School system must change

Re: “Public-separate school system works,” Joel French, Opinion, April 23.

The private, charter, homeschooling requests are a direct response to the public-separate school system not meeting the basic needs of our children.

These parents are typically making substantial personal and financial sacrifices to ensure their children have the necessary quality education.

Joel French needs to focus, in detail, on how our tax dollars are spent in the provincial education department and how school boards distribute their funding.

Not all school boards “provide much-needed transparency and accountability”; the CBE, for example, is anything but transparent, accountable or lean.

The CBE bus transportation fiasco is just one example of how arrogant and unaccountable a school board can be.

What is needed are changes in the structure of the education department within the provincial government, school boards and the Alberta Teachers’ Association in lieu of cancelling or reducing funding to cost-effective, successful programs.

Cliff Badger, Calgary