Commentary
Robin Hood was famous for one thing—robbing from the rich and giving to the poor. This approach might have worked in medieval England but it’s much less appropriate in a modern school board.
Unfortunately, some trustees in the Toronto District School Board (TDSB) apparently see themselves as the modern-day successors of Robin Hood. A TDSB committee recently voted to force school councils to give a portion of their fundraising revenues to a centralized fund, which would then be redistributed to schools that were less successful in raising money.
Critics of the proposal, which the full board narrowly rejected on April 16, argued that it’s little more than a tax on the volunteer efforts of parents and will lead to a drop in total fundraising revenues. After all, there’s a huge difference between fundraising for the school that your children attend and fundraising for a general fund that may or may not directly benefit your children.
While TDSB is the first school board in Ontario to consider this policy, some school boards in other provinces have already gone much further. For example, Winnipeg School Division (WSD), the largest board in Manitoba, recently announced that its students will no longer be permitted to engage in any door-to-door fundraising activities.
In addition, the WSD superintendent said that money raised by parent councils cannot be used to supplement school budgets or upgrade playground equipment. But any properly managed school board in Canada should have more than enough resources to meet basic educational needs. Rather than micromanaging about how fundraising revenues can and can’t be spent, WSD should investigate why fundraising dollars went toward these things in the first place.
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Supporters of restrictive fundraising policies argue that it’s inequitable to allow school councils to control their own fundraising because some schools have more ability to fundraise than others. However, if you restrict fundraising you will hurt disadvantaged students the most since there will likely be less money in total available to support their needs. Simply put, restricting the right of parents to raise money for their own school has more to do with ideology than with equity.
In far too many cases, school trustees think that they know better than parents. Whether it’s removing police officers from schools in the face of escalating violence, keeping parents in the dark about activist field trips, or siphoning off fundraising money collected by parents, many trustees are enacting policies that are not in the best interest of students.
While some parents are content with the education provided by government schools, others want to enrol their children in independent schools or even opt for homeschooling. At least with these options, parents don’t have to worry about trustees interfering with their fundraising efforts.
Unfortunately, Ontario is one of five provinces that refuses to allow any public funds to follow students to the school of their choice. This means that parents who want to enrol their children in an independent school must pay the full cost themselves—along with paying taxes to fund public education.
A much more sensible approach is to allow at least a portion of the provincial per-student funding to follow students to the school of their choice. There’s no need to reinvent the wheel. British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and Quebec already provide anywhere from 35–70 percent of per-student funding to qualified independent schools.
It would also be good if all provinces followed Alberta’s example and passed legislation for charter schools, which are publicly funded schools that operate independently of government school boards. This way they are free from the meddlesome political interference of school trustees who want to make all schools fit within the same mould.
The last thing parents and students need is to be under the thumb of school trustees who see themselves as modern-day Robin Hoods. Trustees who want to rob from the “rich” and give to the “poor” are really just robbing everyone. Parents, not trustees, know what’s best for their own children.
Michael Zwaagstra is a public high school teacher and a senior fellow with the Fraser Institute.
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
