School funding is failing vulnerable students

Like many school boards across B.C., the Saanich School District is faced once again with having to make educationally unjustifiable cuts to services for vulnerable students, despite the recent hard-won Supreme Court decision restoring funding for reasonable class-size limits.

After years of making cuts in reaction to chronic underfunding, our executive staff, after much agonizing, have reluctantly recommended to trustees that we cut services for special- and indigenous-education students in order to pass a balanced budget as required by a provincial law introduced by the B.C. Liberal government.

The Saanich School Board has historically allocated funding to special-education services above provincial requirements, and has made significant efforts to fund indigenous-education services. It is important to note that there are no set provincial requirements in B.C. for providing services to indigenous learners, despite the recent recommendations of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and the well-documented challenges presented to indigenous youth attending B.C. public schools.

Efforts to fund services above provincial requirements by some boards across B.C. such as ours, have been made based on research evidence and strongly held values about the importance of meeting the needs of all learners in our schools. While efforts have been made to keep up with the increasing number of students with special needs, and in indigenousstudent populations, they have often only come with unsustainable sacrifices being made in other crucial budgeting areas.

Now boards such as ours are faced with a Hobson’s-like choice of being unable to sustain current levels of service despite increasing need for said service. I contend that cutting services to these students is unjustifiable, and in essence unethical, immoral, discriminatory and therefore illegal.

While school trustees are required by provincial law to pass a balanced budget, we are morally compelled to make evidencebased decisions that serve the interests of our communities, and the principles of natural law. In the judicial ruling of Moore v. Her Majesty the Queen in Right of the Province of British Columbia as represented by the Ministry of Education and the Board of Education School District No. 44 (North Vancouver), I believe there are compelling arguments in support of maintaining our current level of services above official compliance ratios, which are antiquated and arbitrary.

First, cuts to special-needs accommodation can never be a matter of achieving efficiencies, or as in our case, initiated to balance budgets to meet externally politically motivated or dictated requirements. Second, special education is in essence not an extra service; rather it is a matter of law that providing specialneeds education is essential to securing the right of the child to an education. Third, failure to provide special-needs services that are sufficient to support students in need is tantamount to discrimination and counter to the United Nations Convention on Rights of the Child, the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and B.C. Human Rights Code.

There is simply no evidence that needs have been reduced in our districts; in fact, the opposite is true, so cuts are unjustifiable. I beseech trustees, parents, students and community members to protest with all their moral might any district budget that cuts special-education or indigenous-education services.

The time has come for supporters of public education in our communities to demand that the next B.C. government walk the talk of support for our vulnerable student populations and public education. The health and vitality of our communities demand decisions concerning educational funding be based on evidence and equity, not on misguided and shortsighted notions of efficiency.