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The Anglophone East School District continues to get further and further behind financially, that according to a member of the District Education Council.
Angela Lawson says the budget for the coming year, includes funding from the province for 454 Educational Assistants, but they need at least 100 more than that, “Based on the assessments for September, we need 569, so we’re short, $2.2 million. This happens year, over year, over year. It gets to be really difficult to try and find where we are going to make up the rest of that money.”
She adds, “The Education Act requires us to provide EA’s to students of a certain assessment level. So, Priority one students, we are not allowed to refuse to provide these students with an EA. They need that service. So the numbers we have, 569, this is the bare minimum EA’s that we can operate with. Yet, we don’t have the money. So we have to pull from other places. We have to pull from transportation, we have to pull from building operations, we have to pull from facilities, so that means repairs and maintenance we can’t do. We don’t pay for some Psychologists, because we haven’t been able to fill those positions. What we do with that money, because we can’t fill the positions, we use the private system to do some of these assessments. If you hear from any parent, you’re going to hear that it is two or three years to have these assessments done. So the fact that we have to use that money to fund our EA’s is frustrating for us because we are getting further and further behind, just like our facilities.”
Lawson says Anglophone East receives the lowest per pupil funding in the province. She wants the province to provide equitable funding between the Anglophone and Francophone sector and equitable funding between all of the Anglophone districts.
When Lawson was first elected to the District Education Council, she remembers hearing they had about a $500, 000 gap, “It’s getting harder and harder for us to find this money. We are now sitting at $2.2 million. It’s a lot harder to find that. Just because we have been efficient, doesn’t mean we should have to continue to go without and to not have services available to our students because of a lack of funding, and that is where we are at.”
