School fees

[velvetpage]

I just read a website for the Calgary Board of Education. I skipped over most of the academic stuff, because it's actually very similar to what's on my board's website in relation to standardized testing, but I was intrigued by the page about school fees: Parents may find that there are about five hundred dollars' worth of school fees if they have two kids in high school.

Now, from my perspective, I think this is a good idea. I think it's crazy that the Ontario government provides every single pencil for its kids, for example. Careful shopping and sticking to a short list would make it possible for most kids to get all their basic supplies for $30-$40. This way, teachers can order exactly what they want their classes to have, everyone pays the same amount, and there is a waiver for parents who can't afford it.

I absolutely love the idea of a lunch supervision fee. One of the reasons our boards are crunched for cash and putting caps on supervision time is the changes to lunch supervision since the Harris government. Back in the late eighties, many Ontario boards hired supervisors to watch kids eat, so that teachers would have that time free. The decision at the time was that, if they were paying the supervisors anyway, it was okay to let kids stay for lunch even if their parents were home. Then Harris came, and with him came the financial crunch, and suddenly the lunch supervisors were gone. But a whole generation of kids had grown up expected lunch supervision for their children, free of charge, and someone had to provide it. So it fell back in teachers' laps.

What do you think? Is there a place for school fees, with a family cap on them and a waiver system in place, in Ontario?

Comments

[forthright.livejournal.com]

I absolutely agree that it is a travesty that these things are defined as extras and then cut from budgets, forcing teachers to do things that they are not contractually obliged to do. But the solution is not to play into the discourse of government cost-cutting and accept that they *are* extras. After all, by this definition virtually anything in public education can be considered as an 'extra'. This is certainly what you see in some American states where there is a barely-disguised all-out attack on public education as a concept.

The problem you mention with parents, I think, is that many of the parents who are most uppity about funding issues are those who have money and time - urban, well-to-do parents who will go all-out to fund a new computer lab or some such thing. These parents don't mind shelling out for music instruction, lunch supervision, etc., because it is a small inconvenience. But for the parents who can't afford that, or who live in rural areas and can't arrange supervision, these things are more basic than the standard government discourse currently allows. You see the difference quite clearly in a rural environment. My dad was the principal at three different rural schools, up to and including parts of the Harris era, and there was simply no way that lunch supervision or free bussing could be cut: all the parents were agreed that these were essentials.

To put things in a different light: elsewhere you recently talked about your discomfort at your students being in a home environment where their mothers are living with criminals. Are you similarly uncomfortable with your students (and their friends) spending lunchtime there?

[velvetpage.livejournal.com]

It seems to me we're not really discussing what I expected to discuss - because I've made all the arguments you're making, and defended them. I know exactly where you're coming from. But I find it interesting how people in other jurisdictions make all the same philosophical arguments, even while paying for very different things. One lady further down thinks it's crazy that our government provides basic school tools, pencils and notebooks, for kids, but in other ways she completely agrees with you - and philosophically she's on a similar page. Yet the things she pays for, and expects to pay for, are very different.

Forty years ago, it was an accepted fact of life that people had to budget for their children's school supplies, even their books, because that was simply part of having children in school. I can certainly see the point of advising high school students to buy the books they're studying in language classes, for example - for twenty bucks per term, you get to study the books, and keep them for your personal library, you can mark them up if you wish to, let them get dog-eared, and no future student is going to have to put up with your markings unless they choose to buy a used book from you. (I don't like this idea for anything other than literature books, though - those are generally available in cheap paperback editions. Science and math books really are expensive, they're built to be durable, and they should be loaned out by the school each year.)

We've gotten to the point in Ontario where every single aspect of education is the school's, or the board's, or the province's jurisdiction. We provide their notebooks, their pencils, their textbooks, their babysitting over lunch hour even if a parent is available - everything. We've organized our school days so that there isn't time to go home at lunch, so that kindergarten is all day, five days out of ten, instead of a more humane half-day every day program for our littlest students. The reason for that? It's cheaper for the busing. We do all this, make public education entirely the purview of professionals in a school setting from eight-thirty until three, and then we're surprised when the parents don't feel comfortable in the school. We're surprised when the general public, especially the Ministry of Education, expects us to be entirely responsible for every aspect of a child's education. We complain, with good reason, that we're being held responsible for things about our students over which we have no control, but philosophically we've set ourselves up for that. When we take absolutely all control out of the hands of parents, we shouldn't be surprised if they expect absolutely all results to come from us, too. And yet that's not reasonable. A child's home life as at least as much, and most studies say more, to do with their success as anything we do in the classroom.

Parents have a responsibility to see to their children's education, in whatever environment that occurs. For most, that means supporting what goes on at school. We could go on forever about the poor little kids who go home to crappy home lives and oh, isn't it sad. Of course it's sad. Of course we, as a society, have a responsibility to help as much as we can. But I'm not convinced that taking on responsibilities that are traditionally parental, and making them part of the public school system, is the best route to go for that.