Director of the local Catholic School Board says it is too early to tell what the impacts will be
Ontario has increased its education funding, but there's a catch.
The province has announced that overall funding will be $24.66-billion, up slightly from the $24.53-billion this year.
But with rising enrolment, it means the amount boards receive per student is dropping.
Director of the Windsor-Essex Catholic District School Board Terry Lyons says it is going to take a few weeks for each board to figure out its share of the funding.
At this point, he says it is too early to tell the impact of the changes to the funding, teacher retirements and programming.
"Right now it is just the provincial data in terms of what they are providing for the entire province, but we don't have enough information as to what it looks like in our local school board, so it is very hard to deciminate at this point how that is going to play out and what the overall benefit or loss is at this time."
He says the board doesn't even have all of its retirements yet, so the staffing effects are unclear.
On the surface, Lyons says the attrition protection fund sounds great, but since the teachers aren't being replaced, there may be an impact on programming.
"Say you cut 20 teachers or 30 teachers out, what does that do to your programming, how many courses are you removing from the system and how do you balance that out to meet the needs of our students which is the key primary focus that we have," he says.
For this school year, boards received $12,300 per student but with the new funding, it means boards will get $12, 246 per pupil but Lyons says it is not as simple as just a $54 loss per student.
Education Minister Lisa Thompson says with the $1.6-billion attrition protection fund, "it is expected" that there will not be any teacher layoffs because of class sizes and e-learning changes.
The province announced last month that high school class sizes are increasing from 22 to 28 over four years, while the average class size for Grades 4 to 8, will go up by one student.
AM800 News has calls to both the local catholic and public school boards for reaction.