Catholic school funding 4
Jan stated:
If my Public school board amalgamated with our neighbouring Catholic school board, we could reduce capacity of 5,500 student surplus spaces that we share between us. Not only would we be able to get rid of partially filled schools, but also we would be able to eliminate the redundant administration and duplicated services that these two boards prop up. Doing this, we would free up over 3.6 million dollars annually and another million dollars if we calculated according to our smaller Catholic board’s per pupil funding allocation.
If these are the millions saved in amalgamating these two small boards, imagine the millions saved across the province by ending this overlap? Enough is enough. Instead of dividing, we should be measuring and aligning our legacy. We should be calculating the potential savings across the province.Imagine what we could do together in education, for all kids, from all faith and non-faith communities alike, with a single public school system for each official language only. We could direct our savings into effective and sustainable student programs, services, and school classrooms.
Therefore, re-investments in student programming becomes the priority over investment in organizational structures.
A student-centered funding strategy will enable us to provide quality educational programs and better-specialized supports with more overall choice for all students, as well as better overall supervision to increase safety and to optimize education outcomes. Smaller class sizes for all could become the norm. A properly funded transportation system would treat all student riders equally and provide better bussing service. We could clear the air by upgrading and retrofitting our remaining school buildings, do much needed capital repairs and complete long overdue maintenance orders to make our schools healthy and environmentally friendly. By properly funding music, art, drama, sports programs, and popular extracurricular activities, we could finally dispense with student fees and fundraising for these essentials.
I believe that her information was short shifted and tokenized by following responders, for a variety of reasons. Nor is it a red herring to the argument of not funding Catholic schools. It is an additional factor to that of stopping the funding for separate schools, whilst both schools have empty seating and thus are a drain on the entire system.
And if we think the UN and international organizations are unsympathetic to the vicious empire now, wait a few years until a semi-Islamified Europe exists. I think we'd best forget about old white men and their ambitions to achieve separation of church and capitalism. Let today's powerful white men get out of the road, if they want to grow old. The future is not their's to decide.
Your posts, though most often off topic and blathering, usually do not contain the overt sexist and racist content, proclaimed in this sarcastic irony, or attempt at it, I should say.
___________________________________________________________ "watching the tide roll away"
That's right, so many millions of Asians want to leave those countries because Washington consensus forced on them has created intolerable living conditions for tens of millions of people. So they emigrate to Europe, and they are here already and will be growing in numbers. So why should we think it democratic to set up society according to the ideals of a 22 percent phony majority government in Toronto who are mainly white males? And yes, there will be an estimated quarter billion more Muslims in 90 years. The Asians and Africans are coming, unionist. And some day in the future, one of them will copulate with a relative in your family tree at some point. It's inevitable. So why get all worked up about deciding for them before they even get here? We don't even have a modern electoral system in place yet. My goodness, we're running out of white babies!!
I'm disgusted that some in the NDP believe that Catholics have special rights and actually say Tory's plan was "dividing Ontarians" and "segregation." As much as I disagreed with John Tory's proposal (and for those in the Jewish community for instance who supported it) it was no more disreputable than the status quo advocated by McGuinty and Hampton.
News flash: Catholics are no longer an oppressed group in Ontario. They may have been in the 19th century, but not today. If it's about oppression - then Muslims deserve funding before anyone else given how Islamophobic Ontario society is (I'm not advocating this and believe fighting intolerance means bringing children together and not segregation just that the "oppressed group" argument doesn't hold water). However Catholics were here in large numbers in the 19th century and represent a large voting bloc, but Muslims are not. Why is it fair that a more established, non-oppressed group deserves school funding most?
They'll prolly end up funding their own religious schools with money borrowed from a Muslim bank not charging them usurous rates of interest. Brown people are coming. Better lock up your daughters and granddaughters. Their way will displace ours in large parts of the world. Resistance is futile!! Church and capitalism! Perhaps more church than capitalism. It could prove to be an improvement over this neoliberalized deregulated mess. Sounds good to me. I'm not worried for some reason.
News flash: they were oppressed until 1984 by an educational system that told them "when you turn 16 and finish Grade 10 you can either go get a job like your dad did at your age, or try to persuade your parents to pay tuition fees for you if they can, or leave all your friends, switch schools, and go to a school where everyone sees your parents were too poor to keep you in your own school."
This thing about saving taxpayers money is absolutely ridiculous. And especially if we consider the ridiculous amounts of taxpayer's money that is siphoned off and carted away by special interest groups without a religious bone in their ample bodies. They worship money, and I don't care for their ways a lot moreso than I am uncomfortable with witchdoctors infiltrating capitalism. It might even be an overall improvement
In Toronto? I can't comment. I can only say there was in Peterborough in the fall of 1958, and I don't know of anything that would have changed that situation between then and 1984.
As I said when you first raised this, where would the younger kids go, physically? No room for them in the public elementary school, while the Catholic elementary school would be part-empty. Obviously they would still be in the same building, which would be two schools in one, with a Catholic Board principal running the older (shrinking) section, and a Public Board principal in charge of the younger kids. Teachers would have to transfer gradually from the Catholic Board to the Public Board, likely while remaining in the same building. The custodian and secretary would need split personalities. Nothing much would change except a double-barrelled sign outside: "St. Mary's (Grades 4 to 8) / Laura Secord (Grades JK to 3)," with the grade demarcation shifting up each year. Each bargaining unit would get the best of either collective agreement. This would continue for 10 years. Before the ten years was up, someone would surely say "this is nuts."
And we know the model country has none of those
And we know the model country has none of those
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And we know that in the case of model systems, countries or Utopias, it's the getting from here to there that's difficult, eh Fidel?
But it's the relative ease with which private school students go on to university that is most unsettling to this citoyen Canadien . Should we not promote the idea of the end of private secular schools with at least as much vigour as the emancipation of the "priest-ridden" ones, in the name of equality of opportunity?
Much easier to make that case. Less suspicion about motives. More meaningful outcome if successful.
Seems to me that the two objectives were bound together in the case of Quebec, and we only make things more difficult by separating them, elsewhere.
We already have several Catholic universities. And Catholic hospitals. and Jewish hospitals, etc. These are all religious institutions receiving taxpayer money. Is this inherently worse than religious elementary and secondary schools?
Are you being serious in suggesting the abolition of private schools?
From SSC:
Are you being serious in suggesting the abolition of private schools?
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In my studies of social justice, it has always seemed to me, SSC, that serious talk about equality of opportunity in a meriticracy had to mean a really level playing field to begin with. If one is serious. And I am being serious.
You see, I don't believe we are going to get anywhere on any of the subject areas being seriously discussed here - economic, social, environmental, until we are able to bring about a Cuban-style "model". (And Cuba's exploits in the medical field are clearly something to be emulated. Just think of what they could accomplish for humanity in a world free of political and economic suppression).
One reason I keep mentioning the folk in the hills above you, there in Virginia, is that they, too, would be amazed at mention of true equality of opportunity - and a majority of them are descended from people who came to America a couple of centuries back in search of that very thing. They would react in disbelief at the mention of the concept, as you have.
"Humanity" is supposed to accomplish social and economic miracles but without any real belief in miracles. Just some kind of misbegotten hope.
School administrators already do things as bizarre as this. For example, split grades, when the overall population of students does not balance properly and individual teachers end up teaching two grade levels at once. Two set of curriculum for the same class, two sets of grades, two rubrics, etc. etc. for one teacher. This was fallout from the Harris years.
I don't think this topic has ever come up babble, nor in the papers even though it is kind of nuts.
Oh, we certainly don't have a pure meritocracy. I'm not where I am because I'm the smartest guy out there and people who are struggling are hardly all stupid.
But you can try to achieve meritocracy by trying to build some people up or by trying to tear others down adn I think attacking private schools fall into the latter.
And there are so many areas where people enjoy privelege. I'm not privileged jsut because my parents had enough to send me to private school. I'm priveleged because, for example, I'm physically healthy and fit which gives me certain advantages which gives me certain advantages over people with physical challenges. The solution is to knock down barriers for such people and create a more wlecome world for them. it's not to amputate my legs so that we're all at the same level.
It's not jsut private schools that give some an advantage over others. it's aprental education levels, it's the time they can spend helping you, it's financial security, it's personal safety. Unless you're advocating handing children over to the state, you will never have this level palying field. I don't know what attacking private schools which deliver great educations, albeit not for everyone, achieves.
This is the crux of the matter.
Sounds democratic to me, just abolish things with a stroke of the pen. Like abolishing poverty could be achieved in the same way. I don't care much for these kinds of abolishers who are so careful to abolish some things and not others. Henry the eighth was an abolisher of monasteries and abbeys, and razed some impressive buildings to the ground. And with the destruction of abbeys and firing of monks off the job went England's only social services, and valuable real estate seized and redistributed to people who really didnt need enriching. And there was no tax relief. Quite the opposite. It doesnt hurt to question the king's motives. How GATS threatens post-secondary
Oh for pete's sake! Likening getting rid of tax payer funding of religious schools, to actions of Henry VIII is more than a bit out there.
___________________________________________________________ "watching the tide roll away"
Not as far out there as suggesting that taxes will be reduced in Ontario, or that separate school funding stands in the way of solving child poverty. Those people are so far out there that they can only meet themselves on the way back. And GATS is key to the modern day movement for enclosure.