Education Minister Margaret McDiarmid is recovering from a serious illness so Advanced Education Minister Moira Stilwell is filling in for her at present. During the Ministry of Education budget estimates debate last Wednesday in the Legislature, Dawn Black raised New Westminster education issues and received a commitment from Minister Stilwell that she was willing to meet “with anyone” to discuss the New Westminster Secondary School replacement project. The Hansard transcript is printed below.
DEBATES OF THE LEGISLATIVE ASSEMBLY
(HANSARD)
COMMITTEE A
WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 25, 2009
Afternoon Sitting
PROCEEDINGS IN THE
DOUGLAS FIR ROOM
Committee of Supply
ESTIMATES: MINISTRY OF EDUCATION
D. Black: It's a pleasure once again to stand across from the minister, who is doing double duty for her government. I'm pleased to be here and ask some questions about my district of New Westminster, which is a smaller district in the province and faces some unique challenges. Just as my colleague mentioned earlier about Vancouver, New Westminster also faces unique challenges because of its geographic land space and some other challenges that we face in New Westminster.
The cuts that have come to education have a very negative impact, but it's not just the cuts. We have seen cuts in New Westminster to three programs –– the loss of the annual facilities grant for New Westminster alone, which, as I said earlier, is a small district with a smaller budget. It means a $1.1 million cut to our annual facilities grants.
The other cuts that have come in –– actually with no notice and are quite a shock to elected school trustees who try to manage with long-term planning…. Then when these cuts come, it is a real shock to them, and they have to adjust all of their funding.
The other cut, of course, is the cut to B.C. School Sports, which will have a negative impact on the students at New Westminster senior secondary, at Queensborough school and at Glenbrook school. Then, of course, there's the cut to the PAC funding, which will impact on all the student bodies in New Westminster.
But besides just the actual cuts to funding from the government, what we've also seen is a downloading onto school boards for outgoing costs that are mandated by the government. In fact, the wage increments for teachers…. They're legislated, but they have not been properly funded. We've seen the impact when the government chose to increase the MSP premiums –– the Medical Services Plan's premiums. This will have, again on New Westminster, a small school district, an impact of $45,000 a year.
The impact of the HST that the government brought in after the last election. After promising they wouldn't do that, as a matter of fact, they did it. The HST will have an impact of $240,000 to $250,000 a year in increased costs — again, to a small board like New Westminster.
There's also the climate action initiative. The impact on New Westminster for the climate action initiative will probably be in the range of $100,000 a year. So again, we're not just seeing cuts to funding for school programs. What we're seeing is downloading of costs and legislated costs that the government is not assisting the school district with.
I just wanted to give one example of what some of these cuts mean. In New Westminster in September — in fact, I think it was on September 22…. Because they had to lay off a custodian, there was a very unfortunate incident that happened at F.W. Howay school, where a young student — this is an elementary school in New Westminster — was ill and vomited.
There was no custodian on staff. There had been in previous years a custodian at the school who came at 10 a.m. every day. There was no one there to help clean up, and they had to shut the bathroom down, lock it down. There was a lot of concern by parents around, of course, the talk then about H1N1 — and this child was sick — and the health implications of not having staff on hand who could help to clean this up.
Now the district, in an attempt to deal with the shortages of support staff and custodial staff, had put together what they called a fly crew, which the district could call upon in an emergency when there was no custodian on staff. Unfortunately, on that day the fly crew wasn't available to come, so it really meant that the school was in an unsafe and unclean condition for a full day.
I would like to ask the minister: do parents in British Columbia and parents in my community of New Westminster not have a right to expect that their schools will be clean and that their children will be in a safe and healthy and clean environment for the day when they're sent to school?
Hon. M. Stilwell: Certainly, as a mom and a concerned parent I can understand that parents would be upset at hearing the story that came home from school. I am relieved that on that day the people at the school did exactly the right thing in the face of handling body fluids and shut the washroom down. I do also understand that there were extenuating circumstances that particular day with janitorial staff being ill and so on.
The school boards do have the responsibility to provide a safe and healthy environment for all students. Our expectation is that they do, and in my experience they do work to the highest and best purposes of the students to, in fact, do that.
D. Black: Well, I agree that the school boards have that responsibility, Minister, but I would also say that the B.C. government has a responsibility to ensure that school districts have the funding in place to allow them to do what they want to do and what they are elected to do. That is to provide safe schools for our children and to provide the kind of education that parents have a right to expect for their children.
The other issue that I wanted to ask the minister about today is the long-awaited new high school in New Westminster. This has gone on for a long, long time. The high school in New Westminster was built in 1948. As I mentioned earlier, there are a number of significant challenges in New Westminster because it is the oldest city not just in the province, but in western Canada. That results in some particular challenges in our community.
One of them is that the site where the high school is now is built on a graveyard, a cemetery. The nature of the city is that it's a compact space, and there's not a lot of land available. So the challenge for the board and for the community is in building a new high school on a site…. Where the high school sits now you cannot build on because of the graveyard.
There are two other community features on that site. One is Massey Theatre, which has been in place there for 60 years and was part of an initiative across Canada, I think, highlighted by a past Governor General to ensure that there was an opportunity for arts to work as part of a unification of Canada. So we have Massey Theatre on the site. We have the old high school on the site, which is in deplorable condition, and I would invite the minister to come and see just how deplorable it is. I really believe that there are some real safety issues there as well.
Then we also have on the site Mercer Stadium, which is the stadium that the school uses and that community organizations use. The other complication is that the city owns some of the land and the school board owns some of the land. So it has been very challenging not just for the school board but for the city and for community organizations to come up with a plan that meets the needs of all of the community in building the new high school.
City council passed a resolution recently asking that the Minister of Education meet with the two locally elected boards, the city council and the school board, to discuss the challenges that they're facing and also to perhaps ask the government, ask the minister, if they would consider that it's not just New Westminster Secondary School that needs to be replaced.
There are two other schools being built in New Westminster, one on the site of the old St. Mary's Hospital, which will be an elementary school, and one at the John Robson site where there is a school presently, which will be a middle school. But my understanding is that the three schools are presented to the school board as a package and that all the ducks have to be lined up in a row for one to go ahead.
So what the city council is asking is: would the minister meet with them and with the school board to discuss the challenges they're facing at the site of the New Westminster senior secondary? And would they consider decoupling, if you like, allowing the middle school and the elementary school to go ahead while the city works together to work out the obvious challenges around building on a site that has a graveyard, that has two other facilities on it that the community would like to be able to maintain, but knowing that they need very badly a new high school in New Westminster? Would the minister consider that?
[1800]
Hon. M. Stilwell:
There are three points. I want to go back to your first question and highlight — I think that you have been here when we have been talking about it — that we have a trend of declining enrolment in the face of what I think has been a true commitment to education, and that is increasing budgets.
When I look at the school district of New Westminster, in five years the enrolment has decreased by 3.6 percent; the budget went up approximately 20 percent. More impressively, in ten years the enrolment overall went up 10 percent, but the budget went up by 50 percent. Again, I think those are pretty impressive numbers against a trend of broadly declining enrolment.
I want to speak to the issue of safety, because I think it's important. As a mother I certainly understand that we want our children to be the best educated. But the truth is that when you send your child to school every morning, your fundamental concern is that they will be safe. It is of paramount concern. Where schools or school districts have issues that they think are related to safety, we are committed to trying to work with them to find a solution that keeps the children safe. I want to make that clear.
With respect to the new high school, three new schools, ministry officials have met with city officials and school district officials and are aware of the constellation of factors that you've described. In terms of your question, I am happy to meet with anyone to hear about whatever situation is in your school district that they want to make the government aware of. I'm happy to learn more about what sounds like a slightly complicated situation but, I'm sure, solvable.
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