THE TELEGRAM GIVES THE GOVERNMENT AN A

SIMPLE MATH

THE TELEGRAM

It's a case of moving out of an archaic and unworkable formula and into simple math. The only question is why it has taken so long.

For years, successive governments have been defending the province's teacher allocation formula. The defence has been a simple one: when you gather up all of the province's educators and divide that number into the province's student body, you get one of the lowest student-teacher ratios in the country, a sort of X divided by Y equals Z.

But left out of that equation were a couple of wild cards: first, that not all of the teachers being counted as a classroom teacher actually teach. That's a small thing.

Much larger is the fact that the province has deemed some schools as necessarily existent, meaning that they have to have a certain number of teachers despite having far fewer than the normal number of students. In that case, the formula means that X (rural schools) plus X (urban schools) divided by Y (teachers) equals Z. What that meant is that, as class sizes in rural schools got smaller, classes in urban schools necessarily got larger.

And every year, we'd hear the same thing around budget time: that the provincial government had "saved" a certain number of teaching jobs that otherwise would have disappeared because of the overall shrinking student enrolment in the province. The "saved teachers" number grew every year, but it was always a chimera: unable to move forward while handcuffed by the necessarily existent rural schools, boards would have been unable to cut teachers and still provide basic education.

You can't tell a board, for example, that it must have 80 teachers in five schools, and at the same time, only give funding for 30 teachers based on student enrolment numbers.

Now, the province has done something truly positive: it has moved to allocating teachers based on individual school and class needs, and, for lower grades (up to Grade 9) the provincial government is bringing in maximum class sizes. It's such a straight-forward, reasonable solution that you have to wonder why no government has put such a system in place already.

The answer is really simple: the change will cost cold, hard cash, and that's something we haven't always had.

The province is budgeting some $3.56 million to cover the first-year costs alone: earlier governments have known there was a problem, but stuck with variants of the status-quo to save cash, and then topped up the system in emergencies.

A new approach makes more sense, and you don't need Grade 9 math to realize it. Realizing it and doing something about it, though, are two different things.

By the way, for many students, today is actually report-card day. For the government, at first blush this move gets an A.