Students and teachers are struggling in BC with underfunded and understaffed schools. The public school system faces teacher shortages and increasing enrolment, but the provincial NDP government didn’t provide enough funding to address these shortfalls. This has led to widespread concerns that this year’s Vancouver School Board (VSB) budget will include cuts to programs and services, or even to school closures.
On April 19, 200 students, teachers, parents, and other supporters attended a rally outside the Vancouver School Board offices, organized by COPE as part of the grassroots campaign, No Cuts, No Closures. COPE’s elected school board trustee Suzie Mah spoke at the rally in support of students and teachers.
An impressive group of students from the Ideal Mini School attended and spoke at the rally. Socialist Alternative interviewed two students, Eileen and Sophia, after their speech. Ideal Mini is a unique school with a small student body that fosters a tight-knit community among students and teachers. Eileen and Sophia spoke about how attending Ideal Mini School profoundly improved their experience of the school system: “you know everyone, everyone knows you; it feels like a second home, honestly.”
As Eileen and Sophia put it, “the VSB has been trying to get rid of our program for decades,” but it has been met with resistance from students, parents, and faculty. This year the board is trying to move the Ideal Mini School from its current dedicated building into a larger building at Winston Churchill Secondary School. The students see this move as an attempt to indirectly end the Ideal Mini program. They told us, “From what we know, [Winston Churchill] is over capacity and there are no open rooms.” The students and parents were never consulted about this change. The VSB organized a Q&A session on the day of the rally, but the students heard about it less than two hours in advance. Eileen and Sophia reported:
“They were trying to blindside us… they spoke at us rather than to us… everything they said was a deflection. They said their main goal was to alleviate our concerns, but they did the exact opposite of that… basically chaos ensued and now everyone is even more anxious at our school.”
Once the speakers had finished on the front steps of the VSB building, students and supporters flooded inside, where the VSB trustees were meeting. Several Ideal students sat through two hours of presentations of an arcane budget-making process. A follower of the budget process commented that it was bewildering to see how the overall budget balance can change by several millions of dollars from one meeting to the next for reasons that are difficult to understand. Student and teacher “stakeholder groups” had an opportunity to ask questions, often getting vague or unsatisfying answers from the school board bureaucrats.
The BC NDP government shares responsibility for creating this situation where students, parents, and teachers need to fight to defend their school system. The VSB is required by provincial law to balance the budget, so if the provincial government doesn’t provide enough funds to run the schools, the school board still must make it balance. The provincial government can raise taxes on the rich and highly profitable corporations, but the VSB doesn’t have this power. That’s why Vancouver students and parents need school board trustees that stand up and defend their interests.
School board trustees need to be putting pressure on the province, to demand they provide needed funds. Trustees need to make sure that if there is a shortfall, the money comes from executive and senior administrators’ pay, rather than programs and facilities that affect students’ learning conditions and teachers’ working conditions. The eight highest paid VSB bosses get over $200,000 a year — a total of nearly $2 million a year! There are also concerns that the VSB could argue to sell public land or rent it on long-term leases to balance the budget. The Board’s Land Asset Strategy report mentioned “surplus sites,” but they are redacted. It would be a disaster to sell off public land, and school trustees need to ensure that this won’t happen.
Vancouver’s school board is dominated by the right-wing ABC party, which is the friend of big business and the well off. It’s clear that the ABC trustees aren’t going to stand up to the province to demand higher taxes on the rich to fund schools, and they aren’t going to fight back against school closures and budget cuts. COPE trustee Suzie Mah is exemplary in her support of students’ and teachers’ interests. But Suzie has just one vote, which is why a grassroots working-class movement outside the VSB is needed to put pressure on the right-wing majority.
After the meeting on April 19, ABC trustee and school board chair Victoria Jung published a letter saying there were no immediate plans to close schools as part of the current budget process and accused “individuals or parties” of “using fear to get ahead.” But the VSB has closed schools in the past in order to balance the budget. Jung’s letter is careful to specify there are no immediate plans to close schools in this budget. But the process to initiate school closures can take months and trustees could trigger this process just as soon as the current budget is passed.
On May 1, VSB staff finally presented a balanced budget to the school trustees for their consideration. The ABC trustees tried to have the budget quickly approved at this meeting, despite concerns from students and teachers’ advocates that it was difficult to decipher what the budget’s implications were for school programs. COPE trustee Suzie Mah and OneCity trustee Jennifer Reddy voted against passing the budget on May 1, which delayed a final vote to May 10. At that meeting, Mah was the only trustee to vote against (Reddy did not attend).
In the 2013 fight for a $15 minimum wage in Seattle, only one councillor, Socialist Alternative’s Kshama Sawant, supported the campaign, while all other city councillors opposed it. But with Sawant’s support, the pressure of a mass movement outside city council forced the other councillors to back down and the movement won a $15 minimum wage in Seattle, the first of any major city in North America.
While the VSB budget for this year has been passed, the fight to stop cuts and closures of schools is not over. COPE and Socialist Alternative in Vancouver will continue to mobilize community members to stand up for the public school system. It will take a movement of parents and students to pressure the VSB to prevent cuts and closures. A strong campaign can expose the hypocrisy of elected officials and bureaucrats and force them to change course.
