Quebec school boards have undergone some serious whiplash over the past year.
The roller coaster began in December, when the province’s education ministry demanded school boards and service centres collectively find $200 million to give back to the CAQ government.
The Western Quebec School Board respected the demand, finding small sums here and there by reducing the amount of window cleanings it gets in a year, cancelling its principals’ breakfast, ending free use of a public coffee machine at its office and deciding not to fill several positions that were vacant.
This collection of small savings amounted to about $1.1 million the board was able to cut without, it insisted, affecting student services. A true feat, given this money was already accounted for in its budget for the year. But when an organization is cancelling the use of a free coffee machine to make ends meet, you can guess it has likely found every other superfluous expenditure it can.
At the time, the board’s chair Joanne Labadie warned the worst was yet to come, in terms of cuts from the province. And she was right.
In June, the CAQ government announced another round, this time a sweeping $570 million, after plans for the following year had already been established, and ordered school administrators to ensure these cuts would not affect student services.
This, for many, was a laughable demand, given the previous round of budget crunching they had just completed. Remember the coffee maker.
The uproar was audible, even in our far corner of the Pontiac. Teachers unions, parent associations, and opposition parties protested and signed petitions, all while administrators scrambled to find millions in pennies they could stack up to meet these demands.
“The government appears to be following a slash-and-burn process to our budgets, and waiting to see where the pieces fall,” Labadie said at the time.
And just as administrators were closing in on meeting these last minute budget restrictions, after many hours spent leaning over spreadsheets and consulting with principals, the government realized the pieces weren’t falling in its favour and decided, ‘You know what? Maybe we went too far. We’ve listened to the school network. We were wrong. Here’s $540 million back.’ My words, not the minister’s.
But if only this were the tone he struck. Instead, he chose condescension.
“Let’s be clear: This is not an open bar,” he said in a statement posted to his Facebook account, reminding schools this funding has to be spent on student services, and that service centres will only be able to get access to it if they prove they’ve made an effort to reduce administrative costs. “Reporting will be required,” he warned.
As if school administrators are the ones on a mission to cut student services. As if they didn’t spend the last month redoing budgeting work they had already done to meet the province’s spending demands while trying to protect already underfunded student services, only to have that work rendered useless.
Yes, this is good news. But how can the minister, in the same breath as he is admitting his previous round of cuts were too harmful, warn schools to cut back spending on administrative services, the very services that made it possible for these schools to jump through the last minute hoops his government set out for them?
School boards may be wise to hold onto those administrators because until this government figures out how to clean up the financial mess it’s created by wasting hundreds of millions of dollars on failed investments and tech projects, this rollercoaster of education cuts may well continue.
