Provincial budget cuts means TDSB needs to make some tough choices

ERIC HEINO

April 8, 2010

The Toronto District School Board (TDSB) has been playing musical chairs with its budget and now that the province has removed one more seat, it's a mad race to determine the odd one out.

It's complicated, but Trustee Josh Matlow attempted to summarize the problem.

"What we have been doing for the last four years is taking between 30 and 50 million dollars each year from our regular annual education formula grants, the GSNs (Grants for Student Needs) for facilities and maintenance and major repairs grants and taking it and putting it toward our (maintenance) deficit. We have then been supplementing that gap by taking money from the Good Places to Learn grant," Matlow said. "Now that the government has said they are no longer giving us the Good Places to Learn grant, even though we still have about 35 million dollars of over 400 million total we received, once that is gone this year then we are not going to have anything to fill in that gap of $30 to $50 million we take from our regular grants."

To recap, money for backlogged maintenance and repairs was coming from a General Student Needs grant, which was in turn coming from another provincial grant, which no longer exists. Long story short, what was a balanced budget before provincial cuts now needs to either defer much-needed building maintenance or authorize millions of dollars in cuts elsewhere in the operating budget.

Suggestions at a budget committee meeting on April 7 included cuts to special education, educational assistant positions, reduction in principal and senior staff salaries and sale of capitol assets. The board could also raise money through energy conservation, better promotion and other revenue-generation programs.

The budget must be voted on by the board during their June 23 general meeting, but before any decisions are made official, staff will be hosting four public meetings across the city to hear how the public wants to proceed with decisions required to balance next year's operating budget.

Trustees were unsure about whether these meetings would be open-ended or focus on a specific set of questions prepared by board staff in advance. TDSB chair and member of the budget committee, Trustee Bruce Davis, was frustrated by a series of setbacks to a committee that thought they had a balanced budget in March, until the provincial government threw them a curve.

"I oscillate between thinking we can clean up this budget in a few weeks and pulling my hair out," Davis said. "Either we are over-servicing our children or we are underfunded... we can produce a balanced budget within a month, but it's a question of which budget do you want?"

While many parents may frown upon service reductions in areas such as special education, which is in theory funded by specific provincial grants but ends up drawing an additional $20 million from General Student Needs funding, simply deferring $30 million in maintenance projects would add to an existing $2.8 billion backlog for repairs and renewal across the city.

Most trustees seemed to agree the solution lies somewhere in the middle, involving a mix of cuts and deferring most, but not all, maintenance.