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BRITISH COLUMBIA

COPE trustees hit
NPA’s ‘cover-up’

of school cutbacks

The right-wing trustees who dominate
the Vancouver School Board are systemati-
cally covering up the deleterious effects of
22 years of Social Credit restraint.

That’s the charge levelled by the three
Committee of Progressive Electors’ board
members, following the release of a report
by senior VSB staff detailing the course and
class cutbacks and loss of staff caused by a
shortfall of $12 million in provincial
government funding since 1982.

The Non-Partisan Association: majority
of six trustees want to place a disclaimer on
the report, entitled ‘‘Facts at Your Finger-
tips,” a question-and-answer document

_ designed to aid senior staff, principals and

vice-principals in explaining basic facts
about Vancouver’s schools to the public.

The COPE trust-
ees — Pauline
Weinstein, Wes}
Knapp and Philj
Rankin — say the

reports prepared by
school board staff in
recent months,
should be made
public.

Weinstein said
“Facts,” which was
to be discussed at INET
the board’s, regular meeting Monday,
“reflects the cuts in programs and services
to our children from the last 2% years of
Social Credit restraint.

“Before this document was produced,
we’d have to ask board staff to prepare usa
bunch of facts and figures on given subjects
any time we were going somewhere to speak
about the schools situation,” said Weinstein.

“This isn’t the first time the board has
tried to muzzle the facts about the cutbacks
and keep them from the public,” charged
Rankin.

Rankin said the NPA trustees have “sat
on” information such as that contained ina
confidential report prepared by Vancouver
school superintendent Dante Lupini. The
report, a comparison of school districts in
large urban areas west of Quebec, shows
Vancouver to have among the smallest

_ number of senior staff and services, and the

lower cost per pupil in its size range.

Lupini presented the report at a confer-
ence of school superintendents from large
urban centres last spring, and has used the
document during several meetings with the
education minister and ministry staff.
COPE trustees argue it should be made
public, “‘but so far the board has sat on the
report,” said Rankin.

Rankin also accuses the NPA majority of
obfuscation, pointing to information released
with city tax notices last June. A diagram in
the traditional “pie” shape, denoting the
contributions to education from city tax-
payers and the provincial government, had
been altered several times from the original
prepared by school board staff, to “soft-
pedal” the effects of government cutbacks,
he said.

“The board refuses to publish a three-
year budget, even though the cutbacks are
slated to go on until 1986. They claim they
don’t want to tie the hands of the new
board — but we know they just want to
keep the worst from the public until after
the election Nov. 17,” Rankin charged.

COPE trustees point out that most of the
facts contained in “Facts at Your Finger-
tips,” and related documents are not secret.
Details of the effects of school cuts have
seen the light of day in various press articles
and statements from board members since
the beginning of restraint in February, 1982.

But set down in chronological order in

cold print, the facts present a damning
indictment of Victoria’s cutbacks.

A confidential document entitled “The
Effects of Budget Restraint and Provincial
Legislation” lays down the history of res-
traint from February, 1982 to April, 1984.

Viewed from the perspective of NPA
support for Socred education policies, it isa
potential embarrassment to NPA trustees
during the fall civic election.

For example, it notes: “May, 1983. The
board is informed by the Ministry of Educa-
tion, that, contrary to a previous under-
standing, 1982 surplus funds cannot be
applied to the 1983 fiscal year.” That entry
is followed by: ‘‘June, 1983. Trustees seek a
meeting with the new Minister of Educa-
tion, Jack Heinrich, but are informed that
the minister is not available for consultation
with the board at this time.”

Elsewhere, the document records that in
July, 1983, summer school enrolment
dropped because of the imposition of fees
and reduction in summer school centres.

“Effects” also details times when parents
and school employees met with trustees to
map strategies to counter the effects of cut-
backs. While in some cases, the result was a
combined protest to the government — at
the urging of COPE trustees — in most
other cases, the response to Socred cuts
from the NPA trustees has been silence,
COPE trustees charge.

“Facts at Your Fingertips” is a far more
innocuous document, providing as it does
information for school officials to answer
questions from the public. Nonetheless, it
drew the fire of Bryan Hannay, one of the
most right-wing of the Vancouver trustees.

Hannay told the Vancouver Sun last
week the document contained “half truths
and inaccuracies” and charged that “anyone
reading it from cover to cover would get a
very negative view of what’s happening.”
He also charged that “Facts” was prepared
without the trustees’ knowledge.

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"T1991 TRUSTEES

AND

Vancouver School Board

r
HE EFFECTS OF BUDGET RESTRAINT

PROVINCIAL LEGISLATION

FT

CONFIDENTIAL VANCOUVER SCHOOL BOARD DOCUMENT...handy primer of Socred
cutbacks the NPA trustees would prefer to bury.

Both Lupini and the COPE trustees
defend the document, saying it is accurate
and that its release followed previous board
approval.

“The board had agreed that the cuts
should be made public,” said Weinstein.
(Board Information Officer)Chuck Gosbee
kept asking them what kind of report they
wanted. They of course said nothing,
because they don’t want that kind of infor-
mation made public.”

_ Lupini said the report was an “adminis-
trative initiative” to put into print some-
thing that was approved by the board one
year ago. The only inaccurate part, he said,
concerned teacher layoffs in 1985-86, which
will not be as severe as projected because
several senior teachers have opted for early
retirement.

Meanwhile, the effects of the cutbacks
are being felt as students return to school.
COPE trustee Wes Knapp, also an official
in the B.C. Teachers Federation, reports

that one third of the school in the Van-

couver system are “in chaos.” ——
“We've had reports that there are literally

‘hundreds of classes extremely large, with

enrolments running from the high 30s to the
low 40s. Some 30 schools are undergoing
significant changes,
teachers from one place to another.

“But there’s not a great deal of flexibility.

with transfers of -

There’s no money to hire more teachers,
and 228 teacher positions were cut this
year,” said Knapp.

The hardest hit program, he reported,
has been English as a Second Language,
with all the staff assistants laid off.

“Many of those children still don’t speak
English — but they’re being stuffed into
larger classes, without the benefit of super-
visory aides,” related Susan Davis, presi-
dent of the Vancouver Elementary School
Teachers Association.

Class sizes in Vancouver’s elementary

- and secondary schools have always been

among the highest in the province, said
Davis, adding that the latest cuts “have put
our school system back 15 years.”

In response, the association is working
on a class size survey, to be released at the
end of September for public scrutiny, she
said.

Exposing the effects of the cutbacks is
also-COPE policy, said Weinstein.

She charged that Hannay’s comments
over the, “Facts”.document “‘confirms our
suspicions that this board just wants to
cover up the effects of the cuts in our system,
to protect them and their Socred friends.

“We’re going to fight for the release of
that information, so that people can see the
extent of the cutbacks, and push for an end
to destruction of public education,” she
asserted.

The period following the election of a
Tory majority will see a “sharper con-
frontation between those seeking to get
the Mulroney government to live up to
its promise of jobs and corporate inter-
ests which are striving to push the
government to the right and towards cuts
in social programs, the central executive
committee of the Communist Party said
last week.

As a result, the CP warned in its
statement following the Sept. 4 vote,
“unity of the progressive forces will be an
urgent necessity.

“In these conditions, working people
face a two-fold task — on the one hand
to compel the Mulroney government to
fulfil those promises made to the people
and, on the other hand, to stop the
implementation of a ‘hidden agenda’ of
promises to the corporations and the
Reagan administration,” it said.

Mulholland, president of the Bank of
Montreal just a week after the election,
underscored the CP’s warning that busi-
ness interests would move quickly to
pressure Mulroney to enact a right wing
agenda.

Mulholland told an audience at the
exclusive Canadian Club that the Tories
should consider cutting the federal deficit
as its first priority — and should elimi-

Significantly, a speech by William -

‘Mass movement must check Tories’ — CP

nate universality in social programs as
the means.of doing that.

Mulroney was compelled even before
the election campaign to promise that he
would not alter universal social pro-
grams but comments from John Crosbie
and others have made it clear that
Socred-style social service cuts are indeed
part of the Tories’ hidden agenda.

“Unity of the progressive forces is an
urgent necessity to check and defeat this
drive,” the CP statement warned.

The CP committee noted that the
peace movement and the women’s
movement had been successful during
the election campaign in forcing political
parties to declare themselves on issues of
peace and women’s equality.

“Now that struggle must be con-
tinued, extended and widened so as to
constitute the nucleus of a growing
movement of the people which could
lead to the achievement of a progressive
coalition to challenge the policies of
monopoly and the multinationals.

“Now more than ever there is a need
to develop movements around the
demand for reduced hours of work with
no reduction in pay, increased pensions
and voluntary retirement combined with
the demand for a massive public invest-
ment policy, a housing program and job
creation. ..” it said.

The CP also emphasized the need “to

unite all the peace forces aroynd the
demand for a made-in-Canada foreign
policy of peace and di ment”
including support for a nuclear freeze,
and the non-first use of nuclear weapons,
as well as the demands advanced by the
Peace Petition Caravan Campaign.

It urged that concentrated attention be
given to the Peace Petition Caravan set
for this October as well as the Canadian
Labor Congress lobby on jobs called for
during the May CLC convention.

“Now more than ever there is a need
to mount an ever more effective fight-
back against the union-busting, wage-
cutting drive of monopoly and _ its
governments and in support of the
organization of the unorganized,” it
added.

Pointing out that the NDP in Parlia-
ment “cannot do the job alone,” the
statement emphasized the need for “a
well-balanced combination of parlia-
mentary and extra-parliamentary action.

“As our party warned, the federal elec-
tion will not provide solutions to the
various problems facing working people
and the country,” the statement said.
“Their solution depends upon the rise
and the power of the mass movements
and on the united effort of working
people directed to curb the power of the
monopolies and win the struggle for
peace and jobs.”

Pe ree ee eee Ce ee ee ee ee See Ty SO Re

PACIFIC TRIBUNE, SEPTEMBER 19, 1984 ¢ 3