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By Jim Coggins
INDEPENDENT schools in B.C. – the majority of them Christian – are facing several new challenges, according to Fred Herfst, executive director
of the Federation of Independent School Associations (FISA).
In late 2009, the B.C. Ministry of Education announced that kindergarten will
move from a half-day program to a full day, beginning in September 2011. The
Ministry is providing funding to enable half of B.C.’s elementary schools to move to full-day kindergarten, beginning this coming September.
Herfst told BCCN that kindergarten remains voluntary in B.C.; the required age to start school is
six. This means independent schools will have to decide if they want to offer
full-day kindergarten. If they offer it in 2011, they will receive funding. If
they decide not to, or continue with half-time, they will receive no funding at
all.
There will be financial implications for independent schools, which receive only
50 percent of the operating grants that public schools receive. The rest of the
cost will have to be made up from tuition and fundraising.
This means independent schools will have to make a decision. More properly,
Herfst said, parents will have to decide.
It is fundamentally a “parenting issue,” he asserted. Will parents want to have their children at home longer, or will
they prefer to send them for more formal education earlier?
“If 90 percent of the parents in a school community want full-day kindergarten,
the school will do it,” he observed.
The second challenge, Herfst said, is the Harmonized Sales Tax (HST), which will
increase schools’ costs in July.
There is some possibility the government may offer schools rebates or funding
increases to offset the increased costs. In that case, FISA is “asking that the independent schools get whatever the public schools get.”
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Nevertheless, independent schools are generally financially stable, and Herfst
said the HST will not cause huge difficulties.
A larger concern may be enrollments. Because fewer babies are being born, public
school enrollments have been falling slowly.
However, enrollment at independent schools in B.C. has continued to rise
steadily.
Nevertheless, Herfst said enrollment in independent institutions is expected to level off and remain static for the next few years.
If an individual school sees an enrollment decline, it could cause financial
problems.
February 2010
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