found in talking with different industries is that customizing is possibly the best. I think that's what I was suggesting in my brief there and in my conversations, that we have to weigh all the items before we say, "Okay, fine, this particular unit, these units, should come together or should not come together."
The Acting Chair: Thank you very much for your presentation. It was much appreciated.
ONTARIO ENGLISH CATHOLIC TEACHERS' ASSOCIATION, SUDBURY SECONDARY UNIT
The Acting Chair: We're now moving to our last scheduled presentation of the day, which is the Ontario English Catholic Teachers' Association, Sudbury secondary unit, Nina Stapleton, president. Please come forward.
The reason I'm saying "scheduled," for the information of the committee members, is that there are two individuals in the audience today who are concerned citizens who would like to have the opportunity to make short verbal presentations afterwards. We'll need unanimous consent for that, which we'll do afterwards. Obviously we've got a time constraint as well, so we'll complete the scheduled interviews and then we'll move on to the two others and hopefully find some time.
Good afternoon. Welcome to the committee and the public hearings. Could you introduce yourselves, and please feel free to proceed.
Ms Nina Stapleton: I'd like to thank everyone for having us here today. I'm Nina Stapleton, president of the Ontario English Catholic Teachers' Association at the secondary level in Sudbury. To my left is Kerri Wiermier, who is an adult-ed student. To my immediate right is Teresa Stewart, the principal of the adult-ed school that our board runs in Sudbury, and to her right is another adult-ed student, Bruce Holden.
The amendments in education that are coming into play in Ontario must be viewed within the context of a broad spectrum of government initiatives which have made social policy and the needs of the common man subject to the whims of market forces and appear to be tailored to monetary gains of private enterprise.
Ideology rather than rationality appears to drive every decision that is being made. Economic considerations have become the new standard directed towards ensuring a major tax cut regardless of the consequences. Anxiety, doubt, uncertainty, frustration and anger have become the order of the day under the guise of a so-called progressive conservatism.
On a personal note, I was brought up by parents who held high the following maxim: "To whom more is given, more is expected." That is why we are here today. As teachers, we feel we've been given a lot. We've been given a lot by this government in the past, by Ontario, by Canada, and we have an obligation to ensure that the rest of society has the benefit of experiencing what we have.
The amendments that occur in terms of junior kindergarten we find very, very offensive, because they will eliminate the requirement for school boards to operate junior kindergarten programs, therefore making provision of such programs optional. Furthermore, the reductions in the funding of junior kindergarten programs do not leave an option for many school boards, a number of which have already made the decision to discontinue the program. The funding changes appear to be a major departure from the ministry policy of the last 30 years.
It's inconceivable to us that the government would take this direction despite the many national and international studies that clearly point out the value of early childhood education programs. If this policy is upheld, we will see a generation of children grow up angry that they all did not have a level playing field at the outset of their educational lives.
Junior kindergarten programs are critical to the future economic and societal wellbeing of this province.
On another note, we are concerned and opposed to the amendments with regard to Bill 34 as they pertain to teachers' sick leave. Sick leave plans are not unique to education. Many employees in other professions and industries have comparable sick leave plans.
This particular amendment is viewed by teachers as a direct attack by the government against a particular group. There is no proof that this particular amendment will bring about savings and will do nothing but create ill feelings and a subsequent poor climate among those entrusted with the education of our most precious resource.
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But the focus we're going to have today will be adult education, and before I turn it over the people I brought with me today, I would like to point out the statistics that we had, and I gather another group that was before us had some of the same information.
There are private companies offering these services but at very high, high cost, and the funding they get to pay for these models comes from the government services such as workers' compensation, Ministry of Health, Ministry of Community and Social Services and so on. So it is out of the taxpayers' purse. The figures that are there are from one particular company, and I have cited the name. School boards can offer the same service at a much cheaper cost, so to me it doesn't really make sense that we move in this direction. However the true costs will be much higher for the disadvantaged adult learner, and ultimately for Ontario society.
At this point I'd like to ask Teresa Stewart, who is the principal of the adult school in Sudbury, if she would speak.
Mrs Teresa Stewart: Thank you. As Nina said, I'm the principal of St Albert Adult Learning Centre, and that's under the jurisdiction of the Sudbury District Roman Catholic Separate School Board. Our adult centre began four years ago. With an empty elementary school, a handful of teachers and a small budget, we began to deliver a variety of adult programs onsite, and eventually offsite. Today we serve between 900 and 1,000 individuals annually.
An adult learner, in our definition, is anyone over the age of 18 years of age and out of school for at least one year. The age range presently is between 18 and 74. We offer adult basic literacy and numeracy, secondary credits towards a secondary school diploma, upgrading credits beyond the diploma, English as a second language, programs in computer-related areas, contract work for local businesses, and co-op work placements. So we have quite a variety.
St Albert Adult Learning Centre has become a multi-use facility. The concept that spirits its activity is "community." Adults who attend can not only upgrade their academic needs, but access onsite supports such as day care, a food bank, a clothing depot, counselling onsite and offsite, support with affiliated social agencies and businesses.
It provides an alternative to the usual school atmosphere for learning. It is based on the individual's need. Each student has an individual path he or she follows. It is developed at entry in conjunction with our counsellor. Flexibility of time and program allows for easier access. This recognition of prior learning with future goal aspiration is vital to individual success.
It is impossible to talk about adult education and the adult learner without focusing on quality of life. Whether the individual is centering on basic skills such as literacy or additional qualifications, the purpose is the improvement of the quality of the learner's life.
A homemaker whose children have left home may want to develop new opportunities for herself. An immigrant worker not fluent with either official language needs to improve his or her employment opportunities. A retiree having completed 30-odd years in one career wants to embark on a completely different path.
Beliefs that we carry about ourselves, beliefs about capabilities to succeed and our level of competence, are formed during our childhood years. A child who grows through the formative years with a developing belief in his or her worth as a competent person will in all likelihood become a competent adult, believing in personal abilities to succeed at whatever the task.
There are very few individuals who develop naturally to the state of self-motivated, self-directed problem-solving without vast amounts of support from both home and school. Those of us who are dealing with literacy, upgrading and vocational retraining learners know only too well the impact that a negative self-concept has on an individual's perceptions of competence and perceived abilities to learn.
I've noted here situational barriers, institutional barriers and dispositional barriers as barriers for adults when they come back to school.
It is important to note that as we look at present society, we need to do something. There is a high dropout rate, high numbers of single mothers, high number of literacy problems, large numbers of unemployed, and a significant drop in apprenticeship programs. I've noted numbers for you to look at.
Just recently, Lester Thurow, who spoke at an annual conference on the Investment Funds Institute of Canada, stated that the global economy will continue to feel the pain of restructuring for the rest of the decade. Skills and education of the workforce are the only things that will matter. There's no economic future for the unskilled.
He goes on to say that 10% to 15% of North Americans are better educated than anyone else in the world, but those without post-secondary education could only eventually find themselves working for Third World wages.
What directions do we need to look at to help the adult learner? I can only respond to this question as an educator.
The success we have had at St Albert's is proof that a high-school-based program with a model of integration can work, and work successfully. Our model has attracted the interest of other school boards who have visited to see the process in action. Recently, we were awarded national recognition by the Canadian Association for Community Education.
The uniqueness of St Albert's stems from its ability to recognize a need in the community and to link with a community partner. I won't go on to page 4, but you can see listed the number of programs that we have actually facilitated with community partners. Without them, we could not have survived, and recall that we are only here in our fourth year.
It is my understanding that 100,000 daytime adult students are in Ontario high schools. Why is that so?
Many adults need more education. Today's high-tech jobs require more education. Employers, colleges and universities demand a high school diploma. Adult learners need language and skills upgrading.
I believe that our high schools meet this need best. They use existing facilities in the home community. Their teaching staff is professionally trained and certified. They offer a wide range of services in one location, working with community agencies and local employees. Most adult students learn the skills and get the credits they need in a five-month to one-year period, and programs are proven and respected by employers.
If we look at the success rate of adults in high schools, a recent survey by OSSTF noted that 28% go on to college and university, 37% find employment within four months, and the most staggering reward is that the number on welfare is cut in half.
As an educator, I've seen the success of these adult students. Two of them are here today to speak to us. The desire of an adult to return to school, be it for a diploma or for upgrading, speaks well of his or her desire to continue to learn. Seeing this commitment has been the spirit behind what I do at St Albert's. My greatest satisfaction comes from the success of an individual who despite all types of barriers -- emotional, financial and academic -- succeeds and leaves our centre as a renewed individual.
Two evenings ago we had our graduation. We had 88 graduates. We were very proud.
The two students we have with us today are Kerri Wiermier, who has recently graduated and is hoping to go on to college in September, and Bruce Holden, who has come to us for upgrading and has discovered a new talent for teaching. We employed him unofficially as a peer tutor, and he thinks one day he might like to be a teacher. So I'd like to turn it over to Kerri Wiermier.
Ms Kerri Wiermier: Thank you. I'm honoured to have been chosen as one of the spokespersons on behalf of adult learners.
I have been a student of St Albert Adult Learning Centre since October of last year. I can't tell you just how proud I am to be graduating this June. For you to fully understand the extent of my pride, you must understand St Albert. To feel welcomed was an understatement. Not only were their arms open wide, but embracing. The principal and staff, including the office staff, are there to assist us at every turn, behind us all the way, celebrating our successes, lifting us back on our feet from failures. Our goals may range from reading to our children or grandchildren to a university degree, but that's the beauty of St Albert: It services every need.
My self-esteem has never risen higher than now. Thinking that you can accomplish your goal is one thing, but proving it to yourself is so much sweeter. There is a confidence and a pride in all of us that has never been felt before. To see a friend smile when they say, "I'm a high school graduate," or "Cambrian has accepted me," is truly a feeling beyond words. All this would not have been possible without a second chance at education and teachers who are our friends and our guidance counsellors. With their encouragement, patience, understanding and support, we have learned to see the potential within each and every one of us. There's no quick judgement, just a helping hand.
We can relate to one another on familiar levels, for we are not only teachers and students; we are adults able to share experiences and learn from each other. We are not treated as mere students, and so a camaraderie forms between teacher and student working together for the common good. St Albert's is truly a partnership in learning. It has given adults from the hardest and dire conditions a spark of hope for themselves and their children. Through adult education, our lives aren't destined for bleakness any more. We are living proof of the success of the adult education system. The principal and teachers have truly gone above and beyond the call of duty, because love and caring are not a part of their contracts.
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With the great things adult education is doing for and in the community by reducing the need for social assistance, the retraining and educating of adults, steering them into being productive, vital members of the community, it saddens me to see that the government is taking such a stand against adult education. The cuts themselves are forcing the closure of so many adult-ed programs and making it equally difficult to get an education at a traditional high school. Where are we to turn to? What kind of future does that leave for us? The message the government is clearly sending to us is that you cannot learn from your mistakes and get an education later in life. You must live with it: live with the consequences of your actions, live with your poor choice of careers that has led you to the retraining, but you can't get there due to school closures. "Sorry about your injury, but -- "
There are too many happy endings in adult education to let it die without a fight. We can't have people thinking, "I can't read, I'm ashamed, and the government doesn't care." We can't be creating a social underclass where people want to work but don't have the education to get there. There are many of us with a potential to do great things for this province and country, but without the vision of the provincial government, our minds will be left to atrophy, forcing us to remain on some form of social assistance when all we want to be is hardworking, taxpaying citizens. It's a problem that cannot be ignored. If we shove it under the rug, it won't go away. The heap will still be there when the rug is pulled back.
Wouldn't the deficit be more reduced by educating and retraining the unemployed, be they on family benefits, unemployment insurance benefits, welfare or disability? Wouldn't it be more profitable to get us out into the workforce to become taxpaying, deficit-reducing citizens than sitting at home, waiting for the cheque to come in? We'd rather be working citizens.
One adult education teacher has the potential to graduate approximately 10 students a year, sending them off to work, college or university. Just think about it. In as little as one year in college, a student can be a self-sufficient member of society. Isn't that a bargain? One teacher for 10 people no longer dependent on financial assistance, and that's per year, dependent for what could potentially be the rest of their lives. For me, that would amount to about $10,000 a year for 14 years, and another $7,000 for the next 30 or so. It comes to about $350,000 the government could have saved by hiring one teacher for one year, and that's just myself. Multiply that by the number of adults who are wanting to complete their education. That adds up to a staggering number of dollars that the government could have saved itself by getting adults educated, working and off the financial assistance program. What a deal.
The answer seems clear to me: We need adult education.
Ms Stapleton: Thanks, Kerri. The next presenter, although he doesn't mention it in his written part that you have there, has come to us from industry through an industrial accident and thus needed upgrading to go on to qualify to continue to become a productive member of society.
Mr Bruce Holden: My name is Bruce Holden. I am currently a student at the St Albert Adult Learning Centre. I'm very new at this, so please disregard the cracking in my voice.
There was a time when a person could easily find work in this province. You just followed in your father's footsteps and did what he did. This was especially true in industrial centres such as Sudbury. In its heyday, the International Nickel Co, as it was known then, employed around 30,000 people. Most held labourers' jobs which required little or no education. Those days have gone, however, and now we are seeing a minimum standard of grade 12 being set by most industries. A working knowledge of computers and their programs has become a prerequisite for job applicants.
Where is an adult learner supposed to go to obtain the required courses? I voice these concerns because I am one of the over 80,000 adult learners who are affected by the proposed cuts to education funding.
The amendments may force some school boards to eliminate adult education because of a lack of funding. To make up the shortfall in funding, boards might be forced to increase taxes. But who are the people who will be paying the increases? Are they not the property owners and aren't some of those property owners the adults who need to continue their education? Why would anybody, including myself, pay for those services if we are denied access to them?
People, no matter what age, deserve the right to a proper education; not just for the sake of having it but for using it as they would any tool to create a stronger sense of self-worth in order to go out in the workplace and be productive. Everyone has a need to be needed. I'd felt lost and alone with no direction. I know the empty feeling inside when you cannot contribute. It is by far the worst feeling I have ever had. With the help of the dedicated staff at St Albert Learning Centre I found what I needed to progress. Their co-op program let me find a new direction and by volunteering for their peer tutoring program, I regained confidence in my own abilities while helping others gain theirs.
For whatever reason a person had to leave school, they should not be penalized by not being allowed back into a place of learning. Even the most hardened of criminals is given a second chance through the parole system. It seems that life imprisonment in Canada has been reduced to 15 years and, in some cases, most notably as recently as last year, those convicts have access to formal education that might be denied us law-abiding adults. Leaving school may or may not have been the right thing to do for some, but how long will they be forced to pay for that mistake? Perhaps that would a life sentence in a different kind of prison. We as a country have also opened our borders to people of many foreign countries. How will they learn to communicate and assimilate if they cannot attend a school designed for that purpose?
What will become of our community? Where will all these people go who are left out? Will they just hang around in the mall, not being able to find gainful employment? Maybe they'll resort to crime to provide for their families. Can an adult learning centre be a cornerstone for a better community? Judging by the institution-of-the-year award bestowed on St Albert by the Canadian Association for Community Education, it can. Though she's too modest to have said it before, Teresa Stewart also received the educator-of-the-year award. A national association for education believed that an adult learning centre was worthy of its top honour. By becoming a partner with the community, the centre can provide a means of developing employable skills for the learners. This can only strengthen the community as a whole.
It took years to run the deficit to the amount it has reached today. Yes, steps have to be taken to curb it, but at what cost? Ontario has long professed to be a partner in learning and now is the time to strengthen the partnership, not dissolve it. People are what make this the richest province in the country. Let's not start putting economics ahead of the welfare of our people. Slashing the costs at this rate is only a Band-Aid. What cost do we as Canadians place on ignorance? Thank you.
Ms Stapleton: Also in the package there's some information specific to our particular school in terms of resources and so on, but if I could draw your attention to one item that's approximately six pages from the end of the package, you'll see that these types of schools develop all kinds of liaisons with business and with employers.
The one in particular that I'm showing you is the one from International Nickel. We know that this is a very large company and we've received endorsements for the type of program that the school offers from many such companies and so we feel that to simply cut the funding to this particular type of education is going to be not only detrimental to Sudbury, but also has a potentially devastating effect across the province. Thank you.
The Acting Chair: Thank you very much. We have two minutes remaining per party for questions, beginning with the government side.
Mrs Munro: I wondered if you could tell us a little bit about the nature of the funding that you receive. I notice that there are a number of groups that obviously play a role in the ongoing development of your school and I just wondered if you could tell us that.
Mrs Stewart: You'll notice on the first page I talk about the programs. The core amount comes from the Ministry of Education and Training, but in order for us to complement that and have the funding necessary to generate our activity, we have to write proposals. Annual proposals are submitted -- well, last year it was through the Ontario Training and Adjustment Board. Further proposals are sent to the Secretary of State. We have moneys that we receive from the landed immigrant and newcomers to Canada section of the Secretary of State. We also receive federal moneys for co-op stay in school, again through their initiatives for youth.
When I talk about partnerships, I don't mean money transfers. I'll give you an example of one that's happening now with teen moms. We have the Cambrian College students in co-op with a teacher from St Albert's, a church basement that we facilitate it through and our board that provides overall supervision. So there are four partners that provide that program. Along with the funding that we have to find annually to supplement, we also go into the community to look at partners.
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Mrs Munro: I guess my question then is --
The Acting Chair: Things are very tight. Sorry.
Mr Patten: I'm sorry we don't have more time as well, but I think this is probably one of the most graphic illustrations of the differentiation between simply providing an alternative as the government tends to propose that adults can just go take a continuing education course for an hour on this subject or an hour there on that subject and that would do the job. Graphically, your personal testimonies as well, Bruce and Kerri, conclusively, I think, add to the overwhelming body of knowledge that is saying, "Listen, this is a program that provides people who do not just need a course," and in the words of one director of a school this morning that I thought were well put: "Our biggest challenge as teachers with adult education students is we know they can do it, but they often don't know whether they can do it. They don't have faith in themselves or they don't have the self-esteem that you talk about." That is the difference, that you have that kind of support, that kind of encouragement, it seems to me, that can elevate your sense of confidence and your sense of self-image in addressing what is there. You already had the capacities, but it's the belief in yourself and the human and personal development side that you would not get just on a course-by-course basis. Would you comment on that?
Ms Stapleton: If I could make a comment. What you've said is certainly true, and I'd like to speak from another perspective.
When Teresa started this program, people were scrambling trying to get funds, trying to get placement, trying to get cooperations going with industry. My husband is a comptroller for four companies in Sudbury and I went home and I said to him: "Listen, they've got this program going. Would you consider speaking to your people, getting people into the work sites?" I see lately in the government's agenda that they're looking at giving companies a $1,000 tax incentive to take co-op students.
I spoke to my husband about this. They've been in business for many, many years in Sudbury, and he said: "We don't like to do that. We don't like taking people in. It's not that we don't feel that we should pay our debt to the community, but it's more hassle than it's worth. We don't really feel that we give these people what we're supposed to give them. We just can't do it, and it's not productive for us and it's not productive for them. I know a lot of places do do it," he said, but he really feels that justice is not being served in the way that it's presented as being served.
Mr Wildman: Thank you very much for your presentation and thank you for coming so far to make it. You certainly presented it in a way that it really hit home with me, particularly you, Kerri and Bruce, in your comments. Kerri, you raised a lot of questions that I would hope at some point members of the government will try to answer in terms of the future of adult education and people being able to contribute to society instead of being trapped in welfare or other types of social assistance.
Could I ask two questions basically? The first one is to Bruce and Kerri: Do you think you could have achieved what you've so far achieved if you hadn't had the option of St Albert's and had been doing it through either correspondence courses or night school continuing education courses?
Ms Wiermier: I wouldn't have received the quality of the education that I received at St Albert's, speaking in terms of, say, the Cambrian College upgrading program. I'm planning on attending nursing at Cambrian next year. Without an OSSD I wouldn't have been recognized as being a qualified nurse, even though I've completed the Cambrian course only because I had a high school equivalency. That wouldn't have been enough to get me a job out in the real world. It might get me to the nursing course and through the nursing course, but it would never get me out there and working. Without an Ontario high school diploma, I just wouldn't have been recognized as being qualified.
Mr Holden: In my own personal circumstance, a back injury has left me incapacitated to perform as an auto mechanic. My wife is working shift work and she's pulling in extra shifts to try and make up the burden of my lost income. I'm currently on UI, which is only one third of what I used to get, and we still have a mortgage and kids to feed and the like. We cannot afford any kind of day care, and going to daytime school allows me to be home in time to receive the children off the school bus, and when she has shift work, I can be there and make the meals and clean the house.
Mr Wildman: I want to congratulate you both.
What has the cancellation of OTAB meant for the operation of St Albert's, and what do you see in the future to replace it?
Mrs Stewart: It's a good question. We aren't really sure of the ramifications financially. I'm told that there is a possible 10% to 15% cut in the proposal that we have put forward, but still I'm unclear as to what will happen.
The Acting Chair: Thank you for your presentation. It was very effective and much appreciated. As I mentioned to members prior to this final scheduled presentation, there are two individuals, two citizens who would like to have some time. Can we seek unanimous consent to have both individuals have an opportunity? Mr Brown actually has gone out and written something up for us, so do we have unanimous consent for six minutes each? I know we have to be out of here by 4:30 in order to break things down and let the staff do that. We're agreed to that.
MARK BROWN
The Acting Chair: We'll have Mr Brown first. We appreciate your being here and we apologize there isn't more time, but we're glad that we can get this in here. Thanks for pulling this together on short notice.
Mr Mark Brown: Thank you very much for letting me have a couple of minutes to speak.
The Acting Chair: I'm watching this clock real closely, Mr Brown.
Mr Brown: First, just some observations. It's great to see all the stakeholders collected in one place trying to solve one problem. I find that fantastic. We've got teachers, we've got students, we've got taxpayers, we've got board representatives, we've got union members, everybody trying to solve the same problem.
If we could have all those stakeholders solving the problem of enumerating what is the most conducive environment for students to learn in the classroom, it's my opinion as a concerned taxpayer -- I have a new-born son, he's a year and a half old now and he's going to be entering the education system four years from now. I was a teacher at one point; now I work in the private sector. Teaching wasn't for me. It wasn't because it was a bad profession. All the teachers I know, all educational professionals, without exception, are always working towards what is best for the kids. When you talk about board members, people who work at the board, they were once teachers themselves and they've moved to the next level. They have new responsibilities, but still they're working towards what's best for the students in the classroom.
Union members, the people who represent the teachers, are working towards what's best for their people, their membership, which is the teachers and the administrative staff and that sort of thing. Everybody seems to be working towards the same thing but we don't really know what it is. We have studies that say, "This is really good for in the classroom, that's really good for in the classroom," but I think we need to build some sort of consensus. We have the answers. I'm sure they're in some file somewhere, but I think what is really important is if all of us stakeholders, all the people who attended today, went out and sought information based on experience. Taxpayers who have no children have experience; they've been through the school system. You can ask them, "What, in your experience, was the thing that made the classroom the best place to learn when you went to school?" For parents you can say: "What is it that you've noticed about your son or daughter over the years, when they had one year where they really loved school? What was it about that year that made it so good?"
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If we collect that information from all stakeholders, the teaching professionals who I think learn -- one presenter mentioned that people who work on the front lines know everything. Yes, they have a lot of valuable information, but we need to build a consensus so that when the board sits down with the union, they have the same information and they know what they're trying to accomplish: that they're trying to get smaller class sizes or they're trying to get adult education, all that sort of thing.
I really commend the current government for giving the responsibility to the people who are involved. They're not saying to cut continuing education funding. They're saying if it's important to you, then fund it using the resources you have. Let's face it, the government's primary job, as far as I'm concerned, right now is to eliminate the deficit. That's their job, so they've set out on a course to do that and they've given constraints to each of the boards. That's all they are. They say: "Okay, this is the money you have. Do with it what you want; do with it what's important to you." Now it's up to the boards and the people who are affected to say, "Well, what is important to us?" I think that's where it should all begin.
I have a couple of other comments, if I have time.
The Acting Chair: You've got about 30 seconds left.
Mr Brown: Your accounting problem -- I'm a computer programmer now. Start with very general divisions. Have two categories: payroll, not payroll. Next year refine those two categories. Start very simply if you want to have everything consistent across the board.
I have a concern about targeting the 85 factor. It's the same type of thing. Mr Bob Rae did a great thing. He moved towards fiscal responsibility by going ahead and saying, "This is what we have; now let's do something with it," but what happened was that it ended up targeting the people at the bottom end of the scale, the young people. Try to do something to amend the act so that it hits everybody equally. I know it's extremely hard to do, but don't target people who are retiring. They've lived their lives, they've assumed they're going to get a certain amount of money and they've made decisions based on those assumptions.
If you change that in midstream, then they're going to say, "Oh, you're picking on us." It creates a sort of envy. The young teachers will say, "That's great"; the old teachers will say, "Oh, that's no good." It's happening right now. My wife is a full-day senior kindergarten teacher. She finds it very hard to get up and go to work in the morning, and that's the type of thing. You want to have enthusiasm like we saw from Bruce and Kerri, but you want to have it in the classroom because that's what's necessary to survive.
The Acting Chair: I apologize, but I have to interrupt you. We've got to keep going. We have your written part as well and we're grateful for that. We'll get a chance to look at that. I thank you for coming forward.
WILL DEBRUYNE
The Acting Chair: We welcome Mr Will Debruyne to the committee.
Mr Will Debruyne: Six minutes, that's not going to -- actually, maybe just a little point.
I misunderstood this whole process here. Had I know a little bit more -- the media should have presented it a little better -- I would have come here with a little more formal presentation. My interpretation from the media was that this was an open session where people could come in and express their views on Bill 34 and give some recommendations. That's from the media. I don't know where the show goes from here, but that is something you may want to do.
The Acting Chair: I wish there was more of an opportunity for this. It's just difficult in every community.
Mr Debruyne: To give myself a little credibility, I was born and raised here in the Sault, went on to university, got three university degrees and married. I've taught elementary school, high school, private school, Ridley College, and for the last 10 years have been teaching at Sault College. Actually, Bill was one of my students for a course.
To be honest with you, I was very disappointed in the Sault Ste Marie Board of Education's lack of answers to Bud Wildman and Peter Preston on questions such as administrative costs. It disappoints me that people can't tell me what an administrative cost is. I think that's shameful. That would be number one on my list. If it means you have to put down a list that this is an eraser, a pencil, an administrative cost, a salary of a teacher -- you can't have those discrepancies. When I hear Mr Preston say his board is operating on almost half the expense of the Sault and they can't answer that question, that really bothers me.
Mr Patten: Not true.
Mr Wildman: It's comparing apples and oranges.
Mr Debruyne: Mr Patten, this is the one I really wanted to draw attention to, cost saving, and the one I truly believe in is the amalgamation of boards. In Sault Ste Marie we have the separate and the public school. I'm not talking about taking the two boards, keeping the same administration and putting them in the same building. We only need one director of education here; we only need a certain pool of supervisors.
I think we're looking at it in the wrong way. We're going from the top down. Let's start in the classroom. What is the class size that we can operate in? I think you can see that by far, we are completely overadministered here in Sault Ste Marie. Sure, they're starting to make strides here with transportation, but reading the media, it seemed like it was an impossible thing, that the two boards couldn't even get together to do busing. Come on now; you're busing students from school to school. Who cares if the school is a separate school or a public school?
Mr Preston: It's still a yellow bus.
Mr Debruyne: Exactly, it's still a yellow bus. My wife is Catholic; I'm nothing, if you wish. I have three children. Our children are in the separate school. One is age six, another one is age four and the other one is age two. I heard a lot of discussion here, but when we talk about stakeholders, I'm hearing the same thing from people who are directly affected by junior kindergarten and adult education. Of course they're going to be screaming and crying and reading -- I just wrote a few notes on the back of this, but I would have fallen asleep listening to somebody read their gut concern off a piece of paper, which on the bottom line probably means their job, if you're eliminating it.
Kindergarten, for my daughter, has been a social experience. Do you need a full-fledged teacher in that classroom? That one I don't know. The two teachers my daughter has had were excellent. Could that be somebody who was trained differently, that is, didn't need a university degree and didn't need a bachelor of education? I think that could be the case. Does it mean also that if junior or senior kindergarten is eliminated, our children are going to be vastly affected? I don't believe so. I didn't go to kindergarten because our school didn't have it at that time and I don't feel I've lost anything. I certainly can see the social benefit, not academic benefit of the kindergarten system.
As for the adult education system, at Sault College you don't see that high school student graduating now, jumping into college. There is such a blend of adults -- that is, older people who have lost their jobs -- and you see the blend of high school students. I can't see a problem in integrating in the same way adults into the high school system, then on into the college system.
The Acting Chair: Mr Debruyne, thank you very much. We apologize again for not having more time.
Mr Debruyne: Thank you very much.
Mr Preston: You want to write something out and send it to us.
The Acting Chair: Absolutely. Write something up and present it the committee.
Mr Debruyne: Okay, I will do that.
The Acting Chair: If I could just let the members know, all amendments must be in the clerk's office by noon this coming Monday, May 27, and they will be available, as soon as the clerk has them, to all the members. We next meet for clause-by-clause on Tuesday, May 28, at 3:30 pm and then again on Wednesday, May 29, at 10 am.
Mr Patten: Are we inviting all the witnesses to join us for clause-by-clause?
The Acting Chair: They certainly can come.
Mr Skarica: Mr Chairman, I have a quick housekeeping matter. There was a question asked, "What school boards have cancelled junior kindergarten?" I've distributed to all the committee members and filed with the clerk a copy of the boards that have cancelled junior kindergarten. That's number one.
Number two: Mr Wildman asked a few days ago, "What is the status of the junior kindergarten review?" I have asked the ministry to look into it. The response they provide me is as follows:
"When the minister refers to a review of junior kindergarten, it's in terms of the reviewing of all education and children's services programs. Staff have been and are presently involved in several initiatives which examine programs for preschoolers and young children. These include the review of education finance; there was an internal study of junior kindergarten which was completed in the fall of 1995." I've asked if they produced a formal report, and apparently they did not. "There was a triministry directors' working group of children's services" -- that was with health, community and social services and education. Again, that did not produce a formal report but it identified young children who were felt to be at risk by the government. In the budget there was $225 million set aside for the programs, and I can list them if you want, Mr Wildman, but I think you know what they are.
Mr Wildman: Thank you very much. I appreciate that. I'm correct that it appears there is not a formal review of the kindergarten and junior kindergarten programs.
The Acting Chair: Transportation will be available at the front door of the Holiday Inn at 5:15. We're leaving for the airport at 5:15.
Mr Wildman: Thank you all for coming to the Sault. I hope you have a good trip back.
The Acting Chair: This committee is adjourned.
The committee adjourned at 1631.