Sea to Sky school board comments on funding review

An agenda item added during the Feb. 13 Sea to Sky School District board meeting provoked a discussion of more than an hour as the trustees went over the 22 recommendations of a funding model review.

In February 2018, the Ministry of Education contracted an independent panel to review how the province's education funding model is structured. While this will not impact the amount of funds the province provides, it could have lasting impacts on who gets the funding and how it can be spent.

Much of the discussion surrounded parts of the first recommendation: Special needs should be covered first, including Indigenous students, unique district characteristics and inclusive education.

"I think we all agree with this recommendation," the board's secretary-treasurer Mohammed Azim said.

The recommendation for determining funding, in simple terms, is to consider some of the unique challenges—such as the distance of the school from services, the extreme weather a school may have to consider, and the like.

"We benefit from this," superintendent Lisa McCullough said of the unique school characteristics and geographic factors. She used Pemberton's Blackwater Creek Elementary School as an example since it receives funding for how far away it is located from other schools. Without that funding, McCullough added, the school would have to close.

"There may only be 10 kids there, but otherwise those kids would be on a bus for two and a half hours," she said.

The addition of funding for overcapacity in the same recommendation, however, concerned trustees that SD48 would have to give funding to other districts. If the Sea to Sky District will lose funding, McCullough questioned how they'll know the other districts tried to efficiently address their overpopulation issues rather than just receive more money.

"There would have to be an increase in rules to make me confident that that wouldn't be a cash grab," she said. "What would motivate me as a superintendent to go tell 100 angry parents that they're moving to the school down the street when I actually get funding if I leave them there?"

Board chair Rick Price suggested an auditing process would help.

As for the special education funds, there are two main categories: students who have less common, high-cost issues, and students whose needs are more common in most communities. Funding for the first set of students will stay the same, where the school will work with doctors' designations.

But according to the funding model review, students with more common learning needs - such as a learning disability or moderate behaviour issues - would no longer need to be formally diagnosed by a doctor to be eligible for funding. Instead, schools would be given funds for special education they could distribute as necessary.

A recent audit of the SD48's special education funding found only one of the district's 289 students with special needs was no longer eligible under the current funding plan.

"What I see is an unintended consequence of the way we do things now," Price said. "Sometimes before a kid gets the help he or she needs, we first convince them they have a deficit ... Give them the enabling support they need without the necessity to first inadvertently convince them that they are riddled with deficits. That doesn't do any good for anybody."

Trustee Cynthia Higgins asked what the long-term implications of removing a required diagnosis could mean for students.

"I love the idea that we could go ahead and not label kids and get them the money they need quickly," Higgins said. "I'm curious if that label, which is so not great for kids to have, is advantageous for them in the future because it identifies them to maybe be exempt from taking courses or having to do requirements to graduate."

McCullough said students may still need to provide their education history to post-secondary, but the K to Grade 12 public system could support them with a report or counsellor testimony instead of a formal diagnosis.

Superintendent McCullough said Recommendations 9 and 10 are problematic for many districts. The review calls for changing funding from the number of courses taken to based on the number of students, which can be much lower. It could impact how many advanced courses can be offered to students in rural schools who need to be competitive for applying to university or college.

"One of the critical factors in our grad rate," McCullough said, "is simply the requirement that our students take eight courses and not have spares."

In SD48, students haven't been given spares for seven years in order to keep them on track to graduate and so they aren't given unsupervised time at school.

"This has been a critical factor for kids who are a little wayward and maybe things are a little unstructured in their life to stay structured and stay on track. It's absolutely affected our grad rate. Now the incentive for the principal will be to create spares to offer some kids the ninth course," she said.

The board will submit their comments and concerns to the ministry, asking for clarifications on several recommendations. Azim said the new model is not expected to become effective until the 2020-2021 school year, to give time for feedback and implementation.