| Some Calgary parents are concerned that the provincial government may spend money on closed public schools to make them appropriate for use as charter schools while public schools remain desperate for cash.
The Calgary Board of Education recently closed five inner-city schools, partly because of low enrolment and partly to reduce facility and operating costs at a time when school boards around the province are demanding provincial funding to upgrade schools and build new facilities in new suburbs. A recently approved charter school in Calgary has expressed interest in taking over one of the closed schools.
Although no decisions about future use of the closed schools have been made, a provincial government spokesperson told Fast Forward that money is sometimes provided to charter schools when they take over abandoned public schools to make purchases for new students.
Lynn Ferguson, a member of the Calgary Association of Parents and School Councils, says she doesn’t understand why the public school board isn’t given enough money for infrastructure upgrades at public schools while money is sometimes doled out after those schools are closed and taken over by a charter school.
"A lot of these (closed) public schools needed a lot of renovation money" that wasn’t forthcoming from the provincial government, Ferguson says. "(The government) then tells the school board to give the school to a charter school and they get dollars to renovate."
Martin Dupuis, a spokesperson for the provincial government’s Ministry of Infrastructure, disputes that notion. He says no decisions about the future of the closed schools have been made, but in the past, the government has only occasionally provided money to charter schools for equipment purchases. He adds that no money is automatically earmarked to charter schools upon their approval.
"We only provide equipment money. Since the school is owned by the school board, any renovations must come from their budget," Dupuis says.
"Infrastructure works with school boards to find appropriate space.... Every situation is different, but we only provide money in some cases for equipment."
Lois Abernethy of the Calgary Arts Academy and Research Centre, which was recently granted permission to open an arts-immersion charter school, says her group would like to be given permission to use one of the recently closed public schools, but isn’t expecting any renovation money from the provincial government.
"We want to be inner-city... but if any of those schools wouldn’t be available to us, then we could go rent space," Abernethy says. "We don’t really need money to make it more appropriate to our teaching style. We could work with almost any space."
Ferguson says she doubts whether there are enough strings attached to the "equipment money" to ensure charter schools don’t spend it in other areas, such as facility upgrades. Even if renovations aren’t in order for the new Calgary Arts Academy, she says the provincial government seems to be favouring charter schools over public ones.
"There’s a lot of people who want their own community schools," she says. "Why do these groups of (charter-school) parents get to jump the queue?" |
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