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Michael Hoare
#Part 4 – Where did the idea of a “funding formula” come from?

Gail Nyberg, ex chair of the Toronto Board of Education, Bob Gidney education researcher and writer, Jeff Kendal, former school councillor, Trish Crawford, education journalist, comment on the funding formula that led to the closing of Midland Avenue Collegiate Institute in June 2000. Part 4 of the Life and Death of an Ontario High School.

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Éducation
Transcription
00:00To find out more about this idea of a funding formula the Harris government had developed
00:14and that schools like Midland didn't fit into, I moved both west and east.
00:20West to London, where Bob Gidney lives in a comfortable house with his wife and fellow
00:24researcher Wynne Miller. Bob wrote the book, From Hope to Harris, The History of the Education
00:29System over the past 50 years. And east, along Highway 7 to Ottawa, where Jeff Kendall, former
00:36trustee for the Midland Ward, told me how he saw things as one of the people who voted
00:40for the closure and who stood by their decision.
00:44I'm Jeff Kendall, a former school trustee from Scarborough and presently a law student
00:49at the University of Ottawa.
00:50Okay. You've been a law student for how long?
00:52In 1999, two years I've been.
00:55When were you elected to the Board of Education?
00:57In 1994, the first time. And that was to the Scarborough Board of Education.
01:03And then in 1997, I was elected for the next three years to the Toronto District School
01:08Board.
01:08Okay. So just explain to me, you were elected to represent a particular area?
01:13Yeah. I was elected the first time around to represent what was called Ward 5, which
01:18was the constituency within Scarborough. There were 14 of them. And the second time, the
01:23school boards within metropolitan Toronto had merged into one. So the ward I represented
01:29grew and it became Scarborough City Centre.
01:31The reaction against the school boards begins in the very late 80s, but gathers enormous momentum
01:38in the early 90s. And there you're not talking about the Harris government, you're talking
01:41about an NDP government. The reaction by the hostility on the part of huge proportions of
01:49the citizenry and a lot of the politicians who were taking the flack to what the school
01:56boards are purportedly doing is pretty extreme.
02:00Dave Cook, after all, was Minister of Education in a social democratic government. And he was
02:07appalled by the school boards. And it's Dave Cook who first, who initiates the policy of
02:12stripping the school boards of much of their power and amalgamating them. And that's because
02:17there were boards in the minority probably, but they were the big Toronto boards, the boards
02:26that get all the press, the boards where their activities are reported in Toronto papers which
02:34are read across the province, like classically the Star, and which would follow these events
02:40closely. The final turning point actually is the Scarborough story in 92 when the Scarborough
02:46trustees, remember now we're talking about the height of a depression in Ontario, the most
02:51serious recession we experienced since the 30s. The height of that recession, the Scarborough
02:56trustees voted themselves a 60% raise. And the people of Scarborough, the property owners,
03:02just exploded because they've been seeing their tax go, their property taxes rise in sometimes
03:06double digits annually year after year after year to pay for the programs. And that wasn't
03:13entirely the trustees' fault, by the way. But there were incidents like that that just exploded
03:16all over the press and had the media calling for action and the politicians just shaking
03:22their heads and rolling their eyes over this.
03:26Initially I saw it as an opportunity to get involved in public service. And politics has
03:30always interested me since I was quite young. And it was really a good, it's a good level
03:34to get in and, you know, begin a bit of a career in politics. It's small and local enough
03:40that you can sort out what your style is. You get to know people very well and you get
03:44to, you know, test the waters a little bit and see if it's right for you. Looking back,
03:49it was a good experience because I learned a lot of skills and, you know, techniques and
03:55that that I wouldn't pick up anywhere else and will never have an opportunity to experience
03:59a game. You know, public debating in a forum, in a democratic forum like that, where there's
04:06no right and wrong. It's the consensus building. Just an opportunity to meet literally thousands
04:11of people in the community and find out what's important to them. You get to know your community
04:15a lot better. And to deal with some of the big provincial issues that we were facing at
04:21the time. We were looking back, at the beginning I didn't realize what I was going to be a part
04:26of. Looking back I was part of a great upheaval. It's not something I would want to be part
04:32of. But having been part of it, looking back at what happened, it certainly was a valuable
04:36experience and let you get a different perspective on how decisions are made.
04:39The notion of a funding formula arose from a central problem that arises with the kind
04:47of financial arrangements that have been traditional in both Canada and the United States, where the
04:53sources of funding come from both the state or provincial government and from local school boards
05:00are raised on the local rates, the property tax. So in other words, if you just consider
05:05the residential tax base, you've got built-in inequalities of opportunity. Just because
05:11the kid is born in a rural township, or say, in northern Ontario, those kids are going to
05:17have less resources at their command, for a pupil basis, than you are in Toronto or London
05:23or Ottawa, the richer boards in Ontario. Now, how do you get around that? And the answer
05:28was increasingly, you can't. Okay? So the compromise in Ontario for the last 30 years has been the
05:34government would give grants to each school board, and they would attempt to equalize.
05:41There would be an equalization formula. The government would attempt to give more grants to poorer
05:48boards, less grants, to rich boards. The problem was that that really didn't address the issue.
05:53You could bring all the poor boards up to a minimum standard, but Toronto could just keep taxing and
05:58taxing and taxing its local residents, and so that there'd still be vast disparities between the big
06:04urban boards and most of the rest of the province. So the solution that the experts came up with again
06:09and again in reports was, the only way you're going to give equality of opportunity across this
06:14province is to really substantially restrict the power of local boards. Tax. The Fair Tax Commission in
06:20Ontario, anything but a Tory plot, let me tell you, deliberately set up to reform the tax in a more
06:28equitable manner by a social democratic government, that report came up calling for the virtual
06:35abolition of the power to local tax. They were going to leave no more than 10% above budget in the hands of
06:44local boards, right? Now, what they were recommending was restriction on local boards and at the same
06:50time, the development of a funding formula which was fair and equitable across the province.
06:59What that means is you start estimating the cost of all the specifics that go into creating
07:04a good school. The cost of space, the cost of program, the cost of teacher salaries, and you look for an
07:11optimum or average figure, and that becomes your basic funding formula.
07:22I felt that Bob Gidney was giving me a very positive spin on the funding formula idea.
07:28It sounded almost as if he had been one of those experts on the expert panels he had talked about.
07:33So I tried to get another point of view from another source.
07:36When following leads or reading articles, I finally ended up at the source of all those fabled newspaper
07:42clippings. Yes, the hallowed press room of the Toronto Star, one of the few serious countervailing
07:48powers in Ontario politics.
07:51I am Trish Crawford with the Toronto Star. I'm a feature writer. I write in the life section currently,
07:56but I have also covered Queen's Park, City Hall, Board of Education.
08:01And why these changes? There's two goals. One is the province wants
08:07to save money. The second thing is a philosophy that the student in Welland is the same as the
08:14student in North Bay is the same as the student in Toronto. Ontario hosts half of all new Canadians,
08:20and Toronto hosts the bulk of them, as well as the 905 area right around it.
08:25There are 530 students in an area of Toronto called Rexdale who started kindergarten,
08:33junior kindergarten, with English as a second language, and yet they're born in Canada.
08:40One in five children in Toronto is raised in family below the poverty line. That means something,
08:47means something that the schools have to catch up to. There's breakfast programs. Recreational
08:52programs are twin to many, many schools. They're the heart of all the activity that these families
09:00participate in. They don't have money for clubs and other memberships. They rely on the school board
09:06to provide these. So all the pupils don't come to school armed equally with the same ability to
09:13succeed. And you have to spend more to level the playing field for some.
09:18Virtually every panel that studied this matter said there's a case to be made for equality across
09:27the province. There's a case to be made for central funding. But we also got to remember the politics
09:33of local autonomy. It's important that local boards have the power to make decisions within limits. So the
09:39proposal was always to leave the boards with five percent, ten percent power to tax. In other words,
09:47you could raise five to ten percent from your residential rate payers above what you got from
09:52the government. The Tory government made the decision to wipe that out. All the funding was to be determined
09:58by Queen's Park. We don't know exactly why they opted to go against the advice of successive
10:05expert panels. But they did. And consequently, we now find ourselves in a situation where the only
10:13money the Scarborough Board has at its command for the first time in our history is the money it receives
10:19from the provincial government.
10:24Gail Nyberg, chair of the TDSB at the time the decision was taken, has a house in the former
10:39township of East York. She took half an hour from her work on the Canadian census to talk to me.
10:44The history goes back prior to amalgamation. We amalgamated all of the six area boards into one
10:51in January 1998. Prior to that, it's my understanding that the former Scarborough Board
10:57had looked at Midland as a possible closure because it had a low enrollment base. But I think most
11:04importantly, it also had a lower enrollment base in the high schools that surrounded it. When amalgamation
11:11came forward, all of the area boards basically stopped with any planning and worked on bringing
11:16these boards together. In March 1998, we had a new funding formula that came from the province.
11:24And the way the square footage was calculated, it appeared that the Toronto District School Board
11:32had 11 million square feet. At that point, we knew very, very well that we didn't have 11 million square
11:39feet in excess. But the formula was devised in such a way that that's how our numbers came up. So the
11:47board lobbied the government for a long time to try to get them to change the funding formula. And we hit
11:54roadblock over and over and over again. So the plan was devised by the board to actually take the
12:00government's own formula and roll it out. And we began to compile a list of schools that you would close
12:07if you were trying to remove 11 million square feet. What happened is we came up with a list of 138,
12:14which only actually removed eight million square feet. Because what happened when you applied this
12:20really stupid formula, we could no longer place students. And what our staff did was they said,
12:25okay, we're going to try to do this. But whenever we're going to close a school,
12:31in theory, we have to be able to place the students. When they got to eight million square feet
12:36that they had removed on this list of 138 schools, they could no longer place any students.
12:42And the board announced that list. And it threw this community Toronto into a tizzy. But what happened
12:48was... Was that intentional, the tizzy? Absolutely. Absolutely, it was intentional. It was intentional.
12:55And I can tell you, Michael, when we got the list of schools on the Saturday in an information session,
13:03the board was all behind this plan to do this. Because we knew we had to prove to this government
13:09they were wrong. And they don't have a history of listening. So it had to be pretty dramatic.
13:13And boards across the province were facing the same difficulty. But understand, when you live in
13:18Toronto, you have the press in your backyard. And we are so much bigger than any other board,
13:23that our numbers are staggering. When I looked at the list and I looked at the formula and how it
13:32worked on the Saturday before, I can remember saying to one of our facilities people,
13:36my gosh, this formula is so stupid. And it's so simply stupid that even the press are going to get it.
13:43And when the press get it, the government is going to be forced to change this.
13:47So on October 29th, the board announced these 138 schools. And it took six days. Six days of public
13:56pressure. And just like, the community was up in an uproar before the government said,
14:03okay, okay, you made your point. And they amended the formula in the ways that we talked about. And
14:10when the formula was amended, it put $54 million back into the Toronto District School Board budget
14:15on a yearly basis. But I think one of the reasons Midland was on the first list is because it did
14:22have a large square footage. It could bring you closer to your goal. But it did have a number of
14:27high schools surrounding Midland that could receive the kids. And also, certainly, all the experts have
14:36said to me, I'm not a teacher, and I don't purport to be. But I do know a little bit about organizing
14:41high schools. And when you have 650, 700 students, there's some good situations. But you also limit
14:50the offerings of courses and curriculum that can be offered. The optimal size of a high school is
14:56about 1200. And it gets a little crazy after it's 2000. And at 600, those students were losing out on
15:04some of the options. I was just mulling over in my mind the notion that there might be a dark side to
15:13all those sunny Canadian lawns and tidy houses, when suddenly there was a screen. The bus I was
15:19traveling back from Ottawa lurched to a quick stop. Somebody had thrown themselves out the window,
15:26a distraught teenager apparently trying to commit suicide. Everybody got out. We were quickly surrounded
15:32by OPP stuck at highway junction 7 and 38 until well after sunset. I felt I was lost in a punch drunk
15:40road movie. The driver had to be replaced. A passenger who had witnessed the scene was too shaken to
15:45continue the journey. She went back to Ottawa.
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