Ottawa Sun
Published: Wednesday, March 25, 2009

Failing grade on portables

In tomorrow's budget the McGuinty Liberals will set aside $32.5 billion for infrastructure including some $4 billion or so for education projects over the next few years. In the scrums afterward, expect the premier to speak eloquently about the importance of education, enlightened self-interest, international competition, etc.

But for all his nice words, a story by Jon Willing in the Sunday Sun about run down portables at St. Matt's Catholic High School in the east end shows the darker record of the McGuinty government on education. And the 22 portables complete with rotting wooden panels and missing wooden rails at St. Matt's are not a one-off problem.

Lester B. Pearson up on Ogilvie Rd. has 15 portables, many of them dating back 20 years. St. Pete's Catholic High School on Charlemagne Blvd. with had 22 at last count. St. Pete's just happens to back onto my property. When we moved there in 2002 the school had 27 portables on site. To be fair, an expansion was built and all but three were removed. But like persistent plantar warts they just came back over the last few summers.

And this is just three Catholic high schools in Orleans alone.

ROTTING

Across the city the situation in other boards is the same. I have just returned from four Caribbean countries and all of them, regardless of their limited economic means, at least have the decency to house their students in concrete and steel buildings. But here in Ontario, rotting portables for our tweens and teenagers are just fine, thank you. And we wonder why dropout rates are still too high and some kids just can't engage?

Local school boards, with input from parents, have prepared capital plans for needed and long-overdue school additions. Yet the educrats at Mowat Block in Toronto (wonder if they know where Ottawa is?) have shot back that these plans don't meet funding grant criteria and point that enrolment is projected to decline by 600 in the case of the three Orleans schools above by 2013. But did they forget to factor in local intermediate school closings, hmm?

This portables issue is pure bureaucratic bafflegab and points to a failure of local political leadership. Combined with the record number of split-grade classes at the primary level across the city and the record of the McGuinty Liberals -- despite their progress on reducing pupil-to-teacher ratios in Grades 1 to 3 -- is mediocre at best.

Despite this issue being a matter of public advocacy, record and study, it appears as though the Ministry of Education is reticent to spend funds on adequate buildings for our students. The provincial criteria focuses on allocating funds to so-called "growth areas" first. But with our city poised next week to debate its mandatory five-year Official Plan amendment with a strong bias to focus growth inside the greenbelt, then this area and many schools that have been denied funds to date will logically fall into the aforementioned "growth areas."

One wonders if the educrats in Toronto are aware of this?

It's time that local Liberal MPPs and the premier are held to account for their failure on this file. Tomorrow's budget is their last chance to change their current grade of F when it comes to portables. The issue of properly funding public education capital projects should also emerge in this spring's provincial PC leadership selection process.

And sadly, it may take until the next provincial election in 2011 before we see a change of attitude, and frankly some policy maturity, on the issue of portable classrooms.