‘An attack on school boards’: HRSB chair rebukes education minister
Posted Jan 27, 2011 06:00:17 AM.
This article is more than 5 years old.
The chair of the Halifax Regional School Board has fired back at the provincial Education Minister and other critics who have suggested that school boards are crying poor while sitting on piles of cash.
The board has been mostly silent throughout the Dexter government’s 22 per cent funding cut exercise but that silence was broken Wednesday night – not with a revelation of what the board learned through imagining big cuts, but with a rebuke to the education minister.
“This is being seen as an attack on school boards, plain and simple,” said board chair Irvine Carvery.
Board chairs are set to meet with Education Minister Ramona Jennex next week, but Carvery says the department’s release of about $45 million in accumulated surpluses across the province isn’t setting the stage well.
“I’m afraid this kind of action on the part of government is going to bring board chairs to the table not in the right frame of mind,” he said.
Carvery admits costs have gone up, but he says student achievement has improved as well. He also notes that much of the money is spent doing things the province says the board is required to do.
“School boards are not allowed to spend the money from their surplus without government approval,” he said. “Even if we wanted to spend the money the government would need to approve it.”
He says he’ll be writing the education minister with a message.
“We are fully prepared as a board to do our part but like I said, it stops at the school door,” he said. “We will not go inside that classroom and implement any kind of cuts that are going to impact on the education of the students of the Halifax Regional School Board.”
Carvery also notes Nova Scotia’s bad books would be worse without school board frugality.
