I went to the Fun Fair at Rawlinson School in the heart of Oakwood Village the other week. It was a blast. It was sunny and warm. I got to spend time with my kids, meet other parents, everyone had fun. But the fair, while fun, isn’t fair.
Rawlinson doesn’t have enough money. The province doesn’t provide enough funding to cover the costs of schools. So, schools like Rawlinson hold fundraisers like the Fun Fair every year to raise money to meet some of its smaller costs like computers, field trips, guest speakers, science programming, and the snack program.
I paid $100 to set up the Midtowners table and spent $50 in fair tickets for my kids. That money was hard to part with. Other parents were telling their kids that $20 in tickets was the limit. Our economy is tight. Everyone is feeling the squeeze.
But thanks to the Fun Fair, and the hard work of parent organizers, the school will likely be able to pay for the smaller items it needs. But no bake sale, book fair, or festival will be able to pay for what Rawlinson really needs. Smaller class sizes. My 6-year-old’s class is full. There are 23 kids in there. That’s Ontario’s cap on maximum class size.
The school also needs fixing. The kindergarten yard is a dirt slope to an iron fence. We all accept it, but really? Little kids deserve a little more than that. And for the longest time, the school entrance where kids enter the school at the back, was flooded. A small lake formed back there. Kids being kids made a big game out of it, but it should have been fixed long ago.
These are the things our taxes should be paying for, but don’t. There’s a funding shortfall of $4.5 billion just to keep school buildings in shape this year, even though Toronto taxpayers paid $2.185 billion in the city’s education property tax levy to the province this year. The province should be earmarking the money for our schools, but instead all of it goes to general revenue. That just means the Ford government does whatever it wants with that money
I wrote about only one school in our area. What about those schools whose communities can’t afford to raise funds? And what about those schools located in wealthy areas that have no problem raising money? That’s what’s really unfair.
I guess Doug Ford thinks his billion-dollar shortfalls will be paid in bake sale cookies.
