NDP calls for detailed school repair list

When the provincial budget is released in March, school repair priorities will, for the second year, be itemized on a Top 10 list.

Gover nment will let school divisions know where their capital requests — be they school repairs or new builds — fall on the list, but that kind of information won’t be made public.

Until 2012, the ministry formed detailed, play-byplay lists of every request made by school divisions across the province, each ranked according to safety issues and enrolment pressures.

But for the 2014 budget, that approach was changed to the current Top 10, with the idea that it gave school divisions a more realistic idea of whether or not their projects were likely to get funding in the next three to four years.

I f your neighbourhood school needs repairs, though, and it doesn’t make the list, then you won’t know when a fix might come — and the NDP says that’s not good enough.

The Ministry of Education estimates the repair backlog for Saskatchewan schools at $1.5 billion.

NDP education critic Trent Wotherspoon said Tuesday that government needs a transparent, prioritized list — complete with firm timelines on when each project will be completed — to deal with the massive infrastructure deficit.

Alongside that plan needs to be the resources to support it, he said, though he couldn’t name an exact dollar figure on Tuesday.

He said the ministry needs to sit down with school divisions to figure that out, and accused government of being a “very poor partner in education.”

“School boards have been identifying this challenge for some time, and government hasn’t been listening,” he said.

“They need to wake up to this reality and make sure students are safe.”

But assistant deputy education minister Donna Johnson refuted Wotherspoon’s claims, saying her ministry and divisions “work very closely together to develop long-term capital strategies and the capital priorities for the province, and we take that work very seriously.”

“We are in communication with our school divisions regularly — and certainly on budget day — to let them know where their projects land,” she said.

She said the ministry also debriefs each school division that made as request “to make sure they understand whether their projects have landed on the list, and why.”