Parents who have children with special needs can’t be guaranteed that assistance for their child will be available come September, Education Director Wayne McAndrew told public school board trustees last night.
In fact, the school board won’t know how many special education assistants it can hire until sometime this summer, he added.
“For many of the students we have served, we could be in a position not to offer these services,” he warned. “There’s a high degree of risk and you’ll be very vulnerable.”
Due to the new funding model, McAndrew said hundreds of millions of dollars that used to be held locally for high needs kids are being held in Toronto.
“If we wish to provide these services which we have done in the past to these students, we have to make specific applications [for funding],” he noted.
McAndrew has people working overtime filling out the necessary paperwork but he stressed the final decision on whether funding for special education services is doled out lies solely with the Ministry of Education and Training.
And with 2.2 million kids in the public education system alone, McAndrew said that means tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of applications have to be made.
“They will be visiting this board and others in the summer [to review applications],” he noted.
In other school board news, construction on the “multi-use” facility is moving swiftly, with the end of January now the target date for completion.
But trustee Dennis Brunn said Confederation College should be able to occupy its part of building in September.
“The walls on the rest of the school portion will be going up soon,” he added. “The quality of the construction is excellent.”
“If you go to that site today and the next few days, you’ll see people working on the outside walls, you’ll see people working on the inside of the walls, you’ll see people doing wiring,” noted McAndrew.
“There’s a lot of workers on the job,” he added.
Also at last night’s board meeting:
•teachers will be participating in a “teacher transfer night” tomorrow (McAndrew noted several teachers were interested in switching schools in the board and so they decided to try an exchange night);
•Robert VanCauwenberghe, David Hickling, Cheryl Low, and Rene Hogue had their applications for early retirement accepted by trustees;
•trustees accepted the retirements of Marilyn Allan from Fort Frances High School and Edna Donovan of Atikokan High School;
•teachers Don Graham and Arlene Robinson of Atikokan Elementary School were given a 0.5 leave and a 0.4 leave respectively for the next school year;
•trustees approved contracts for window replacements at J.W. Walker and Alberton schools totalling more than $111,000; and
•trustees approved a budget of $21.5 million for revenues and expenditures for the eight-month period ending Aug. 31.
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