Thank you for providing this opportunity to comment on your preliminary 2005/06 Budget. We continue to appreciate the openness of your Budget Process and your willingness to engage in public discussion.

Recognizing that your timeframes for reviewing and making changes to the preliminary proposals are very condensed, we would first like to say that we think you have been successful in responding to the need for a greater number and variety of staff in Vancouver’s schools. The loss of non-enrolling teachers and student support workers over the past three years (and more) has left gaping holes in the supports and services that students should be receiving. We are glad to see that many of these supports and services will be restored. We are also glad to see increases in both office staff and administration as it is important for people in the school community, especially students, to enter a school office without feeling that everyone there is too busy to help them.

We understand that the proposals you have made will prevent the need for layoffs in the year ahead. We believe that students will benefit from this greater stability, but we cannot help but wonder what other proposals might have been made if just some of the funds being used to create new positions – and perhaps offset redundancies from declining enrollment - were redirected to other needs.

Related to this, our one significant uncertainty about your Budget proposals is in relation to the 18 FTEs that you will assign to support “Teaching, Learning and Development.” Frankly, we don’t fully understand what these 18 FTEs will be doing. While our own Statement of School Needs identifies having well supported teachers as a minimum requirement in all schools, and while the “Teaching, Learning and Development” proposal may well be an effective innovation to support teachers, we would need more information before we could honestly say that this proposal responds to that need and deserves to be a priority for new spending in the next school year.

Our last comment is not directly related to the proposals you are considering. It is a capital expenditure issue. A well – and safely – equipped playground is a basic need for every elementary school. We have noticed an increasing number of schools where parents are turning to corporate sponsors or committing to major fundraising efforts to pay for playground equipment. That parents will go to great lengths to build new playgrounds for their children is an endorsement of the basic need that playgrounds serve; it should not be exploited as a way to download costs. We take the position that the Ministry of Education is required, by legislation, to provide adequate learning resources for all students who are participating in the educational program. Relying on parent fundraising to provide basic school equipment, such as a playground, is a form of private subsidy and can lead to significant inequities between schools. We raise this issue because we believe this is something you should look at in the weeks and months ahead and deal with at a policy level.

We conclude with our final thanks for your efforts to be inclusive and publicly engaged in this budget process. We have outlined some areas of concern and we are confident you will consider them.