TORONTO- Ontario's school system isn't prepared for the declining enrolment challenge and the government should look to other provinces for ways to integrate community services into schools in an effort to keep them open, according to a new report released Thursday.
The annual report by People for Education found Ontario schools have shown a marked improvement when it comes to issues such as class size but adds the government "lacks a forward-thinking vision" when it comes to addressing enrolment, which is expected to drop by 500,000 over the next 15 years.
The study found public school enrolment has shrunk by about 90,000 students since 2002 and that at least 50 schools are currently slated for closure while some 300 are involved in accommodation reviews.
"We're at a moment in Ontario right now where it is possible that we could use declining enrolment and other public policy issues as a chance to open up our schools, to make them live up to the enormous potential they have as a kind of community asset," executive director Annie Kidder said.
"But that's going to take some new policy at the provincial level and it's going to take a lot of leadership at the provincial level to make this happen."
Kidder suggested Ontario look to Saskatchewan's School Plus program or Quebec's Community Learning Centres initiative, which have successfully integrated things like dentistry clinics, community computer labs, public libraries and public health services into schools.
According to the report, Manitoba also provides funding for community schools that "act as a hub for a broad range of services, supports and opportunities that strengthen and support schools, families and communities."
"It's to shift our... way of thinking about school buildings in particular from the way we think of them now, which is kind of isolated from everything else," Kidder said.
The report, which is based in large part on a survey of 68 of 72 Ontario school boards, found that 90 per cent of Grade 3 and 6 students are passing their standardized tests.
Class sized have also been significantly reduced and the ratio of special education and English-as-a-second-language teachers to students is improving, Kidder said.
Still, she cautioned that schools are continuing to raise huge amounts of private money, often to help pay for the sort of things the government should be covering.
According to the report, schools fundraised nearly $600 million last year - $29 million more than was raised the previous year.
"There's cases where parents are funding extensions on school buildings and new libraries," she said.
"It causes inequities in the system where you have some schools that are really good at getting grants or doing the fundraising... who will be much better off than schools that are in communities that can't do that."
Both the New Democrats and Progressive Conservatives welcomed the report's suggestions, noting the province has failed to come up with a plan to address the issue of declining enrolment. The opposition suggested the Liberal government is stalling until 2010, when it has promised to conduct a full review of the education funding formula.
But Education Minister Kathleen Wynne dismissed the idea, noting the government has made changes to the funding formula every year since taking office in order to make it less enrolment based and that the review in 2010 is more an evaluation of those changes.
She also welcomed the idea of integrating community services into schools and suggested it's already happening.
Several schools have public libraries, she said, adding a pilot project is currently underway at several schools to make autism services for children more seamless.
"We need to look at our schools as the hubs of communities and we're going to be asking our declining enrolment work group to look at those issues," Wynne said.
"When a school is consolidated, or when there's a school closure, or when there's a new school being built, we need to make sure we're looking at the whole community."
