Deal or no deal?
TDSB budget - the price is right, or is it?
The debate over the Toronto District School Board’s cuts to balance its 2006-2007 budget opened with a lady in the front row beating her canes together and singing a rousing protest song against any cuts to school funding. It was a perfect opening to a night filled with a circus mix of partisanship, buffoonery and last minute rewriting of board spending, which was intermittently filled with acrobatic
maneuvering under the big top of the TDSB.
The meeting on October 25th/early 26th was a culmination of almost five months of discussions between trustees,
the Ontario Ministry of Education and community groups on how to solve the $83.9 million deficit the board had posted in its June budget for 2006-2007. The mission of the night was to somehow
agree on one of two ways to cut the board’s costs from $2.336 billion to the $2.252 billion the Provincial Education Ministry is willing to fund. If they did not balance the budget that night, the Ministry would send in a supervisor to take over control of the board and make the cuts. It took the board seven hours to finally come up with a compromise budget, which was written in four minutes,
to keep control of the TDSB.
“I would vote for a rubber duck if it balanced the budget,” said trustee Sheine Mankovsky, in the first of many rounds of discussion on what plan to support for this year’s spending. After almost seven hours of these discussions,” which often bore striking resemblances to personal attacks, I was ready to pull my ducky right out of the tub and offer it for voting. I was hopeful that at least one of the trustees would share Mankovsky’s confidence in the bath-time bureaucrat.
However, there were some who just didn’t trust the little guy, such as Irene Atkinson, who called any cuts, “pure, unadulterated political expediency,”
and Elizabeth Hill who likened them to, “cutting off the toes to fit the shoe.” Hill fervently declared that she would never vote for any cuts, no matter how small.
The budgets still could have passed easily, though, if those who supported
cuts had been able to come to any kind of agreement. Instead they voted down each other’s motions again and again and claimed their opponents were only voting for political ends. Bruce Davis went so far as to begin singing Carly Simon’s “You’re so Vain.” While he melodiously crooned, “You’re so vain you probably think this budget's about you,” the debate raged on.
It’s not like the budgets had any major differences either. They both shared the key switch of $40 million from facility renewal to general maintenance
(sounds confusing? It is), which will see future improvements, like our new windows, halted. They also did not include earlier suggestions of closing pools, or schools, although these will need to be done in the long run.
The differences between the two budgets were all very minor and included whether to reduce funding for lunch -room supervisors and when the board will begin to stop hiring Educational Assistants for the early grades. Jarvis’s trustee Sheila Ward, the chair of the board, pointed out how I felt about the whole process in her critique of her fellow
trustees: “How stupid will we look in the eyes of the public tomorrow when we can’t pass a budget that does no harm.”
Yet, when she said this, the stupidity
had barely begun.
Later in the night, trustees attempted to have a majority walk-out so that they would not meet quorum and the meeting would be forced to end. Not enough left, however, and everyone, but one, filtered back in unhappily. This one was the ever musical Bruce Davis.
Doug Sarro, a former student trustee, summed it up best, “I knew they were nuts, but I never thought they were this nuts,” and one of the current student trustees, Nick Kennedy of North Toronto C.I., suggested I call my article “The Trustees Run Away.”
Unlike many of their colleagues, the student trustees kept their heads straight all night and represented students
extremely well. Nick Kennedy and Ted Kuhn, Martingrove C.I., condemned their fellow trustees for their childishness,
and pleaded with them to be at least as mature as those they are supposed to help.
Meanwhile, just to keep the night as confusing as possible, soft ethereal
muzak would begin to flow out of the boardroom’s speakers intermittently throughout the meeting. The music was reminiscent of a soft opening sequence, similar to the meeting itself, which was a lead up to the municipal election. Throughout the meeting, many of the trustees had their eyes firmly set on the November 13th election. They, therefore,
viewed the budget as a tight-rope to be walked rather than a problem to be solved.
In the end the board passed a hybrid of the two original budgets, after seven hours of discussion and four failed votes. This hybrid was created in about four minutes, in a last ditch effort to find a resolution. Many of the board members didn’t even know what the final budget outlined; instead some were playing with their hair or taking a quick nap as it was described. Some even seemed offended when trustee Howard Goodman suggested
that they might want to have a piece of paper in front of them.
The final draft passed, and the TDSB was kept under trustee control, yet it is frightening to think that our school programs live and die by last minute decisions, of overly tired and overly partisan trustees.
Trustee Josh Matlow blaimed the trustees' last minute budget woes on their childish approach, saying, “We’re not mature enough,” and he’s correct. I’ve never seen even a student council meeting have as much squabbling as the board, and perhaps that’s the answer. It’s time that students take their schools into their own hands and have a say on how they’re run. We need to take more opportunities,
as the student trustees do, to get our voices heard.
Meanwhile the TDSB is proving the old circus quote that “there’s a sucker born every minute.” Get heard; make sure that the sucker isn't you.
JargOnline 2006 - 2007 