Education in Ontario

What I have to say might upset some people, but please read with an open mind. Back in the 2007 Provincial Election, the leader of the Progressive Conservatives, John Tory put into his platform a half a page about funding faith based schools. The Liberals took that little section of the PC's platform and ran with it by attacking the PC's every chance they got claiming that the PC's were not for our public education system, and wanted to divert 500 million dollars from the public and catholic system to fund faith based schools. In my view this cost John Tory the election and then his leadership of the Provincial PC's.

Should we be funding faith based schools with taxpayers money? My answer is no, should we give tax breaks to parents who want to send their kids to a faith based school? My answer is yes, provided that the teachers are certified to teach in Ontario.

When we take a look at our public education system in Ontario we have several different boards, like the public school board, the catholic school board, the french school board and so on. Each one of these boards have elected school trustee's, they have their own offices, their own buildings in most cases as some do share space in rural Ontario. Besides our health care system, our education system is next in line to receive the most funding from the province. With raising deficits, and higher debt, Provincial governments, regardless of who's in power will need to address the whole funding issue.

So what can be done? Well I feel we can take a hard look at combining our school boards. For example in areas where we have the Catholic and Public school boards using different offices in different buildings, they should be able to operate under one roof. This would help reduce costs by not having to pay double for the same services. The same can be done with our school trustee's. I would like to see our trustee's paid a full-time wage, but to be able to do this we would have to combine the Public,Catholic, and French school boards into one mega public school board. Don't get me wrong, we will still have seperate school boards that will operate, but the decisions will be made by one set of school trustee's and not 3 or 4. They would all be housed in one building, and not 3 or 4 different buildings. This would save the Ministry of Education billions a year in expenses which could go towards new school construction, paying for books, better training for our teachers, smaller class sizes, and so on.

So for those of you in our education system, do you think I'm crazy, or am I making sense.