Boards face uphill battle
UNDER EROSION THAT BEGAN WITH BILL 101, combined primary/secondary numbers have dropped below 90,000
For Quebec’s nine English-language school boards, enrolment is a tough sell. No matter how hard they try or how well they do turning out bilingual graduates, many anglophone parents still choose to send their children to French schools instead of French immersion, or choose private schools over public. As Janet Bagnall reports, the English boards feel their schools’ true value — including their innovative programs and extra-curricular activities — is not fully grasped by their community.
On Dec. 20, Education Minister Marie Malavoy summoned top officials of the province’s school boards to a meeting that was noticeably short on holiday cheer. About $200 million will vanish from their budgets in 2013-14, she told them, as a special equalization payment among boards is phased out among the richer boards.
“Then she said, ‘ Do not touch the classrooms,’ ” said Stephen Burke, chairman of Central Quebec School Board in Quebec City. “But it’s impossible to not touch the classrooms. We’re down to the bone.”
Quebec school boards absorbed cuts of $249.9 million in 2011-12, and face a similar cut for 2012-13 — although the Education Department says that offsetting the cuts will be an increase of $182.9 million in the department’s $10.2-billion budget for 2013-14 announced in November.
The special equalization payment, brought in under the Liberal government, is intended to bring all boards up to a level playing field. Boards are allowed to charge taxpayers a maximum 35 cents per $100 property evaluation to cover a portion of their expenses set by the province, but not all do. Those that don’t are vulnerable to cutbacks.
For the province’s nine English-language school boards, the financial situation is just one more blow. Under the erosion that began with Bill 101, their combined enrolment for primary and secondary students is now below 90,000, an unhappy reality for a community whose schools once held 250,000 students in the late 1970s. Even once adult education numbers are added, the total falls short of 100,000. Anglo boards’ numbers are almost entirely dependent on the province’s birth rate, the below-replacement rate of 1.65 per woman of childbearing age. Quebec analysts predict the anglo boards’ enrolment will climb to 92,011, including adult education, by 2025.
About the only area where an anglo board is showing growth now is in VaudreuilDorion, where the Lester B. Pearson school board is looking for land to build a new school.
Compounding the English boards’ money woes is the apparently intractable problem that no matter how hard they try or how well they do turning out bilingual graduates, many anglophone parents choose to send their children to French schools instead of French immersion, or choose private schools over public. As a result, thousands of English-eligible students are missing from the English public school system.
“We could triple our enrolment if everyone who is eligible for English education came to our schools,” said Michael Murray, chairman of the Eastern Townships school board in Magog.
“We’ve done a poor job,” he said, “of telling parents that we can deliver on bilingualism.”
Burke went further, saying: “We can guarantee your child a very high level of fluency in French and English.”
In 2011, the Central Quebec school board beat the area’s French school boards in the departmental French mother-tongue exam, with a success rate of 95.5 per cent. “We’re going to go down the tubes if parents send their kids to the French system,” Burke said.
The English boards feel their schools’ true value — including their innovative programs and extracurricu- lar activities — is not fully grasped by their community. They feel they are unfairly harmed by Quebec’s high dropout rates in the public sector.
Quebec’s dropout rate — more than 36 per cent — is one of the highest in the country. But David Birnbaum, executive director of the Quebec Association of English School Boards, says that rate is more a reflection of the French boards’ performance than the English. The most recent Education Department high school graduation figures are for the 2006 cohort. These figures show, that across the province, only 62.6 per cent of students from the French public sector earned a diploma within five years, compared with 76.2 per cent of Englishlanguage students.
Birnbaum said nothing in the socio-economic circum- stances of students in the French and English boards would explain the difference in graduation rates. “The English school board of Montreal covers almost to a ‘T’ the same territory as the Commission scolaire de Montreal,” he said. Yet the difference in graduation rates for the two Montreal Island boards is striking. For the 2006 cohort, 78.6 per cent of EMSB students graduated in spring 2012, but only 45.3 per cent of CSDM students did.
“We have a lot of innercity children in our schools,” said Angela Mancini, chairwoman of the EMSB. “But our results show that we’re managing well.”
Michael Chiasson, chairman of Western Quebec School Board in Gatineau, says the English boards’ results are even higher than they appear. “Our graduation rate is probably one of the highest in the country, well into the 80 per cent range,” said. “But the Quebec government insists on calculating it by taking Grade 7 students and subtracting those who don’t graduate in Grade 11, without taking into account all the students who have left the province or gone to another school system.” Under the government’s measure, the board’s 2011 rate was 57.8 per cent.
The English community’s generally higher mobility rate — families move fairly frequently for instance between the Ottawa region and Gatineau just across the Quebec border — has led to another kind of problem, said Birnbaum. “The government wants to know why the family moved, was it to get around Bill 101. On the French side, you just show up with your birth certificate and you’re enrolled.”
More trouble is expected if, as the Quebec government has threatened, military families find their children are ineligible for English education when they are posted to Quebec. “Military families can be sent anywhere at any time,” Burke said. “It’s unfair to them if, because they’re francophone, their children have to switch to French schools after studying most of their life in English.” About 17 per cent of the Western Quebec board’s students are from military families.
Private schools are another challenge for the public network. Quebec is generous in its subsidies to them — as much as 60 per cent of costs. Add in private schools’ much higher graduation rate — in 2011 it was 86.5 per cent, compared with 58.3 per cent for the public sector — and it becomes obvious why about 12 per cent of Quebec students — or 125,000 — attend private schools. About 8,000 are in English private schools.
The days of the privateschool primacy may be numbered, however. Malavoy, this fall, told private schools to drop their entrance exams and start accepting more disabled and learning-challenged students. She also suggested the province may stop subsidizing them.
“You’re dealing with a mindset when it comes to private schools,” said Moira Bell, chairwoman of Englishlanguage Riverside School Board in St-Hubert. “For some families, it’s a tradition.”
Added Burke: “In Quebec culture, you’re nothing if you don’t go to a private school, but that’s wrong.”
“We’re doing a lot to try to counteract the tendency to go to French private schools,” Bell said. “Two of our four high schools are international. We’re specializing with sports-études and liberal arts. Parents really want options for their kids.”
But offering options during a time of cutbacks isn’t always feasible. In the Gaspé, Miller said his board has 18 schools stretched across 2,200 kilometres in two time zones. Sixteen of schools are in areas classed as underprivileged. One of the schools, in the Îles-de-la-Madeleine, has a total of four students and two full-time teachers. The only alternative is a school a 12-kilometre boat ride away.
With a number of boards’ administrative costs already at or below five per cent, there is a limit to how much more can be cut, said Suanne Stein Day, chairwoman of the Lester B. Pearson school board in Dorval. “It doesn’t matter how well we do, we’re never rewarded,” she said. “We don’t run a deficit like the Commission scolaire de Montréal does. We have one of the highest graduation rates, but it’s not recognized, any more than the fact that our per-student costs are lower than the CSDM’s — $5,700 compared with $8,300. We made huge investments in energy efficiencies, with big payoffs, but that’s not recognized either.” (The board’s 2011 graduation rate was 77.7 per cent, the third-highest in the province among public school boards. The CSDM’s was 45.3 per cent.
Even the boards’ one direct source of funding, school tax bills, is not working in the anglo boards’ favour. Unless they have children in an English board, anglophones have to go out of their way to sign up as an English taxpayer. Some anglophone taxpayers actively seek out the lowestcost boards in their area to reduce their tax bills. Where English-language Sir Wilfrid Laurier school board charges 35 cents per $100 property evaluation, neighbouring francophone boards Commission scolaire de Laval charges 27 cents and Commission scolaire des Laurentides, 12 cents.
What would help, the anglophone boards said, is if they could manage their money on their own. “The ministry wants to micro-manage what happens in every school,” said the Eastern Townships’ Murray. “Money is scattered over everything. Locally, we would prefer to spend on early intervention in pre-kindergarten and kindergarten and get them up to speed by Grade 3. Bullying is not a big problem in our schools. We could take some of the money devoted to that and spend it on early intervention.”