Trustee says they got 24 hours to decide on government-SSBA deal

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A school board trustee is raising red flags after a four-year funding deal between the Saskatchewan School Board Association (SSBA) and the Government of Saskatchewan was recently announced.

The trustee, who spoke with the Leader-Post on the condition on anonymity for fear of reprisal from the SSBA, said members of their board were only given “24 hours to say yes or no to this agreement.”

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The multi-year funding agreement (MFA), prescribes a $356.6 million floor for funding in the 2024-25 fiscal year until 2027-28 for additional classroom supports. Minister of Education Jeremy Cockrill said this money “will address important issues like classroom size and complexity,” in the announcement last week.

The $356.6 million represents an increase of $45,600,000 from the budget last year with $40.7 million going toward “classroom supports,” and $4.9 million earmarked for pilot programs, according to the MFA.

All this money is subject to appropriation, the MFA also notes.

The trustee said the deal was floated by their school board late in the day on Tuesday, March 5, but the timeline was unlike anything they had witnessed in their time on the board.

“We were told that we needed to have a very tight turnaround on it,” they said in an interview Friday.

At first there was some push back to the agreement, given that the provincial budget is not yet public. But that changed somewhat when Premier Scott Moe revealed part of the upcoming education budget in a video posted to social media early the next evening.

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The trustee said the announcement put further pressure on their board to make a decision on the deal, which was then officially announced Friday morning.

And even with the increase, the money won’t go far, they argued, especially for urban schools.

“It is going to be nowhere near even the needs that we have currently, let alone the needs that we’re going to have in the years to come with growing enrolment rates,” they said. “It’s nothing.”

Each year the government “cuts and cuts and cuts, so we have to cut and we get most of the blame, but all of our funding comes directly from the provincial government.”

When asked to comment on how the deal unfolded, a statement from the SSBA provided Friday said its president, Jaimie Smith-Windsor, will not comment “further on details of our process with our membership. As she said, the SSBA would not have proceeded without the support of our membership.”

“She couldn’t speak to the process each board had around engaging its trustees on this. Our members are the 27 boards (not individual trustees) and our mechanism is through the board chairs,” the statement continued.

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Throughout negotiations, the Saskatchewan Teachers Federation (STF) has been pushing for language and funding related to classroom complexity and composition to be included within the collective agreement as way to make sure money makes its way into classrooms without the possibility of appropriation or rollbacks.

The trustee said they understand why the STF is taking this stance. “There is no reason to trust this government. So I understand them wanting to have something in writing,” said the trustee.

Still, they agree with the SSBA that enshrining those matters into the contract would make it difficult for some divisions to address their specific needs. Northern schools, for example where there is a lower teacher to pupil ratio may need to consider incentives to retain teachers more than they need to worry about hiring additional staff, said the trustee.

alsalloum@postmedia.com

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