Education - Issue No. 6 - Wednesday, October 24, 2001

2001 Legislative Session: 2nd Session, 37th Parliament
SELECT STANDING COMMITTEE ON EDUCATION
MINUTES AND HANSARD

Present: Wendy McMahon, MLA (Chair); Reni Masi, MLA (Deputy Chair); Elayne Brenzinger, MLA; Brenda Locke, MLA; Sheila Orr, MLA; Richard Lee, MLA; Tom Christensen, MLA; Karn Manhas, MLA; Rob Nijjar, MLA; Jenny Kwan, MLA

Unavoidably Absent: Richard Stewart, MLA

1. The Chair called the meeting to order at 10 a.m.

2. The Chair advised the Committee of a brief business meeting to be held prior to tomorrow’s meeting.

3. The Committee heard from the following invited witnesses:
    1) B.C. Teachers’ Federation
        David Chudnovsky
    2) Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE)
        Barry O’Neill, President
    3) B.C. Confederation of Parent Advisory Councils
        Reggi Balabanov, President
        Brenda Turner

4. The Committee recessed from the 12:17 p.m. to 1:04 p.m.

5. The Committee continued to hear from the following invited witnesses:
    4) University College of the Cariboo
        Adrian Kershaw, Vice-President
    5) Confederation of University Faculty Associations of B.C.
        Robert Clift, Executive Director
        Darwyn Coxson
    6) Vancouver Community College
        Dale Dorn, President
    7) B.C. Confederation of Parent Advisory Councils, Advocacy Project
        Janet Phillips
        Cathy Bedard

6. The Committee adjourned to the call of the Chair at 5:02 p.m.

REPORT OF PROCEEDINGS
(Hansard)

SELECT STANDING COMMITTEE
ON EDUCATION



CONTENTS

		Page

Presentations		121
	D. Chudnovsky	121
	B. O'Neill	127
	R. Balabanov	133
	B. Turner	134
	A. Kershaw	141
	R. Clift	147
	B. Pfaffenberger	149
	D. Coxson	150
	D. Dorn	156
	J. Phillips	159
	C. Bedard	160
	L. Burgess	161
	E. Slanina	166

Chair:	* Wendy McMahon (Columbia River–Revelstoke L)
Deputy Chair:	* Reni Masi (Delta North L)
Members:	* Elayne Brenzinger (Surrey-Whalley L) * Tom Christensen (Okanagan-Vernon L) * Richard Lee (Burnaby North L) * Brenda Locke (Surrey–Green Timbers L) * Karn Manhas (Port Coquitlam–Burke Mountain L) * Sheila Orr (Victoria-Hillside L) * Rob Nijjar (Vancouver-Kingsway L) Richard Stewart (Coquitlam-Maillardville L) * Jenny Kwan (Vancouver–Mount Pleasant NDP) * denotes member present

Clerk:	Craig James
Committee Staff:	Wynne MacAlpine (Committee Research Analyst)

Witnesses:	Reggi Balabanov (President, B.C. Confederation of Parent Advisory Councils) Cathy Bedard (B.C. Confederation of Parent Advisory Councils) Lyse Burgess (Director, B.C. Confederation of Parent Advisory Councils; Saanich School District No. 63) David Chudnovsky (President, B.C. Teachers Federation) Robert Clift (Executive Director, Confederation of University Faculty Associations of B.C.) Darwyn Coxson (President, Confederation of University Faculty Associations of B.C.) Dale Dorn (President, Vancouver Community College) Adrian Kershaw (Vice-President, University College of the Cariboo) Larry Kuehn (B.C. Teachers Federation ) Barry O'Neill (President, Canadian Union of Public Employees B.C.) Dr. William Pfaffenberger (President, University of Victoria Faculty Association; Confederation of University Faculty Associations) Janet Phillips (B.C. Confederation of Parent Advisory Councils) Ellen Slanina (Chair, Saanich School District No. 63) Brenda Turner (B.C. Confederation of Parent Advisory Councils)

W. McMahon (Chair): Good morning. I'd like to welcome everybody to our meeting this morning. Our first presentation is from Larry Kuehn, B.C. Teachers Federation.

J. Kwan: I'm just wondering. Perhaps the schedule has also changed again, but yesterday I had an e-mail from the Clerk's office indicating that there was a small business item to be dealt with before we went to delegations.

W. McMahon (Chair): I apologize. We'll be dealing with that tomorrow morning rather than this morning.

D. Chudnovsky: Members of the committee, my name is David Chudnovsky. Larry Kuehn, who's sitting behind us, is a member of the staff of the B.C. Teachers Federation. He was the one who made the date, so I guess it was his name that you got, but I will be speaking on behalf of the delegation this morning.

We're very pleased to be here and thank the committee for hearing us this morning. I'm here speaking to you on behalf of the members of the B.C. Teachers Federation, who are the 45,000 teachers, the men and women who teach in the public schools of British Columbia. As you know, they teach in every community in the province. They are the teachers who work from kindergarten to grade 12 across the province. We're very pleased for the opportunity to speak with you this morning. I have a brief that I will distribute, but I'm a teacher, and I know that you don't distribute the brief first, because then the students will be looking at the brief and not listening to what I have to say. I'll be very happy to give you copies of the brief in a few minutes.

Let me begin by making a few comments about the context in which we have our discussion about public education. I need to tell you that teachers are anxious about that context. They're worried about that context. The government has recently announced a three-year freeze on funding for public education. We say to you that it's our belief that that is an announcement that government is prepared to break what was one of the fundamental promises in the election campaign. We were told on many occasions that public education would be protected and enhanced during the term of this government. It's important for us to say to you and important, we think, for you to understand that a freeze on funding for three years in the public education system is an announcement of dramatic cuts. To suggest that a freeze for three years is somehow protecting the system is, in the best interpretation, to make a tragic error.

To be concrete about this, I want to point out to you that last year, in the 2000-01 school year, the per-pupil funding for education in B.C. was increased by 4.2 percent. That was in one year. Those of us who work in schools and those of us who live in communities around the province know that in that year, with a 4.2 percent per-pupil increase, there were cuts. There were cuts to ESL programs. There were cuts to what we were able to do for students with special needs. There were cuts in art, music and drama programs. There were cuts to books and in supply and material budgets.

It's very important for us to impress upon you and leave you with the message that the notion that a funding freeze somehow protects or enhances what we're able to do in the public schools of this province is a tragic error. A funding freeze for three years will mean massive and escalating cuts to services for children. We think it important that we begin with that statement of context.

I want to deal with a number of specific issues, many of which government has put on the agenda in terms of its program for education in B.C. over the coming period. First, I'd like to deal with the issue of accessibility. A principle of our public education system and a principle about which we are tremendously proud — so should you be, and I'm sure you are — is the notion that our system is accessible. That is to say it provides an education and all of the advantages of that education to all students, whether they live in rural communities or urban communities, whether they live on the west side or the east side, whether they come from families which are rich or poor, whether those students come to us with English as their first language or English as their third or fourth or fifth language, which is often the case. We're committed together to accessibility to programs for all of those students, and it is a central pillar and a central part of our understanding of what our system is. So we call on you to think very carefully about accessibility as you develop program directions — to be concrete.

The suggestion has been made that targeted funding to local school boards — and I'll talk about local school board autonomy in a few minutes, because I think it's an important issue for all of us — be ended in several areas: that is, for aboriginal students, for students with special needs and for ESL. We think that's an error. It's an error because it undermines our commitment to accessibility.

We call on you to recommend that the targeted funding for aboriginal students be maintained. There has been a modest improvement in the success rates for aboriginal students in this province, but we should all be embarrassed about the success rates, and we take our share of that embarrassment as teachers and have looked to that issue very carefully over the last number of years. We should all be embarrassed about the success rates for aboriginal students, any way you measure them, in this province.

One of the factors in the modest improvement over the last few years in results and success for aboriginal students is the targeting of funds so that we can be assured that those resources that are necessary for us — there are not enough of them — to help improve the school experience of aboriginal students are in place. You know that we're still in a situation where aboriginal students' graduation rates are less than half of the broader school population. That's unacceptable, and we believe that the detargeting of funds for aboriginal students will take us in the wrong direction.

I want to speak to the issue of students with special needs for a few minutes. We believe that the support for students with special needs, needs to be maintained and improved. Now, some you will know — Reni certainly will know — that for many years there's been a debate about how we deal with the particular needs of students with special needs who have learning difficulties, behavioral difficulties, social and emotional difficulties, physical and mental handicaps. How is it that we deal with those situations? How do we deal with those students in our schools?

Over the last decade we've come down on one side of that debate, and we as teachers support that for the most part. The side of that debate that we've come down on is the inclusion of students with special needs in the regular program as much as we're able to do that.

Why do we support that? Why is it that teachers intuitively support that notion? It's because we know that we live together in a community. To the extent that we're able to bring all facets of that community together in the school community, we make progress in being able to live together and progress in the education outcomes for both those students with special needs and the others. Inclusion done well in our schools is a benefit both to the students with special needs and to the other students in those classes.

When we ask our members — and we do — their attitude towards inclusion of students with special needs, the preponderant majority of those members say: "We support the inclusion of students with special needs in the regular program." I need to tell you that our members are very worried about that program, because they see and know from their experience that the resources necessary to do that job as well as we should aren't there. Many teachers describe inclusion as dumping — dumping students with special needs into the regular program. That's unacceptable.

We need to make sure that this forward-looking policy, which is in the interests of both students with special needs and the broader community of students and schools, is supported with the resources necessary. Most school districts spend more than their allocated funding. School districts have been allocated targeted funding for students with special needs. Almost all the school districts in the province spend more than that on students with special needs. Why is that? It's because it isn't enough. The job can't be done with the level of funding that's been allocated up to now.

A second — or third; I can't remember — recommendation we make to you is that in your deliberations and in your work on developing program and policy recommendations for government with respect to education, you keep in the forefront of your mind the need to improve and increase the resources that we're able to use in working with students with special needs so that the policy of inclusion — which most of us support, and I trust that you do as well — is successful.

The third area I want to speak about briefly has to do with students in areas of low socioeconomic status. We know that hungry students have trouble learning. It's something that we all understand intuitively, but studies have been done that show it very clearly. By almost every measure, the average achievement of students from low socioeconomic groups is less than the average for higher income groups.

We go back to the issue of accessibility and our responsibility to every child. It is possible, though. We know from our experience. With additional resources, when we set our minds to it, when we have the will to provide the programs that are necessary for these students, they can and do achieve at a level comparable to the wider population. So we would ask that in your deliberations you not forget the 20 percent of students in this province who live below the poverty line.

In that context, I heard just last night the suggestion that the funding for the school lunch programs, the school food programs, which are absolutely necessary for some of our students so that they not be hungry…. We go to school in the morning, and students come to us hungry. That's a reality that teachers face every day. The suggestion has been made that the funding for the school food programs be moved from the Ministry of Children and Family Development to the Ministry of Education. We implore you: don't let that happen, because the result is that we will have a conflict between the ability of a child to eat and whether there are books in the classroom or teachers there. We can't afford that kind of conflict. That funding needs to be guaranteed. It can't be taken out of the wider education budget.

I'm sure there are others who will appear before you who will deal with the issue of post-secondary accessibility. I only want to say briefly that it's the strongly held position of our federation that accessibility for post-secondary students — those are our students when they graduate — be as wide as it can possibly be. We urge you to recommend that the freeze on post-secondary tuition continue, and we urge you to recommend that there be an increase in the level of funding to colleges and universities so they can expand the number of students they educate at that level.

Let me deal briefly with some of the program suggestions that have come from government, because we think they're important. We think they're provocative, and we think, in some cases, they're very useful. First, let me deal with the issue of choice. We know that the minister and the deputy have spoken to the issue of choice, and it appears that it's something that they want to push and that they're supportive of.

School districts around the province provide a wide variety of choices for students in the public system. We have Adlerian programs and Montessori programs. We have mini-schools and French immersion and Mandarin immersion and Russian immersion. We have various kinds of alternative programs, and the list goes on and on. Teachers in this province have been at the forefront of developing that level of choice for students, and we in the federation are supportive of choice.

We think it's very important that that support for choice and choices and alternatives for students be balanced with other principles and other needs and values. Let me talk, for a minute, about some of those needs and values. The first is equity. In other jurisdictions choice has often turned out on the ground to be a euphemism for more privilege for already privileged students. If that's what is meant by choice, we don't approve of it. If we are going to provide choices for students in terms of the programs, the schools and the type of organization of schools that they involve themselves in — and I said we support that — then those choices have to be available to every student, whether they're rural or urban, whether they live on the east side or the west side, whether their parents have the car to drive them to the other school or can't afford that car. If we're going to have a program that encourages and expands the choices for students, then that has to be equitable. That's the first value that we think is important in talking about choice.

The second has to do with resources. We work in a system which has been cut to the bone. We work in a system in which there have been significant cuts in programs for more than a decade. All you have to do is walk into a school and talk to teachers, principals and parents to know that the programs in our schools have been cut to the point where there is no more to cut. It is normal and everyday in this province that schools run out of paper supplies halfway through the year in January or February. It's a normal occurrence. In your work, looking at choice — and again, we support the notion of choice — we would urge you to make sure that that choice doesn't come at the expense of already inadequate resources. We can't steal from the broader program to provide what we call choice — equity and availability of resources.

The third point I want to make is a broader one, and it's one that I would urge you to think about. It has to do with the institution of the neighbourhood school. The neighbourhood school is one of the few institutions left in our society that encourages and builds community. We live in an increasingly isolated and isolating society. The neighbourhood school, as you know — you live in communities around the province — is a focal point for community. It's a place where students can comfortably arrive before school and comfortably stay after school. It's a place where parents can walk and share information, knowledge and wisdom with their kids and their kids' teachers and their kids' administrative officer. It's a place where the community garden committee or the Block Watch committee can meet on an evening and talk about building community, building security and building the kind of links and strength that communities need. While we support the notion of choices for students in schools, we would want you, in your work and in your policy development, to underline the importance, strength and centrality of the neighbourhood school to our communities.

Another element of government program and policy that we'd like to comment on has to do with on-line learning. Again teachers are at the forefront of innovation. Teachers across the province work hard to use the new technology to provide the best possible learning environments and the best possible learning experiences for students. Teachers have developed course material, on-line material, processes and curriculum materials to use both beside and within on-line learning activities. We continue to support that, and many thousands of our members work hard to prepare themselves — most often at their own expense — to be able to do the work they need to do with the new technology.

But it's not a panacea. I've been at this for a long time, almost 30 years, and there's always a fad. There's always a trick. People want to look for the trick that's going to guarantee their child success in the school system, and of course, those of us that work in the school system know that there's no trick. There is no fad. I could list for you the 18 or 20 fads that have come and gone in my experience as a teacher. I know you could add to that list, Reni, because you're even older than I am.

On-line learning and the technology is very important, and it's a wonderful tool. We need to understand its possibilities and its limitations. As with correspondence courses before and distance education, on-line learning can offer specific opportunities for students, particularly students who live in isolated areas or who are in small schools or high schools where particular courses aren't available to them because of the limited number of teachers and courses that can be worked into a timetable. Those are two examples of a tremendous opportunity for on-line learning.

But we want to share a concern that we have around the use of on-line learning, especially with the students who are most needy. The evidence indicates that on-line learning is most successful with students who are most successful. We don't do as well, in terms of our ability to bring students along, with the needy students as we do with students who have the most academic ability. We've noticed in the debate around the use of on-line learning that there's a sense that's it's a panacea for those students who, for instance, aren't comfortable in regular programs for behavioral, emotional or academic reasons. It is suggested by some that the answer for those students is on-line learning. The evidence doesn't show that. In fact — and Larry can correct me — we have a completion rate of about 30 percent in on-line learning courses. It's the same as for the correspondence school students.

In my career as a teacher, which goes back a long, long way — and I'm a secondary school teacher —

students often came to me, before the era of the computer, and said: "I'm gonna quit school, sir, and I'm gonna take correspondence." I need to tell you that I tried to dissuade every single one of those students from doing that. Why? Because we know that correspondence schools aren't that successful. Some students do well in correspondence, and some students do well with on-line learning, but not that many. Why? Because the atmosphere of a classroom, of a school, of being part of a culture that has as a goal success in school is something that reinforces students' ability to succeed. When they're on their own, even with the best of intentions, it's very difficult. I could talk about on-line learning a long time, but I'll stop.

Flexibility is another buzzword or, to be more fair, another direction that both the minister and the deputy have talked about. Nobody's more flexible than teachers. You've got to be flexible if you're in a classroom with 25 or 30 or 33 kids every day. But watch out. Flexibility and local autonomy have often come to be euphemisms for downloading of budget problems. Just look at what happened with the federal government over the last ten or 12 years. They talked about increased autonomy and increased power for the provinces, and what that meant on the ground was the downloading of the costs of medicare, post-secondary education and social services on provincial governments. We are supportive of flexibility and autonomy for school districts, but we aren't supportive if all that is, is a euphemism for downloading of costs. We all have experience with the downloading of costs on junior levels of government.

Let me speak to quality, because no one is more supportive of quality education than the teachers of this province. You'll forgive me if I read a little section of our brief. The B.C. Teachers Federation believes that the conditions for success in producing quality public education include committed and well-trained teachers, parents and communities that support the public schools, administrators who provide genuine and collegial leadership, school boards that listen to the public and to the professionals who work in the schools, and a provincial government and ministry that provide a positive framework of policies and adequate resources for all of those involved.

Differences do exist in perspective and ideas about what constitutes quality and how it is evaluated. It is healthy. It's fine to have those differences as long as we find venues where those differences can be discussed openly and intelligently by the various parties. The public school system has a broad range of objectives, including human and social development, in addition to academic achievement. Our organization believes that assessments of the quality of education should reflect that breadth of purpose using a range of instruments to do that assessment. Quantitative assessments with a single numerical result do not tell the whole story about the education of an individual, nor do they tell the complete story about the quality of the system as a whole. In fact, quantitative measures, because they are often taken to mean more than they do, may tell a very misleading story.

Further, if changes are made with the narrow aim of improving accountability numbers at the expense of the broader but harder to quantify objectives, quantitative measures may distort educational activities.

We want you to be careful. We urge you to take seriously this issue of quality. We do, but we urge you not to be seduced by the notion that if you have a number — a narrow, quantitative measure of something — you think you know a lot. We don't. We know that real assessment, authentic assessment, of students in schools is done over a broad range of subject and curriculum areas, a broad range of goals and objectives of the education system and with a broad range of tools for doing that assessment. It's what teachers do every day.

I think I'll finish. I'll give you the brief now, if you'd like, and I also have another document to provide to you. Let me show you that this is the brief, and what I've talked about so far this morning is a summary and some of the highlights of the brief.

We also have for you a publication that we call Public Choice, Public Schools, which is a publication of our federation that takes a look at some of the range of choices that are currently available to students across the province. We encourage you to look carefully at the brief and at the document. We certainly encourage dialogue. We're very pleased to be able to speak with you today and pleased to be able to continue that dialogue as time goes on.

We have 15 minutes for questions. Before we start, the one thing that I did omit this morning was having the committee introduce themselves to you and to your groups. We'll start with Jenny, please. Your name and your riding would be great.

W. McMahon (Chair): And I'm Wendy McMahon, MLA for Columbia River–Revelstoke.

J. Kwan: As the delegation knows, we're allowed to ask one question and one supplementary. I'm going to ask this question.

D. Chudnovsky: The rules are a little more flexible in my classroom. [Laughter.] We support flexibility.

J. Kwan: I'm going to ask this question. This actually came up from a different presentation, in fact from the Centre for Education Information. The information that was provided to the committee referenced that in approximately ten years' time their estimation is that we'll need to replace about 2,000 teachers — educators, if you will — in our system, because many of them will retire, which causes me concern. As we know, if we don't enhance the system to bring more students into the education system now, we will actually lack educators in the future. I'm just wondering if you have any information around that, especially in the K-to-12 area.

D. Chudnovsky: It's a real issue, and it's one that we all need to take seriously. Our information — our best estimate — is that about 13,000 teachers will retire in B.C. in the next four to six years. It's important to note that B.C. has never educated enough teachers to fill the spots in our system. We've always counted on people coming from other jurisdictions, but that's a problem. I should say that with 13,000 over the next four to six years, we're talking about almost a third of the teachers in the province who will retire during that period. A whole bunch of them are in this room.

D. Chudnovsky: Yes, we will. But the problem is bigger; it's bigger than it's ever been. The reason it's bigger than it's ever been is that there is a shortage of teachers in B.C. beginning. Thirty-nine school districts in the province reported to the ministry last spring that they would have trouble filling their positions this year. That's 39 out of the 60.

The problem is that it's not just a B.C. phenomenon. The shortage of teachers is a national phenomenon, and it's an international fact. There are shortages of teachers in every one of the English-speaking countries. I saw a copy of the Times educational supplement from June. Do you know the Times educational supplement? The London Times puts out a weekly magazine that deals with educational issues. There were advertisements for 9,000 teachers in that document.

What do you do? We face a situation. This is not a bargaining table, and I don't think it's appropriate for any of us to open that up. But what do you need to do? You need to have competitive salaries and reasonable working conditions, or else people will choose something else.

Moreover, the problem isn't just in terms of attracting teachers as compared to other teachers. The problem we face is that for somebody with five years of university education…. When I graduated, there were a number of choices, but there weren't the kind of choices that they have now. For somebody with five years of university education, the range of choices in terms of job possibilities is much broader than it once was. So we face a real challenge together — it's not our challenge or your challenge — in terms of finding the bright young people to fill the positions in teaching in the coming years and in terms of the retention of us old fogies in the system.

Let me make one more point, and it's this: it's not just a question of attraction. Attracting new teachers with fair salaries and reasonable working conditions is only part of the job. Another part of the job — and it's one that you may want to concern yourselves with — is retention. We know that at least a third of new teachers leave the profession in their first five years of teaching. There's a range in the data. Between a third and a half of new teachers leave the profession in the first five years. Let's say it's a third. What can we do together to help retain those teachers in the profession? Why did they leave? Well, because it wasn't what they were led to believe a lot of the time. There's all of this baloney about nine to three and two months of holidays and fabulous salaries. Then you get to school and find out what it's really about. The stats are pretty clear. As recently as this summer we have another study that shows that B.C. teachers are working on average 53 hours a week. That's what all the studies show: approximately double classroom time is the number of hours that teachers spend.

We've got this situation where we have new teachers who are leaving the profession. What can we do to help? Well, we need to think carefully about retention. We need to think about mentoring. We need to think about effective orientation. We need to think about the supports that are necessary to help teachers through those first difficult years, because we know that once they get through those first difficult years, they have acquired the tools, wisdom and knowledge that will help them to be successful teachers. But we're losing too many of them.

J. Kwan: May I follow up with another question on a different track? Especially in my riding, Vancouver–Mount Pleasant, we actually have a lot of students from the aboriginal community and also from the low-income economic status communities — also lots of special needs. For many years people have talked

about the need to change or reformulate the funding formula on that basis. I'm wondering, from a teacher's perspective, what your thoughts are in terms of the funding formula as it applies to different student populations.

D. Chudnovsky: Well, let me make two points. First of all, in terms of funding we need to fund needs. We need to fund on the basis of need, not on the basis of some formula. For instance, with respect to special needs there's a cap. Even with the targeted funding, which we're apparently getting rid of, there's a cap of 4 percent of the student population in terms of funding for what we call high-incidence special needs. Those are the needs like learning disabilities, but that number has nothing to do with the number of students who face those challenges.

What we have in my school district, in Surrey…. I note that we have two MLAs from Surrey. I can speak about Surrey very clearly, and Reni represents Delta but was a principal for many years in Surrey and has a commitment to that school district. They don't test kids anymore in Surrey. There's a limit on the number of kids who are tested for the purposes of determining whether they have particular special needs. Why? Because there's not money to serve them. The resources aren't there to serve them. We have waiting lists of a year or two years or more for students to be tested by psychometricians and other professionals to determine whether they in fact have particular special needs and what those needs are so they can be served, but the school district doesn't do it. I know that's the case around the province in terms of speaking to the needs of those kids, because it isn't a question of a formula of so many percentages of the kids. It's a question of needs.

Let me talk just for a second about aboriginal education, because I think there's some good news, and we need to share that too. There's a group in the province called the partners group which includes the Ministry of Education but also includes principals, superintendents, teachers, the first nations education steering committee and other groups interested in public education. That group has been meeting for almost four years and putting their collective understandings and commitments to the improvement of aboriginal education on the table. You need to know that this is unique in Canada. A forum like that doesn't exist anywhere in any other province, and for us it's been a tremendous experience — a learning experience. The lead group in that committee is the first nations education steering committee, which represents aboriginal peoples in the province as regards education. We're working on very concrete projects together to help improve aboriginal education. There's a project on racism in the schools, where all of the groups are coming together to work to develop materials and responses to racist stereotyping and racist incidents. There's a very exciting project that the groups are doing together on employment equity, on increasing the numbers of aboriginal teachers in our system. We know that with role modelling, we can make a difference.

There are, we think — we don't know — about 400 aboriginal teachers in British Columbia. To increase that number to be representative of the population of students, we'd have to quintuple the number of aboriginal teachers. Obviously, we're not going to be able to do that in a minute, but the partners group are working on a project together with the faculties of education to make it. That project has to do with involving ourselves at the high school level with bright young people and encouraging them to take teaching as an option in terms of a career. It's got to do with bridging programs for bridging the curriculum for people who haven't perhaps been entirely successful at high school and getting them into the university colleges and the faculties of education. It's got to do with supporting faculty-of-education-type programs in communities around the province, because we know to the extent that we take young people out of their communities and bring them to the metropolitan areas to do their education training, that tends to diminish the success rate, because people are more comfortable in their communities. So we're talking about programs that function in communities around the province. That is a tremendously exciting and productive job that the committee is doing together. I would encourage all of you to come to know the work of the partners group and to support it.

W. McMahon (Chair): Thank you. Because our time has run out on us now, I'm going to take one more question, and that's from Sheila Orr.

S. Orr: First of all, thank you for the presentation. And as a mother of five, I thank you for being a teacher.

S. Orr: It's a fairly simple question, actually. You touched on the school lunch programs. Do you know what the cost is of the school lunch program that you're talking about? I can get that figure, but do you happen to know?

D. Chudnovsky: I don't know. Jenny may know better than I. I don't know what the cost is.

W. McMahon (Chair): Thank you so much for coming today and making the presentation.

D. Chudnovsky: Thank you very much for the opportunity. We'll see you again, I'm sure.

J. Kwan: Madam Chair, I wonder if we could, before David leaves, ask the Clerk to get the information

from him from the partners group, and perhaps we can invite the partners group to come and make a presentation to us.

Our next presentation this morning is from the Canadian Union of Public Employees, Barry O'Neill. Good morning.

B. O'Neill: Good morning, and a beautiful morning it is. As has already been mentioned, my name is Barry O'Neill. I'm the president of CUPE in British Columbia. I have a couple of local leaders with me who are also very interested: Alan Gallupe from CUPE Local 382, behind me, and Michael Strong from Local 947. Some of you may know them.

We appreciate the opportunity to come before you today to talk about some of the issues that David has talked about and some of the things that affect support staff specifically. We also want to talk a little bit about and give you some of our feelings around what the three-year budget freeze means to us and, more importantly, means to children in B.C. I'm hopeful that in our presentation you will consider our comments in the spirit in which they are presented, and that is to deliver and maintain the best possible education for our children in British Columbia.

We recognize, as I'm sure you do, that our system has problems. Clearly, we should all be working together to make sure that those kinds of things are resolved, and I think this is one step to do that. However, I would like to say that I for one am very proud of our school system overall. We have an education system in British Columbia that is only dreamed about in other parts of the globe, and I have four children who are successful proof of that.

I would just like to say, on Brother David Chudnovsky's presentation, that I actually have a daughter who went through the education system and has finished her work to be a teacher. Unfortunately, for the last part of her training she couldn't get a seat in British Columbia, so she's now mentoring in Quebec. I think that's unfortunate, and I think it brings forward the issue that we need to develop more seats for young people who want to get into that field.

As you know, CUPE is British Columbia's largest union. We represent about 65,000 members in this province. We represent about 23,000 members who provide valuable support services in K-to-12 education and about another 10,000 members who work in colleges and universities. I would add that many of those 65,000 people, contrary to popular belief, are actually parents, actually humans that do have children in schools and care about their children's education. They certainly aren't willing to sell the rights to that education away for a collective agreement, contrary to what some of the media might think.

In our submission today I want to focus quite narrowly on the concerns of the K-to-12 sector. Although we have made some presentations around post-secondary, which I will mention, primarily I want to talk about the K-to-12 system. In early November we'll be submitting our views around the post-secondary education problem and the impact of some of the decisions that you might make on those workers and on those students. In fact, we have already made a submission around the issue or what the impact might be if there are changes in tuition freezes in British Columbia.

I can recall, as I hope you can, that around the whole election campaign we often heard, as has been mentioned, that you would continue to fund both education and health at no less than the current levels of funding. With all due respect, we see a three-year budget freeze as contrary to that commitment. I think the word is out on that, and I think there'll be no doubt that if that in fact continues to be the position of the government, that will happen. Inflation alone will cut into the services now provided, compounding, of course, over the next couple of years.

Some of the things that our members and certainly communities and parents are saying are: what does that mean? Does the budget freeze effectively account for collective agreement settlements or upcoming settlements? Can those same budgets that are frozen absorb the shocks the economy is going through right now, such as rising energy costs? Can that happen with a freeze in place? Or will district budgets be forced to cannibalize programs and service and reduce staffing levels in order to pay for the price of those increases? They are the real things that are going to happen in districts across B.C. Those are some of the questions that our members are asking, and they certainly have not had the answers. Hopefully, they will be coming in the very near future.

Past experience suggests that the education budget freeze will have a major and negative impact on support staff and on the services we provide within the public school system. CUPE is concerned that support staff are the first to experience the brunt of cuts to school district budgets. Support staff represent close to a third of all employees in the public school system, but these workers perform some of the most important services, I believe, in making sure our children get quality education in a safe and well-maintained institution.

In the four school years between 1996-97 and 2000-01, total school district staffing in the province increased by about a total of 1,100 positions. That's an increase of 2 percent. However, over the same period of time staffing in support staff jobs rose about 0.7 percent. That says all kinds of things about the conditions of our facilities and learning in the classroom. Our members are already straining under stress and workload problems in every district in British Columbia. An additional freeze on spending increases will be harmful to support staff workers and their ability to support a high-quality education system. The deterioration of school grounds and facilities is also a great concern and should be of concern to this government, as it should be to every government. It is a very, very large asset for

taxpayers, and we need to make sure that those kinds of things are well maintained.

We have recommended in our brief some things that we hope for in this regard. We recommend that the provincial government cancel the spending freeze and set education spending according to public demand for public education. We think that's the right way to do it. We recommend that the importance of non-teaching services in our school should be recognized for their valuable contribution to education and that non-teaching staff should not be singled out for layoffs.

We use an analogy for support staff workers that when we hear of layoffs in budgets, we often see the number 2.6. Administrators will be cut 9.4 or 9.6. The support staff people will be cut, and so the list goes on. The way we test those kinds of findings is that we just go to the parking lot, and if there are spaces missing in the parking lot, we know they're usually CUPE members. Those cuts that are otherwise referred to in budgets are usually just on paper. We actually lose our jobs.

School district budget transparency has been an issue for us for some time, as well as accountability. We have been dealing with that with districts and governments and trustees for many, many years. Only when detailed, accurate and complete budget information is published in a timely manner can we be equipped to monitor the impact of budget decisions on our members' jobs and our children's future. I think that's a very important element, because not knowing the information or not having consistent information certainly does nothing for us to be able to add to the resolve that I mentioned earlier.

In recent years some real progress has been made, I believe — and I think this needs to be made very clear — around the issue of budget transparency. An important example of that change is salary expenditure strategies for support staff areas. This change makes it easier for us to make direct comparisons and cross-district analysis of budgeted salary and staffing information, and that is important, I would suggest.

However, we face continuing problems in the different ways in which school districts set their budgets. Here are some examples that have come to our attention over the years and that we have worked towards resolving. We all flag the public consultation process as everybody's top priority, but boards are not formally obligated to have public meetings to consult the public about budgeting. The lack of a public forum for scrutinizing budgets does not allow for accountability for board spending practices. There is a real need for school boards to present their budget publicly with the correct documentation. I believe this will encourage transparency and allow for parents, the public and staff to have an opportunity for input — if that's really what we want — in ways and areas such as special services and so on. We recommend that the government legislate to require public consultation. It's not being done in most districts, and we think that's important if we're to build upon the education system we have in place now.

We believe consistency is also something that needs to be looked at. With forms used by the Ministry of Education to organize budget information, sometimes there's little relation to methods used within school districts to do their budgeting. Indeed, some districts openly disavow any connection between ministries' preliminary and final budget forms and local district processes. I believe this makes it difficult for the taxpaying public to understand where dollars are actually being spent in services to their children. Such a situation does little to further the needed budget transparency that I talked about, nor does it contribute to the broader public understanding of our confidence in the ways our schools are funded. We believe that would go a long way for communities to understand how good our education system really is. We recommend that the government pass laws to improve consistency in budgeting practices in school districts across B.C.

The Ministry of Education does not routinely release detailed budget information that it gathers from the districts, and that's unfortunate. Preliminary and final budgets and audited financial statements are not often available. We must spend an inordinate amount of time and effort chasing and cajoling Ministry of Education staff who are themselves, I would add, already overworked and I'm sure very tired of calls from us to get this information. This situation does not, again, lend itself to supporting the kinds of transparency we think that our education system needs in B.C. We recommend that the government regularly and publicly disclose all detailed budget information it gathers from districts — in particular at the onset — on request.

We and others have talked a little bit about the whole issue of staffing and where that needs to be and whether or not we're understaffed — those kinds of things. Staff employed by school districts are not necessarily fully accounted for in the reporting system. There's a form called form 1530 out there, which reports that. This form actually accounts for the number of full-time-equivalents in schools. We think there needs to be some work done on that, but we think it's a good start. Some districts allocate staff full-time-equivalents to trust funds — if you can imagine — with no published account of how many staff are accounted for. Full-time-equivalents counts of such staff are not typically reported and therefore not reflected on budget reported forms. I think that becomes a problem for parents who try to find out what the kinds of staffing formulas in schools will be and where they should be.

Some districts routinely budget salary expenditures and programs where there's no staff allocated. This money can be spent on things like professional development, teacher in-service, discretionary time, trustee training, first-aid allowances, and the list goes on. I believe that in itself is confusing. It's confusing to us and certainly is confusing to parents in districts. So as you will see, we would recommend that the government enforce greater accuracy and consistency in the reporting of the number of employees and salary costs

The way school board revenues are recorded in district budgets does not appear to follow any consistent reporting practice, as we see it. For example, revenue from short-term financial deposits sometimes fails to be recorded on budget forms and is transformed directly into accounts like local capital reserve. This kind of irregularity does not allow for actual revenues to be recorded accurately. Further, this makes the tracking of some expenditures very difficult. That kind of jargon, in itself and again, confuses parents. They really don't have a very good sense of what their education dollar is doing. We have made a recommendation that we hope you will consider.

It's been talked about on many occasions, and I think we now need to do something around the issue of special education services. We represent about 6,000 special education workers across the province. I would dare to say that except for parents, which we also have the honour of being, there is no group of people who care more for special needs children in British Columbia than special education workers. Their compassion is beyond the beyond. We need to change attitudes as to the value of the work that special education assistants perform with our children. A number of years ago a director in a school district that I used to work in called teaching assistants the cutters of paper and pasters of paper. As you all know, those kinds of comments are out of, at minimum, a 1930s catalogue, and we need to recognize that.

Special education assistants, who work most directly with special needs children, must be seen as full partners in the special education system. Special education assistants are paraprofessionals who participate in the development of individual education plans, do assessments of children and are full members of the team that supports special needs children. Yet the special education review, the ministry and school districts pay little attention to the contribution that special education assistants make and the need to support their work in classrooms.

When the special education review was made public in the spring of 2000, we decided to develop a response to all aspects of that review. We've created a response to that review, surveyed our membership on the needs and wants, written draft responses and presented that report to all of our members in British Columbia. That report is in your kits. You'll find another document entitled Education Assistants Respond to the Special Education Review. This was adopted at our provincial convention in June by all of our members and is the official position of our union.

We'll make a few comments on some specific concerns we have about the review and on the direction we think your government should take on special education to improve service and achieve maximum value for education dollars. As was mentioned by David Chudnovsky, each year B.C. school districts spend over budget by about $50 million in special education services. This may be a sign that budgets have not kept pace with children's needs for vital services, and I would put to you that's the case.

The provincial government's special education review, made public in May of 2000, recommended that special education funding should continue to be targeted until funding was available to meet the needs of all special needs students. There is currently a public debate, I'm sure that you've heard, about the Liberal government lifting targeted spending in special education. Removing targeted funding opens the door, in our opinion, to reduced services for children in special needs. We fear that dollars intended for special education students will be withheld or diverted into other areas. We see that in other areas of the budget already.

Early identification of the needs of special needs children is critical for their development as valued citizens in our society. More resources need to be put into the education system to identify disabilities as children enter into kindergarten and primary grades.

We agree with the position put forward in the special education review, in one of its recommendations. It's our belief that not only would many more children be helped at an early age and their lives would become much more productive as adults, but large savings in education dollars will occur as a result of fewer services being required for those children at a later age in the system. Again, we've made a recommendation which we hope you'll consider.

I want to spend a moment talking about standards in special education, and more particularly provincewide standards. According to our members, students do not get the same quality of special needs care from district to district. That's not surprising, since there's no system in place to ensure consistent delivery of special education programs across the province. Again a recommendation in the review asks districts if their practices are consistent with requirements of individual plans — the education plan for each student, which we are involved in. Many of our members tell us that districts are not complying, for a number of reasons. We believe school districts should be regularly financially audited for the way they spend their funding. Districts that are in agreement with that should have nothing to hide. School districts should also be subjected to a service audit of the effectiveness of program delivery to ensure that students are getting the very best services possible.

Also part of that special education review was a recommendation that calls on the Minister of Education to set up an education partner committee to delineate the roles and responsibilities of special education assistants in the province. We think this is long overdue and have been working on it for a great number of years. Although the review said this committee should be put in place by September of 2001, the ministry has not taken any action yet. That's unfortunate, and we hope that you do.

In our kit you will see the roles and responsibilities document co-authored by our union and the B.C. Teachers Federation. We have distributed over 18,000 copies across B.C., and the demand is great to do more.

We hope you will consider this a valuable tool for workers, teachers and administrators to clearly define the team roles of special education assistants, teachers and other partners.

Given that our time is limited here, we invite you to read all of those documents that we have enclosed for you. We really do hope you take some time, because there has been a lot of work done in particular around roles and responsibilities. We hope you take time to consider some of those things, because we are doing so and have been in recent years.

Around the issue of professional development, I think that special education workers in particular would like to let you know a couple of things about their concerns. The government needs to acknowledge the growing skills and the public demand for greater skills, although the public often doesn't understand that to achieve those greater skills, there needs to be training. However, we are recommending that standardized programs for colleges across the province, and not one-off kinds of programs, be developed.

We need to develop a provincewide best-practices guide that can be used as a basis for curriculum development and provincial certification programs. Partner groups, the ministry and colleges need to be brought together to really discuss and put into place a standardized curriculum that can be offered by community colleges and through distance education. Funds need to be made available for in-service professional development so special education assistants can learn and provide the kinds of services that they provide better. Few districts in British Columbia have programs to help special education upgrade their skills or workers. In fact, many of the training opportunities we get are through the B.C. Teachers Federation, and we are appreciative of that.

As I mentioned earlier, we have some 9,000 support workers and assistants in British Columbia's universities and colleges. Our members support student educators and administration, custodians, maintenance, lab assistants, teaching assistants — and the list goes on and on. Many of our members are also students or have relied on publicly funded post-secondary education when developing their careers. That's been a success story.

According to some research done of late, post-secondary education is a money-maker for the provincial government. In a report by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives — The Education Dividend: Why Education Spending Is a Good Investment for B.C. is the name of the document — Robert Allen shows that the provincial government gets back all the money it puts into post-secondary education. A post-secondary education increases the incomes of graduates, moving them into a higher tax bracket, and the additional taxes they pay more than cover the government's investment in their education. I think that's important for all of us to know and make sure that the public knows.

Increasingly, we are part of a knowledge economy. More than ever our economic success will depend on the level of education achieved by our citizens. We have been successful in this area in recent years. Enrolment in our post-secondary institutions has been rising while levels have been falling in other provinces, and we should be proud of that. This increase in enrolment in B.C. has been directly related to the freeze in tuition fees.

While this tuition freeze has opened doors for students, it has also created hardship for some of our institutions that have not received funding to cover the cost of foreseen tuition increases. It may come as a surprise that the union representing thousands of post-secondary education workers in B.C. takes a strong stance on maintaining the tuition freeze. A fee increase would clearly add income to the institutions that pay our members. However, CUPE members voted at our convention to support continuing a freeze on tuition rates. Our members believe that an accessible and well-utilized post-secondary education system is vital to the long-term interests of our entire membership — our 65,000 members and their families — in British Columbia, and we make a recommendation to you.

We have also summarized in our brief some 15 recommendations that we hope you will consider or, at minimum, that you will take time to meet with us on so that we can give you the kinds of information and more reasons on why those things happen.

Let me conclude by saying that we believe the recommendations that we have included in our submission will help to stabilize education and education funding over the next couple of years, and that's important in an economy, particularly as we've seen since September 11. We believe that increased education funding, not spending freezes or cutbacks, is necessary to the safe and healthy future of our province. We believe that one of the worst things a government can do during such trying economic times is make education less accessible to everyone at any age.

Publicly funded service delivered by public employees will ensure access, quality, choice and the famous flexibility in our education system. CUPE members are an integral part of local communities. We hope you understand that. Many of our 65,000 members are parents, as I have mentioned. As CUPE members, we and our children depend on our education system, and we know from front-line experience what our children need to help them learn. As education workers, as students and as parents we expect nothing less than the best for our children, and we hope we can help continue to make that happen in British Columbia. Thank you for your time.

W. McMahon (Chair): Thank you, Barry, for the presentation. I will open the floor for questions. Before I do that, I would just like to mention to the members that because of our time constraints here, I previously asked each member to ask one question with a supplemental follow-up. Then if they have another question, they can go back on the list, just so that we can get through the members who do want to ask questions. I had to cut the list off last time. So 15 minutes for questions and answers, and I would like to open the floor.

R. Nijjar: Thank you for the thoughtful presentation. Barry, you and Mr. Chudnovsky both stated the same point, which I want a clarification on. You stated that you would like to see government continue allocated funding for special needs and for aboriginal education. At the same time you also stated that most school boards allocate more funding than they're required to by the ministry. Can you please clarify on what basis of evidence you feel that school boards, if not required to have an allocated funding, would definitely decrease funding?

B. O'Neill: One of the concerns that we have and have always had around targeting funds and caps and so on is that to remove those things without a significant increase in the whole issue of transparency would be problematic for us. There's no doubt — David has said, and I have said — that school districts are spending more. I think it's inappropriate for us to take off any minimums that are now spent on special education until we know where the money's being spent. Some of the functions in school budgets are, as we know, very flexible. We know that more than anybody. There are very few protections in allotted dollars, and I think special education is one of them.

Our view is that until you improve the transparency of the whole budget process on what is spent…. We understand that districts are spending more, and there are reasons for that. Perhaps the targeted funds and any increase in education should go to special education so that we know that they're there. Until there's significantly more transparency, there's no way for parents, particularly special needs parents who are always looking at the cuts in school districts and always see cuts as reflected to their children…. I think there just needs to be more transparency in both targets and the caps that we've talked about in the last couple of years.

R. Nijjar: I agree with transparency. I think we all agree with that. Transparency is great. How about the type of transparency of making the school boards accountable for the result of special needs or aboriginal students' education rather than just responsible to fund a certain amount — and who knows exactly where it goes? There still is transparency. It's transparency for the result, which is what you want, what we want and what parents want.

B. O'Neill: Well, the accountability part of it. I have four children in the public school system. One just finished post-secondary. At least in my view, in the districts that I've had, they are accountable already. They're accountable to those people in those communities, and I think there are all kinds of checks and balances. We make some points throughout our document around that very issue. It doesn't necessarily start with what's right or wrong.

We think that the reporting system and the work we've done in analysis with budgets across B.C. tell us that there are some huge inconsistencies that need to be dealt with, but I think that school districts are already accountable. I know that our members are accountable for what they do, as are teachers, but I think there is a huge accountability process in school districts right now. All you need to do is read in a local paper of when a school board screws up. Their accountability is covered in four or five pages in letters to the editor the next day. There is a lot of accountability there, and I think that we often forget about most of it. I think we need to remember that there is a lot of accountability for school districts and trustees already.

R. Lee: My question: is there a proposal of established contracts with the different school districts so that, say, one year later they can see if the objectives are achieved in different school districts? Different communities have different needs. Do you think this is a good idea and also the three-year funding, so the districts have more flexibility in allocating their funds for different committee needs?

B. O'Neill: I think the districts in fact would encourage being able to forecast or to know that there are certain dollars there for a number of years. Notwithstanding, if there's nothing there to take account of things like inflation costs, energy costs, student enrolment costs, all of those kinds of things, then I don't think it's particularly helpful for school districts to know that in three years they're going to get the same amount of money regardless of what happens.

I think the long-range planning for school districts is a good thing. I don't think there's a huge argument around that. I think that school districts themselves would really like to know that there's a certain amount of funding, but along with that there needs to be some recognition that, as you say, the autonomy in school districts and the different kinds of programs that they put together need to be funded. It can't be one document that says: "This is the amount you're going to get for three years." There are variables that need to be taken into consideration. With a strict or straight freeze, you spend most of your time planning for how you're going to cut the next year, because of course, everything is compounded as a result.

R. Masi (Deputy Chair): I was really interested in your comments about certification of TAs. I wonder if you could tell the committee what the certification levels are at the present time. If in fact they don't meet a certain requirement at this time and we insisted that there be a greater involvement in university or university college courses, would we then be leading ourselves into a shortage or a constriction of the number of people available for that vital job?

B. O'Neill: Well, we think there needs to be some recognition. There are some certification or quasi-certification programs in B.C. There was one in Lake

Cowichan a number of years ago. The problem is that the accessibility for teaching assistants themselves to get the training is very expensive, and most of them work.

We're saying that we should be sitting down talking to colleges and post-secondary institutions about putting a standardized training or qualification program in colleges. We should all be working towards that. I know in the mid-Island area we have nine categories of teaching assistants. The things that are expected, the stretch of skills and qualifications necessary is astronomical. We need to sit down with some folks and talk about what we should…. It should be done, I believe, in our colleges and universities, and it shouldn't be done necessarily by a private institution. I heard that one course to take training as a teaching assistant was $8,000. That doesn't take into account that those teaching assistants we have in the system right now are usually providing those services. We believe that we need to sit down and talk about standardizing qualifications. I think the ministry guidelines already make mention of teaching assistants 1, 2 and 3 and medical concerns, and so on and so forth. We're now taking on the roles of nurses in schools, quite frankly, and, I would argue, in some cases doctors. We need to sit down. That needs to be generalized. We need to be specific about the kinds of training and qualifications we want for those assistants in schools.

J. Kwan: My question relates to class size. In fact, if I had an opportunity, I'd ask David that question also. The impacts of class size relative to the children's ability and opportunities to learn…. There's lots of debate around class size and whether it's relevant or not relevant and what the optimal class size for children is, especially for early development. I just wonder: from your perspective, on the issue around class size and the ratio of teaching assistants and teachers to students, especially for the children with special needs and so on, what is the optimal number and understanding out there?

B. O'Neill: Let me get out my honorary membership from the BCTF for a minute here and see if I can answer that. No, let me answer that as a parent. There's no doubt in my mind. It's confusing — the kinds of literature and the contradictory kinds of articles. I know that whenever I read stats from other provinces or other countries around class size, it almost always says that the end result — and we see it here in B.C. in some of our private school systems — is that where you have fewer students in a classroom, children tend to learn better and feel better about what they're learning. I don't know what the optimum class size is. If Mr. Chudnovsky would slip me a note, I could be really clear on that.

B. O'Neill: Seventeen? All I know is that it just makes all kinds of sense to me — it certainly was with my children, and I base my experience on that; I think I'm an authority because I have four children that went through the system — that if class sizes are smaller, then children will have a better chance, in particular if they're not on the higher academic spectrum. If they are slower, for lack of a better phrase, or they need more attention, it only makes sense. I'm not sure what all of the experts might say, but as a parent, at least, I know that when I'm talking to all four of my children at the same time, I don't get anywhere near as far as when I take one of them aside and talk to them. That's my best expertise.

B. O'Neill: Yeah, one. [Laughter.] I'm not sure of the statistics, but I'd base the whole argument on common sense. It makes sense to me as a parent, and I have some experience in that. I guess I'm an expert.

W. McMahon (Chair): Thank you. Do we have anybody else who would like to ask a question?

J. Kwan: Just to follow up with a different question and then back to the special needs component. A little while back I received a series of letters from various parents from different school districts where, I think, cuts were made with respect to special needs assistants and so on. I guess, speaking as a parent or from your association with parents — I also know that we have parents advisory councils coming up next, and perhaps they're the group who can answer some of these questions too — in terms of the impact of….

Again, I'm interested. When you have a special needs child in the school system, the kinds of support that are required in terms of special assistance to the teacher and then, of course, in the broader classroom…. David touched on that as well, but I wouldn't mind getting more detailed information in terms of what kind of work and supports are necessary to optimize the child with the special needs to succeed.

B. O'Neill: Well, I would say that that's probably a different kind of class-size issue. We have special needs assistants that work one-on-one with special needs students. The responsibilities…. What do they do? I don't know if I could ever explain that. I think that if you went into a special education classroom, you would see that the TA and, in many cases, the teacher also spend unbelievable amounts of time with a student to not move very far to our standards, I suspect, but a huge move to their standards.

What do they do for special needs students? Just about everything. In fact, we have special needs assistants that spend most of their weekends and lots of their evenings at the residences of special needs students that they're with all day. They don't get paid for that; that's not part of their jobs. It's not in any job description, but special education assistants are, in my opinion, sometimes too compassionate, if that's possible. They do everything for special needs students —

everything that needs to be done. That could be as minor or severe as anyone in this room could imagine.

R. Lee: I heard that there's a limit on the number of special needs students in a class. Is that one per class maximum?

B. O'Neill: I think there are different criteria. We have special needs students that need one-on-one assistance. We also have groups and in fact have classrooms where we work with teachers to provide the services. I'm not sure of all of the areas — what the limits are or what the formulas might be — but I do know that we have special education assistants working anywhere from a full class to one-on-one. I'm not sure of the formulas.

J. Kwan: I want to put my hand up for a quick question. Earlier on in the Legislature there was a debate around parents volunteering in the school system. I just want to get on record, Barry, from CUPE's perspective your take on that question.

B. O'Neill: I'm sure the next presenter, my close personal friend Reggi, will have something to say about that, but on the record, we have really no concerns with volunteers in schools. As I say, we're parents in schools. We volunteer in communities; we volunteer in schools. We do all of the things that parents should be doing. We're of the opinion, however — and we've made this clear; it shouldn't be a secret to anybody on the planet — that where volunteers replace support staff positions, then that shouldn't be. We should have trained professionals in schools.

I know that my PAC, parents in my community, want that kind of confidentiality, want that kind of training for people who work with their students. But as far as volunteers, we encourage parents to volunteer in schools. There is a place for volunteers in our school districts, in our municipalities, in our libraries, throughout our society. We really don't have any significant problem with volunteers, until they start to do the jobs that we believe our members should be doing.

W. McMahon (Chair): With that, I'm closing. I'd like to thank you very much for your presentation this morning.

R. Balabanov: No problem; it's Balabanov. For those of you who are hockey fans, it's like Larionov or Fedorov.

R. Balabanov: Second vice-president of BCCPAC, Brenda Turner. We also have in the audience today Lyse Burgess, one of our directors who helped us prepare the information. I have a very special guest with me today: my daughter Sarah Balabanov, one of the many hundreds of thousands of students for whom we're all doing this.

W. McMahon (Chair): That's great. Thank you. I will have the committee introduce themselves to you. I don't believe you were here earlier when we did it.

Everyone's moving away from me because I'm sick. I apologize for being late to the committee. I was presenting to the young entrepreneurs of Nanaimo.

R. Balabanov: It's great to see so many familiar faces. Some of us have met before one on one. That's really super.

We apologize for the binder that we've given you. We have a lot of materials for you that you can read at your leisure. I'm sure you're getting lots of those kinds of things, so we apologize for taking more of your time to read through those at some point in the future. The copies of the slides are at the front, but the other materials you can look at later. We'll be referring to them at some point.

We have put together a presentation for you today that talks about the issues from a parent involvement point of view. If parents came to talk to you today, I'm sure they could talk to you for several days about all the different issues around the schools and school districts in the province. But we're going to pick on three things. We're going to focus on the parent involvement in public education in B.C. We'll talk briefly about the history, where parent involvement in public education is today and the vision that our members have given us for the future.

If we think way back to the one-room schoolhouses — some of which we still have in the province, I might add — originally parents built the schoolhouses together, as volunteers. The teacher got to live with one of the families. I always like to mention that at that time, if it was a female teacher and she got married, she probably got fired. Everybody knew that married people could not be teachers.

We've had a lot of history. All the way back to 1922, there was a parent-teacher federation. At one point there was even an association with Washington and Oregon and big conferences with thousands of people, and parents and teachers participating in the thirties and forties.

All the way to what brings us to today — a major revision in the School Act in 1989, when parent advisory councils were actually recognized, and parents were given the right to participate in the schools. At that time our organization changed its name to the B.C. Confederation of Parent Advisory Councils.

The Sullivan commission came out with a statement that we treasure very much. It read: "Structure should be established at the provincial, school district and school levels to ensure that parents are genuinely involved in advising educators and policy makers, local and provincial, in matters related to educational programs, services and operations."

That gave us the basis and the vision for the actual change in the School Act in 1989. Today in the School Act, what it actually says is: "A parent's advisory council through its elected officers may advise the board and principal and staff of the school or the Provincial school respecting any matter relating to the school or the Provincial school." For us, the key words there are "advise," which can be interpreted many ways, as you will hear through our presentation, as well as the word "any."

In addition, in 1996 there was a ministerial order helping us to interpret this even further, which read: "Parents have the right and responsibility to participate in the process of determining the educational goals, policies and services provided for their children" — again, a very, very broad mandate.

It goes on to read: "They have a primary" — primary being No. 1 — "responsibility to ensure that children are provided with the healthy and supportive environment necessary for learning. They have a responsibility to help shape and support the goals of the school system and to share the tasks of educating their young." That's a very awesome mandate coming from the Ministry of Education.

B. Turner: I get to sit at this table and continue on. First of all, I should say that I'm really happy to be here, thanks for the opportunity and what a pleasure it is to work with Reggi and be a part of the team of BCCPAC.

What we wanted to show you was the structure of parent involvement in education starting with the students, where it all begins; with parents; guardians, looking after the welfare of children; parent advisory councils at the school level, hopefully advising trustees, principals and staff; district parent advisory council, an organization where parent advisory councils can go to discuss specific topics at their school and sometimes jointly put their energies together and deliver messages to the district. Then we have the British Columbia Confederation of Parent Advisory Councils, which is the provincial organization that represents parents.

The role of BCCPAC — this is the mandate given to us and the purposes in our constitution and bylaws, which keep us directed — is to advance public school education and the well-being of children and to promote and enhance meaningful parent participation in an advisory role at the school district and provincial levels.

Some of the ways we do this and articulate the purposes of our organization are to have these parent initiatives. One of them — the top one, the advocacy project — we consider our crown jewel. You will have our two advocates, Cathy and Janet, doing a presentation for you this afternoon, and they'll talk about some of the issues raised out of something like the 15,000 calls they've received in the last six years.

Then we have our member services. Our member services support every facet of the organizational structure of parent advisory councils and DPACs. We handle incoming calls from PACs and DPACs that need assistance in organizing themselves or taking on issues, and those kinds of things. We do it via telephone, conference calls, e-mails. Whatever we need to do to support our parent advisory councils and DPACs, we do that.

We hold two conferences a year. One is in the springtime, which is our leadership conference and annual general meeting, and it starts on a Thursday and ends on a Sunday. We have our parents there for a good length of time, and it's really great to spend the time with them and offer them opportunities as well as receive information from them. Then in the fall we have our leadership conference. Our next one is in Prince George, which is coming up from November 1 to November 4. You would all be welcome to drop in to our conference, should you be in Prince George.

DA communications. "District associate" is the DA, and it's a structure or an individual that we've set up in each district in order to facilitate information going back and forth. We use the DAs on a constant basis, and they're the conduit from BCCPAC to PACs and DPACs in order to quickly move information and requests that we have. We make at least four annual calls to district associates, surveying them and looking for specific information. We provide them with opportunities on our website and through our office to contact us at any time, should they need some assistance.

The road show is an initiative we've expanded recently. We did have leadership development workshops, and then we thought it was really important to make a real strong initiative to get out into the province and work with parents who can't always afford to get to our conferences. The road show has been extremely successful. We're really, really pleased with how parents are

receiving us. One of the elements of our road show is a workshop on issues of the day and what's happening in education, and we found that that's the most interesting workshop that we do for parents. They're really excited about it.

Committees. BCCPAC has parents sitting on about 35 provincial committees, and I think the message we're hearing from these committees and the chairpeople is that parents that are coming to these committees are very well prepared and representing parents extremely well also.

Newsletters and the website. We do four newsletters per year. There are all kinds of issues in there, like the current issues or sometimes building upon certain concerns that we have for parents. Sometimes it's PAC finances. We'll put an article in there to support some of the latest things that have come under member services so that we're making sure we get out to as many parents as we can. Our website is just growing by leaps and bounds. It's 350 pages now and continues. We're always needing to put another page out. It's seeing approximately 2,000 hits per month, so we're quite impressed with that.

Then our office staff. At present we have just restructured our office. We now have four full-time staff members who are working extremely hard. It's a small staff for the amount of work that we do. We're a very busy organization. Last year we received over 5,600 calls and e-mails to our office. Just the busyness of our organization…. We're very thankful that we have good staff.

The next thing I wanted to show you is our statement of policy. This is a document that's in your binder, and it encapsulates all the resolutions that have come to BCCPAC through our annual general meetings. It guides our organization's actions, decisions and public positions on key issues. I know that Reggi's is threadbare. She carries it everywhere, and when she's talking to nice people like David Chudnovsky or other partner groups, she uses that document to explain the positions of BCCPAC, why we're there and what parents feel about things.

R. Balabanov: If you met with a group of parents somewhere and said to them, "What are your issues? What are the things you're worried about in education today?" the answers they would come up with are on this overhead. For example, they have a lot of concerns around safety, and those concerns range everywhere from earthquake preparedness to anaphylaxis to having first-aid expertise in the school to whether or not their kids are safe in the playgrounds or in the hallways. They're concerned about things like funding. We've put a new logo on there that we feel every student should be a funded student, every school a funded school and every district a funded district. That's what parents express.

They're worried about things like funding for teacher librarians, because they don't like to see libraries closed or unstaffed; funding for special needs kids who have been on waiting lists too long; funding for collective agreements in which, when they finally come to a settlement, the increases or whatever extra costs might have to come from supplies for kids; funding for curriculum changes — a wide variety of funding issues.

We hear a lot about evaluating the learning environment. This includes the staff in the schools as well as what's happening in the schools. Parents feel there needs to be a better mechanism or there needs to be a mechanism whereby concerns and issues are received from both students and parents about what's happening in the schools. That feedback coming in should be a welcome thing that's happening.

We put accreditation up here, because for parents accreditation is incredibly important. The most valuable piece that parents can participate in, in the history of their school and the life of the school, is when they get to participate in accreditation in a collaborative way — looking at the school 360 degrees, answering questions and investigating what's happening in the school, what's being successful and what the school needs to work on. We really value accreditation, and it's a very important part to parents.

We want to point out that FSA is the foundation skills assessment. Those results didn't used to be released. It was as a result of our organization and the parents of the province who felt strongly that whenever their children are involved in any kind of assessment or testing, the parents should have the results of what that testing is. It should be put in context for both the school and the district, and we should all have access to it. That is now happening.

We hear a lot of concerns around the province right now about collective agreements. Parents are concerned that some issues are being discussed at bargaining tables that we believe are actually policy issues — things like class sizes and special needs inclusion. We believe that there should be some transparency there and that parents should be involved in that discussion, as well as students and others.

However, when you say to parents: "Well, let's step back a minute. We know you're worried about safety. We know you have issues around funding. What is in the way of you expressing and working on those issues?" We've called them enduring issues that have happened since PACs have been given the right to exist right through next year. It continues to be the overriding concern when you really step back. When we do a road show and our workshops, this is the concern that comes up all the time over and over again. That's the fact that we believe there is no structure, authority or process currently entrenched in legislation which gives the parents the autonomy, the information, the opportunity and the kind of communication they need to truly advise and to truly be partners in education.

As a result of what's not there, today we know that the meaning of the word "advice" — which comes out of the current legislation — varies around the province as to how it's interpreted. We know of cases where, for example, the administrator is the chair of the parent advisory council, sets the agendas and even signs the

cheques from the fundraising endeavours of that group. It's a real challenge for volunteer parents to work on changing those kinds of situations without being worried about whether or not there will be retribution in some way either on themselves or on the child in the school. That's always their biggest concern. They will frankly tell us that most the time, they won't bother. They're not there to volunteer and be into issues where they actually have to disagree with someone. They just want to work productively towards improving education.

That seems to be a real issue as we've travelled around the province and as parents come to our conferences. They also tell us that they often don't get information. It's not possible to give meaningful advice if you don't get the information. It's really important that you be fully informed of all the factors, of all the items that affect the issue you're looking at. Too often there seems to be a reticence to keep parent advisory councils fully informed and to give full information before the issue arises rather than afterwards saying: "Well, now we have a problem, and here's a couple of pieces of information you should be aware of."

We feel so often that PACs are expected to be reactive rather than proactive. They're not given an opportunity to actually participate in the decision-making process but rather are too often expected to react to a decision already made — and possibly even rubber-stamp it.

Lack of communication. Too often PACs find that there's a one-sided conversation where parents will be asking questions. They may get the answers to those questions, but nobody volunteers them information to begin with or asks them questions: "Where should we go? What should we do? What are the issues here?" It's us bringing up the issues and saying: "Can you give us more information?"

One of the quotes that is very dear to my heart reads: "Parents have been given the role as partners in education without a parameter surrounding the role." The PACs mandate is to advise on any matter relating to the school, but where, when and in which format is still often decided for rather than with the parents and the PACs. Instead of us being involved in the decision-making process, parents are too often asked to rubber-stamp a decision already made. That, we believe, is a lack of genuine partnership. We believe that too often there is a lack of recognition of the valuing of parent contribution and their participation, which often results in parents saying they don't feel like there's anyone really listening, and no one really wants to hear their opinion. When parents feel unrecognized, they make comments to us such as: "What's the point? Nobody listens anyway. I'm tired of beating my head against the wall." So they go elsewhere to volunteer or step back from truly giving advice.

I'd like to start our vision for the future portion with a quote from Thomas Fleming, who says that public and parental demand for involvement in decision-making, whatever form it takes, is unlikely to diminish, especially at the local level. That's my lead for another quote from a person that we really like, a well-known researcher, Anne Henderson. Anne says that we cannot afford to sequester parents on the periphery of the education enterprise. Parent involvement is neither a quick fix nor a luxury. It is absolutely fundamental to a healthy system of public education. As you can see, she said this in 1988, so we continue to strive to make this a reality.

Parents for some time, since PACs were given the right to exist under legislation, were already talking about: "Where do we need to go? Will this work? What else do we need to make it work?" In January 1998 we produced a paper called Roles and Responsibilities in Public Education, and there's a copy in your binder of materials. I feel it's a very prophetic document if you put it in the context of January 1998. On page 14 it says that "a meaningful role for parents should formally involve parents in education decision-making and go beyond spectatorship." I am really struck with the word "spectatorship." Parents do not feel they should be spectators in public education; they should be part of public education.

It's quite a prophetic document, and I even want to make the comment that perhaps at the time the Liberals read that particular document…. I think some of the initiatives your government has already undertaken are predicted in that document — the kind of things we needed to have happen.

Another paper that we produced much more recently was approved at our annual general meeting in May 2001. You have the latest draft in your binder as well. It's The Role of Parent Advisory Councils in B.C. Public Schools, a document that was circulated broadly throughout the province several times. It talks about what we believe the role of parent advisory councils should be and what the barriers are. It says: "The role of parents in decision-making within our schools has changed over time but does not yet reflect the significance of their participation…. Amongst education partners, parents are singularly able to consider the rights of children in isolation from other factors and to reflect the values of their community in supporting children in educational decisions."

I just want to make the point that we're very proud that those of us on the board and involved in BCCPAC are very careful that we do not have another filter or bias. We are not employees of the system in any way. We are parents. We're very careful when we do representation, although we have many, many parents who we value that also are employees of the school system throughout the province. We're careful, when a representation is anywhere, that those particular parents have no other filter; they can speak singularly only to their children's involvement.

Out of all these discussions and documents we've given you, there are some strong recommendations for action that we've been putting forward for some time and we put forward to you today. First of all, we would look forward to seeing some improvement in the legislation and in ministerial policy. We believe there are amendments necessary to include a clear

definition of the advisory role for parents through their parent advisory councils, as well as recognizing district parent advisory councils who are not currently mentioned in the act, as the district voice and BCCPAC, as the provincial voice of parents. Too often we hear conversations, and we know of school boards who have paid lawyers to interpret the School Act. When they don't see DPACs or BCCPAC in there, they say there's no need to recognize that voice or interact with that voice. They try to disenfranchise that voice, the collective voice of the parents in their region.

We believe there needs to be some improvement in the flow of information. We'd be very happy to work with the ministry and are doing so on an ongoing basis to ensure that usable up-to-date information is available and provided to parents in a timely way. We feel that the distribution of such information should actually be mandatory. It should not be optional at the whim of a single administrator or at the whim of one trustee who thinks maybe parents should know about this. There should be an automatic inclusion of the parents, the PACs, DPACs and BCCPAC in what information is disseminated.

We believe there needs to be a lot of work done around communications. We believe that too often PACs and DPACs are bypassed in communication. We include the fact that very often there's resistance among staff and administrators to give priority to full and timely communication with parents. For example, just recently we ran into, again, a policy on student conduct that was developed without the input of either parents or students. We were given the final draft — the final kick at the cat, so to speak — after the fact rather than being involved all the way along. There's a need for this, and all those voices should be heard.

Finally, our parents are very strong and very passionate about the "f" word — fundraising. They feel that the pressure to fundraise so often to supplement inadequate school budgets detracts from the ability and opportunity of parent advisory councils to assume their rightful advisory role. So often what the administrator looks for, what the school looks for and what the students need is more money to buy basic supplies such as red paper for valentines, textbooks, microscopes — all kinds of things. Of course, if you were a parent and you saw that your child was doing without, that is the first collective thing you would look at doing. Yet they have a lot to say, and they feel that they would rather advise and that the funding should be there. We believe in equity in public education. It shouldn't depend on the active parents in one community to support that school to have those supplies when we know that in some communities those parents don't have those skills or resources.

We can tell you that right now parents fundraise through gaming and other very labour-intensive initiatives. When we consulted and surveyed our PACs three years ago, we came up with a conservative figure of $30 million annually that PACs were fundraising to add to school operating budgets.

Parents around the province are very, very optimistic. They're very enthusiastic and have a lot of energy. There's no doubt that the active involvement of families, parents and students has positive effects in many areas including student learning, student achievement and attitudes. Although the changes in the School Act in 1989 were visionary at the time, it is now time for a new vision: to harness one of the most powerful and underutilized resources in public education — that of parental involvement.

We can tell you that the parents of B.C. are enthusiastic, full of energy, eager to contribute and very, very motivated. We charge this committee and the Legislature to make this parental involvement possible. There's a unique opportunity right now, a new era in student achievement, to effect a new future in our public schools. By empowering parents' meaningful participation in the everyday decision-making in schools, this committee, through its recommendations to the Legislature, has a unique opportunity to make a difference in public education in B.C.

We thank you for the incredible hours I know you're going to have to spend and are spending to participate in this critical work. We thank you for your tremendous efforts on behalf of the students of B.C., and we welcome your questions.

T. Christensen: Thank you very much, Reggi, for that presentation. I think we can all agree that certainly parents are a critical part of our education system.

It may be in the material you've given us, but I'm wondering if you can just comment briefly on how an individual PAC is set up and then a DPAC and how the people that are on the PAC are accountable to the numerous parents in a particular school or district.

R. Balabanov: Well, under the School Act every parent or guardian is automatically a member of their PAC. They elect their executive. They develop a constitution and bylaws, in consultation with the administrator in the school. It's in the School Act that that must be done. That constitution and those bylaws give them the foundation of how to operate. They usually have table officers and all the kinds of things you see many associations having. They have general meetings, executive meetings, votes — all those kinds of things. In a district they band together.

Usually the PACs choose what they call a DPAC representative, who goes to the district parent advisory council meeting. Those are often monthly as well. There they talk about issues that are districtwide — if there is crowding throughout the district, if there are safety concerns or curriculum concerns throughout the district. They again have a constitution. They're another autonomous body. They elect their officers from those DPAC reps or from other parents in the district. They work together with the school board the same way a PAC would work together with the administrator in the school. They have weekly meetings and those kinds of things and talk about those concerns.

There's a variation in DPACs around the province, because some school districts are very small and have very few schools. Parents don't want to be overloaded

with structures that would actually stand in the way, so sometimes it's more informal. They get together once a month with a superintendent and have coffee and those kinds of things to make sure that still happens.

Sometimes, frankly, it does not happen. We notice that in DPACs especially. Too often in districts we hear them saying: "We have no money for DPACS; we don't support them. They can go do their thing; that's fine." We seem to be aware of that especially when there's a disagreement. When the parents in the district bring forward an issue that disagrees with the board of trustees, all of a sudden some support seems to dry up. So that's an interesting issue that we always deal with.

All of them, both PACs and DPACs, come together and are members of our organization. Through that association, through resolutions at the AGM, they direct us on what we want to do. It's a very democratic process.

R. Lee: Thank you for the presentations from BCCPAC. I have a question here. The mandate of PACs, DPACs and BCCPAC used to be as an advisory role. Sometimes it's frustrating because it's not in the decision process. What do you think should be changed so that the parents' role will be increased and the parents will actually be involved in the decision process?

R. Balabanov: Richard, that's the dilemma which many of our PACs and parents struggle with, because in the act it says "advisory." What is truly the meaning of advisory? Does that mean you wait until you're asked a question, "Do you want the school doors closed at 3 o'clock?" and then you answer yes or no?

We believe that as a legal term, advisory actually means that you're therefore obliged to ask for that advice on anything, because it uses the word "any." In order to ask for informed advice, you first have to give ongoing information back and forth so that when some advice is needed, the body can give that advice.

The struggle so often is that in many schools the PACs are seen as a fundraising instrument to go do the bake sale or whatever. They're not given, first, the information. They're not considered as a true partner. They're not included in the decision-making or in the discussion before that even comes so that they can point out issues. It's often after the fact. We talk about rubber-stamping. A decision will be made, and then they come to the parents and say: "You know, we've decided that we're going to do this. We trust you're happy with this."

If a parent or a PAC then says, "Wait a minute; we have some additional concerns," it ends up being an adversarial situation, and defences come up — rather than being included from the first stage as part of the discussion so that the solution that comes up in fact reflects the values and beliefs of the parents and the students in that particular situation.

R. Lee: So do you think that changing the School Act to give the parents and also the organization of parents some kind of decision-making role in, say, budgets at a district level…? Would that kind of role help parents to participate fully as partners?

R. Balabanov: Yes, we definitely believe there should be a strengthening in the legislation to say exactly what things we could be involved in or to strengthen what the word "advise" means. There are certainly some parents who would go beyond that and say that we need to be on school-based councils and those kinds of things, but as an organization, as a collective, the parents of the province have not said that. They're very, very supportive of public education and just believe that there should be a meaningful role for parents and that the current wording isn't necessarily providing that. It's being interpreted so widely that so often they're put on the sidelines.

B. Turner: One of the things we find when we're doing leadership development workshops or when we're on the road talking to parents out in the province or when they come to our conferences is that the autonomy is really a question. In school districts in parent advisory councils we find all sorts of different levels of what people believe parent advisory councils have the right to do. There was an agreement made years ago between school trustees, the Teachers Federation, the principals association and some other partner groups and the then president Moyra Baxter of BCCPAC, which said that PACs were autonomous. Yet we go into school districts where they're not autonomous; they're not free to express themselves. Like Reggi said earlier, sometimes the support dries up.

Parent advisory councils in one district we were just in have a policy in their district that says that the administrative officer should be a signing officer on the PAC account in order to keep it legitimate. So on one hand PACs are charged with the responsibility, through the School Act, to have a constitution and bylaws to conduct their affairs, and then it seems to be superseded by some policy that's in the district. We're not sure that the district has the right to make policies like that.

R. Lee: Thank you. I've got a lot of questions, but I would like to let the other members ask.

E. Brenzinger: As a parent of three kids in school and being a PAC mom, etc., I was just curious to know: do the PAC groups who meet monthly have the opportunity to have in-camera meetings? Is that done, or is it something that's being considered? Would it be beneficial?

E. Brenzinger: Well, the parents getting together without having staff and principals.

R. Balabanov: You know, we strongly believe in the model of collaboration. We do often hear of PACs that say: "How can we meet without the principal there? We need to talk about something, and we feel that their strong personality somehow dominates the meetings." What we try to do is work with them to empower and advocate for themselves so that they feel comfortable having conversations regardless of who's in the room. We shouldn't feel intimidated by teachers or principals or any other staff member. They should be aware that that's a possibility, and we should work with them. We always try to say that we need to take the high road. How can you make them aware of what the appropriate role is when they're in a meeting?

Yes, parents meet separately. If they can't do so in the school, you bet they do in the parking lot or in somebody's house and have those conversations. But when you have a PAC meeting that any parent can attend, we should be very careful about being inclusive. We should model what we would like them to do. We also believe that parents should be at the staff meetings. We see no reason why a parent rep couldn't be at the staff meeting and hear all the conversations, so they can speak with knowledge about how the staff came to a decision and what the deliberations were like. We would like to model that.

R. Balabanov: In some schools and in some districts they're welcomed, and they have a regular role — like, that is the parent piece, and they're there for the whole meeting. In other places that does not happen.

R. Masi (Deputy Chair): I certainly appreciate you coming to our hearings. I just have a question about decision-making in terms of legislation. I guess that's what our committee's all about: to hear proposals for recommendations. In order to strengthen the decision-making approach, it seems to me that there has to be an offset here with responsibility for decision-making as well. At the present time school trustees are elected by the general public, and they have to face an electorate for their decision-making. Teachers and administrators are subject to legal action for a number of things that they could get involved in. What would be the responsibility level of a parent advisory council if they were able to intensify the word "advise" and in fact make decisions?

R. Balabanov: We believe that currently PACs are already autonomous bodies. They have a constitution and bylaws. All the members of a PAC, which are all the parents and guardians in that school, have a responsibility to come and vote and participate and can hold the executive and the group accountable. Under the School Act they are currently — through the table officers, the executive — the collective voice of the parents in that school. The parents hold themselves accountable very, very strictly. They have elections. They make decisions just like any of the other bodies do. There are certainly more and more PACs that are actually becoming registered societies so that they're abiding by the Society Act — those kinds of things. So that's already happening. I think parents would really like to model accountability.

R. Masi (Deputy Chair): Just further to that, what safeguards would there be? It's a fairly narrow electorate. What safeguards would be there to prevent single-issue takeovers of a parent advisory council or a district PAC or even a B.C. body?

R. Balabanov: I guess it would be the same safeguards you'd have in any organization, in any elected position. What safeguards do you have that a trustee doesn't come in and have a single agenda? They're elected by the people who feel that they are the best representatives for them. They're held accountable through the monthly meetings, through resolutions and through process, just like any other association would be.

J. Kwan: My question centres around participation rates or opportunities of different PACs within different school districts. Again, take as an example my own community and perhaps in others as well. Sometimes it's difficult for the parent to participate because of life circumstances. Language also becomes a barrier amongst many, many barriers, which I'm sure you know about.

I'm wondering, from your perspective, what work is being done to facilitate participation across the board. When we talk about the issue of equity and accountability, it's particularly important that participation is made as accessible as possible, recognizing some of the barriers that now exist with different parents in different locations.

R. Balabanov: That's a question that many PACs struggle with on a daily basis. How can we make all the parents at the school feel that they're participating and they're welcome? We know there are some people who, frankly, will never come to a meeting, whether they be parents, whether they be any other member of our society. But there's other ways of including them. PACs work very hard — through newsletters, through surveys, through phone calls, through meeting parents in parking lots — to include them whenever there's a decision to be made to include them in the conversation and encourage people to come in.

Frankly, we hear from some parents: "You know, I was there. I went for two years. And what was the point? Nothing changed, so I'm doing something else now. I support my own child." We have to get over that

hurdle in some way. How can we welcome back those parents that no longer participate and, at the same time, welcome all the different kinds of expectations there are?

There are some really creative challenges around the ESL challenge, around people coming from different cultures and how they perceive parents are involved, because in some cultures they're not involved in education. We hear of schools where they will have a meeting on a night for, let's say, Korean parents so that there's their kind of discussion there. Then they have a liaison with the regular full PAC so that those issues go back and forth. We talk about going out to people's houses and actually welcoming them and picking them up and bringing them to meetings or having other kinds of discussions. Sometimes parents do feel very comfortable about coming and helping with a hot-lunch program. That's one way just to get that parent in the school to see what happens in the school, to get a sense…. That can build from there. If they feel welcomed and trusted, that it's a good place to be, and if they have something more to contribute, you build on that.

For some parents it's a very difficult thing, based on their experience in public education, to come into the school or to speak to a teacher or a principal, a person of authority. That's very, very frightening and intimidating for them. We do a lot of work with our PACs, and we're always looking for more creative ways. For example, the Vancouver school district did a series of videos, all different kinds…. I think there are 15 different ones, geared at different types of communities of parents to encourage them to participate. We're participating in the provincial committee that's doing research in aboriginal parental involvement. We believe that research will show us some more information that will apply to all parents. We believe we have lots in common, as far as why we might not participate in full decision-making and why we don't come to meetings. How can we make that happen a little better?

I think there's a real key role of all the partners in education saying: "We don't just welcome those noisy parents, those parents that are very accustomed to speaking out. We welcome all parents and encourage them to come in the school in some way so that they can see it's not a threatening problem. They're welcome in there, they have a role, and therefore they need to be part of the role of discussions as well." Tell everyone and share with everybody what is working for their child. Otherwise, that information doesn't get there.

J. Kwan: Do you have the statistics in terms of the breakdown in the participation rate of PACS with particular schools or even on the district basis?

J. Kwan: It could be a reflection of attendance rates. How many parents in a particular school actually come to a meeting, as an example? I imagine that those numbers fluctuate in different areas throughout the community. I'm just interested in what kind of representations are there. Perhaps more important than that, what else can we do to facilitate participation?

Having been an ESL student from a low-income family, I tell you it was very difficult for my parents to participate in anything because of language barriers, income barriers, etc. There are just huge difficulties. It's not that those parents don't want to participate; they just don't have the means to participate. How do we facilitate that, in the interests of equity?

By the way, I really appreciate your comment around fundraising. I know of personal experiences where at one school, the school needed some computers, and there was a group of parents there. After about 15 minutes they raised over $10,000 with the group of parents there. They bought all brand-new computers for the classroom. I know that in other school districts we're still fundraising just to get a couple. It's all the equity question. I appreciate your comment on that.

R. Balabanov: That's why we call fundraising the "f" word. It shouldn't be the reason that we're there. It should come out of the goals that the community sets as a whole. I think that when you have a school committee or a district where you say, "We're all equal partners; let's set some goals together," and the parents see that kind of meaningful involvement and see that what they bring to the table — the information they bring about what's working well for their students, what could be done to improve it…. Then they're happy to do fundraising as part of that to accomplish those goals, whether it be to a build a new playground because the old one isn't safe and you need a playground or whether it be to buy textbooks.

Your example of computers is a really, really key one. I was just talking to the North Vancouver DPAC the other day. They did a survey that found that 90 percent of the computers in their district were paid for by parents. If you think generally, overall in the community in North Van there are some people who can write cheques a lot easier than in some of our other communities. I wonder if in those other communities…. I would guess those computers don't exist. I think that applies not just to computers but to other things that are happening in the schools. That's certainly a concern.

I think we can involve those parents in all of those communities. They have some information to give you, especially the ones that don't get involved in fundraising. "What's working for my kid?" I can tell you that my kid's coming home happy or not happy. Let's talk about how we can change that so they're learning more effectively.

W. McMahon (Chair): Thank you so much for coming today and for the presentation.

W. McMahon (Chair): The committee will recess until 1 o'clock, with lunch in the Cedar Room. Thank you.

W. McMahon (Chair): It's a pleasure this afternoon to have Adrian Kershaw, vice-president of the University College of the Cariboo, with us. Before we start, I'm just going to have the group introduce themselves and give the name of their riding.

W. McMahon (Chair): I'm Wendy McMahon, MLA, Columbia River–Revelstoke. Welcome. We'll turn it over to you.

A. Kershaw: Perhaps I should say a little bit before we begin about what I do at UCC. You can see from the slide here that I luxuriate in the title of vice-president of community and distributed learning services. That's really about servicing the communities that lie inside of Kamloops as well as looking after information and communications technologies supplied both to teaching and learning and to administration.

W. McMahon (Chair): Is your mike on? You maybe just need to turn the switch.

A. Kershaw: Is that okay? Good. Sorry about that. That's what comes from being the vice president responsible for technology. I always screw up. [Laughter.]

In any event, I really appreciate the opportunity to talk to you, because I bring a fairly unique perspective in that I deal daily with the issues faced by the small communities that lie outside Kamloops in our region. They're hurting, and they have been hurting for a long time. What we've been trying to do is use technology to reach out to those communities, to bring enhanced services to them.

The challenge we face in those small communities is that we can't deliver traditional face-to-face delivery because, frankly, it's not cost-effective. We can't assemble a large enough classroom for most programs and courses. On-line learning then becomes a really useful tool, because the demand pattern in those communities is broad but very shallow. Lots of people want to take a whole lot of different courses and programs, but we simply can't assemble a large enough critical mass to make it run cost-effectively.

On-line learning is a real key to the future of service to those small communities and indeed, as I'll talk a little bit later on, to a whole range of people who are both time-bound and place-bound, who live in the bigger cities as well.

Before I begin, though, I just want to review what's in your package. This is the maroon piece that I've left you. There are copies of the folios. You can scribble on those if you want to — okay? — as I'm talking. There's a list of examples of collaborative initiatives focused on development, delivery and support of on-line learning, nationally and internationally and from British Columbia.

There's a paper that I wrote about 18 months ago, which really sets in some detail the two scenarios that I'm going to talk about. One scenario is more of the same. Another scenario takes a much bolder and more visionary approach to the development of on-line learning.

Finally, there's a paper that I co-authored with a colleague of mine which gives you some insight into the impact of technology and changes in student choice patterns on the post-secondary system. This is not an academic paper. It was written for administrators, and as I'm constantly reminded by some of the faculty members I work with, administrators are not amongst the brightest lights in the world, and so of course we have to not indulge in jargon. Obviously, it's much more accessible, I hope, for that reason.

That's the package, and I'm now going to launch, as it were, into my presentation. The agenda essentially is to take a look at what's currently happening in the field of on-line learning in British Columbia; then scope out the two options that I've talked about; then take a much deeper look at the more complex and bolder visionary approach to collaborative development, delivery and support of on-line learning; sketch out a vision for you for the future; and then ask: "How do we get there?" I make some suggestions about what's necessary to achieve that vision in the future.

First off, let's have a look at the current status of on-line learning in British Columbia. All institutions in one way or another are using technology to assist in teaching and learning. Some are more advanced than others, and typically what's happening is that technology is being used in the regular classroom to augment face-to-face activity. The fact of the matter is that we're in a highly technology-rich economy and environment now. Our students expect that, so people are delivering on that. Some faculty members are making the next step and actually putting that coursework on line.

But what we're having here is a really incoherent range of courses and programs. I think there's currently about 500 on-line, made–in–British Columbia courses available, but they don't make up much of a program. You know, you might get one course over here at the fourth-year level and another one over here at an introductory level, and there's no coherence. From a student's perspective who's sitting out, say, in Fort St. John wondering how she's going to take a full year's courses over a couple of years to get herself out of the situation she's in and better integrated into the economy, it's simply not possible. If those courses aren't available in a face-to-face environment, it's just not possible.

What we have is this kind of incoherent range of courses, with some exceptions. This is all down to what I call the lone rangers — individual faculty members. These are the innovators and the earlier doctors in the institutions. I'm not taking away from them, but they're lone rangers. They tend to go off and do things out of a sense of enthusiasm and desire to do something new.

That's great, but what we end up with, unfortunately, is a situation where we have essentially piecemeal and uncoordinated course and program offerings. What we have is a situation where institutions are competing with one another, and we get multiple offerings of, say, sociology 100, because instructor X in Fort St. John will want to put one on and somebody at UBC will want to put one on. We're just wasting resources as a system.

In addition, what we find for the mythical student in Fort St. John…. For example, she can identify three or four courses from a number of different institutions that she wants to put together to make up a first-year program in something or other. What she's faced with is a plethora of academic and administrative rules. I'll just give you one example. Every time somebody registers a first time in an institution at the moment, they have to pay an admission fee. Josephine is probably having to pay three or four admission fees. Well, that's nonsensical. We've got to do something about harmonizing that.

In fact, we do have one exception which we call the e-merge project, which is sponsored by C2T2. I'll talk in some detail of that a bit later on. C2T2, by the way, is the Centre for Curriculum, Transfer and Technology. It's a very, very good example that, in fact, collaboration actually works.

As a result of this messy environment that we're working in, we find place-bound students — people who simply can't move because of family, business, their jobs, their personal situations, disability or what have you — or time-bound people, who have to work, whether it's full-time or part-time, and can't get to a face-to-face environment effectively. What they're faced with is that they really don't have much access to on-line courses from B.C. As a result, what we're seeing is that more and more people are voting with their fingers and going into other jurisdictions to get the courses and programs they want.

At 100 Mile House Centre, for example — and I'll talk in some detail of this later on — we support students taking courses from anywhere, on-line and correspondence. Fully 20 percent of our students in 100 Mile House, at the distance learning centre there, go outside of the province to get their courses and programs. I think that's a shame.

What are the options? The one that I don't favour is continuing to do what we've always done. I love this quote from Marilyn Ferguson: "Always doing what you've always done always gets you what you've always got." Essentially, if we continue doing these things, we'll become an on-line backwater. In fact, my assessment is that we're already right on the verge of it right now. If we don't do something bold, then we surely will become an on-line backwater.

The option that I prefer is to develop a policy and fiscal environment which supports the collaborative — and that's the key word — development, delivery and support of on-line learning. This collaborative development would involve all of the institutions in the province. It wouldn't be in the purview of one single institution or a small group of institutions. It would involve the K-to-12 system so that we smooth out for people the moving-out of the secondary school system into post-secondary — essentially capture them before they leave the high school. It will involve, as well, the private sector, and I'll give you some examples of that in a moment.

I want to see it modelled on the national-international examples that I provide in the additional material. In Saskatchewan, for example, we have a project called Campus Saskatchewan, which has just been funded to the tune of $4.1 million to do exactly this. Washington On-Line. Some 30 to 40 institutions are now being supported by that state — their college system — to create exactly this kind of collaborative approach to on-line delivery. In Sweden they just announced that all of their institutions are going to be involved in a national initiative to do exactly what I'm talking about. What we'd end up with, as I've said here, would be a seamless, open, accessible and flexible system that would be available to students anywhere, at any time. I might add that there are huge opportunities to export our expertise into the international market. I'll come to that later on.

Let's take a look at this e-merge project from the Centre for Curriculum, Technology and Transfer. The e-merge project is a relatively small, modest program, but it's shown that collaboration works. What the e-merge project has been able to do with its post-secondary partners is develop a standard approach to a course format. That's really important, because students don't want to have to be learning a new kind of software every time they switch on and take another course from somewhere else, so there's a standardized format. The look and feel are pretty much the same. People click on and say: "I know this; it's not new." You don't have to overcome those problems. The project is beginning to harmonize the administrative and registration procedures. It provides support to faculty learn-

ing to use on-line technology. I'm beginning to develop a common help-desk function and course-hosting activity.

The proof is in the pudding. Last year there were 50 enrolments. This year there are 1,000, with every indication that it's going to go up exponentially. The demand is there. People want this kind of service. What it's doing is providing access to coherent course and program packages.

We have a number of partners, as you can see. At the moment the project has developed the applied business technology program, which used to be called office administration. The first two years of an associate of arts degree are the first two years, essentially, of a bachelor of arts degree. I understand that the library technician's certificate is going to be worked on this coming year. As well, we're going to be finding that people can take a tourism degree completion program.

Also being worked on is a standardized package of learner supports. I want to come to that now. Learner supports are absolutely critical in the on-line environment. As you probably realize, there's no question that on-line learning has lots and lots of promise of increasing access, but as Gordon Thompson has said, increased access to failure is no victory. What we find is that failure and completion rates remain high in most entry-level courses in the on-line environment, except where people get support. The applied business technology program, for example, gave a lot of support last year. They have an 85 percent success rate, incredible in the on-line environment. Remember, this is entry level. When we get to post-graduate and post-diploma programs, we're dealing with people who are usually professionals, are well motivated and have discipline and study skills in place. They're nearly always successful in the on-line environment, so it's really good for the post-secondary and post-graduate environment. If we really want to increase access, we've got to get at the entry-level people. That's why support is absolutely critical; otherwise we're wasting everybody's time — and the student's time.

Let's talk a little bit about what that might look like. This is where I want to talk about our 100 Mile House Distance Learning study Centre. It's a community-based centre. It provides a range of technology and other kinds of access. It deals with a digital divide in 100 Mile House because a lot of people either don't have access to a computer or are not on line with a fast enough connection. We provide that free. Students can take courses from any institution. That's a groundbreaking thing. What we're interested in at 100 Mile House is ensuring that people are successful. We don't care where they take the course from; we just want them to be successful. That's the kind of support we provide them.

We're working with an Oracle database company down in Burnaby right now, helping them deliver their program at a distance for the first time to an HRDC recipient in 100 Mile House. We're currently working with an accredited private training college in Edmonton to get them to deliver their LPN program that will be accredited by the College of Licensed Practical Nurses of B.C. There's really strong support from the community. I'll just give you some quotes that I've got from students: "Even just getting the encouragement when I first walked into the centre made me think I could really do this." That first step is really critical, and we're there to provide that support. Another one: "Coming at it from a family perspective, my son and I did our homework together. My family is definitely being impacted in a positive way. It is a great model." So it's having a real impact on personal lives.

What does the possible future look like? What I would like to see in five years' time is this: we have a B.C. brand that everybody recognizes worldwide as a high-quality product. We leverage our strategic advantages that we currently have in articulation. That's where people from any institution at the first- and second-year university level can take a course from anybody. Last year I was in Berlin. There was a presentation from somebody from the University of Mainz and the University of Stuttgart saying: "This is wonderful. Our students in this one physics course can take a course from Stuttgart." I'm sitting there thinking: "We've got that everywhere for all courses at the first- and second-year level. So we're way ahead. Plus we're developing many diploma and certificate courses that ladder into higher credentials or degrees. It's a seamless relationship. People can finish a diploma program, go out into the workforce, come back and — guess what — get recognition for the full diploma towards a degree program. That's happening very effectively and rapidly at university colleges. Of course, part of that then is prior learning assessment — getting recognition for the work that you've done out in the workplace.

Also in the future is partnerships with the private sector. I firmly believe that we can use online learning to address the critical shortage in the trades field by changing the way we do apprenticeship training, having large sections of the didactic — the teaching — portions delivered on line and having the practical portions supported in the workplace by employees, who are supported by faculty members, going around and doing quality control and assurance.

Similarly, in health care there's no reason at all why we can't make the kinds of partnerships that we're making with NorQuest College in Edmonton. It would be great if it was a B.C. outfit, but there isn't one around. Similarly at the post-graduate…. I think there's lots of opportunity to use on-line training for information and communications technology.

The partnerships with the K-to-12 system are absolutely key. All the indicators are, of course, that post-secondary education is a critical issue for people not only in terms of economics but also in dealing with very social pathologies and, in the long run, improving people's health. There's a direct correlation, and you can see this in the work done by the regional health officers in 1999 between post-secondary participation rates and the quality of health. That's a long-term saving for the province.

I want to see all institutions involved in supporting learners. They don't have to be delivering on-line courses, but they absolutely have to be engaged in making sure that people are successful, because people are at different locations. We need to see the harmonization of all our regulations, so students don't have any barriers to move between institution and institution.

Also, I want to see education become a major element in B.C.'s export economy. The on-line environment really does provide a good toehold into international markets. We can provide courses over there, and then once people get involved in B.C. activity, they will come and take face-to-face courses from us. So it's a real opportunity in the export market.

What are the next steps? Well, not surprisingly, we have to create an effective policy environment. In my opinion, the reason we have the mess that we're in right now — because it is a messy situation — is that we haven't had an effective policy environment to drive this. Obviously, from a policy environment, we need to have some kind of fiscal support as well, which supports the policy and provides the necessary policy levers. I think we can learn from the e-merge model, and we can harness the full potential of the post-secondary system and the other partnerships to provide a really extensive and rich on-line learning environment for our students.

B.C. is at a crossroads, in summary. We can do more of the same and essentially say goodbye to many of our potential students. Believe me, large sections of our population are seeing the B.C. system as becoming less and less relevant to their lives because they can't get access to the needed programs they want in the on-line environment. Or we can take a much more bold and visionary approach and essentially harness the full expertise of our system to collaborate collectively on the development, support and delivery of on-line learning. We can compete with one another and collaborate at the same time. There's no reason why we shouldn't be able to do that. Essentially, we'll provide greater opportunities for our students to become more integrated into a knowledge economy.

T. Christensen: Thank you very much for the presentation. We've heard previous presentations on some aspects of on-line learning, and it certainly is an exciting area for the future. Could you comment on where you see the greatest need at this point? You've said there are a number of courses out there, a real hodgepodge mixture, offered through institutions all around the world.

T. Christensen: Is there a need for us to be developing courses in British Columbia? Or is it enough that we simply find a coordination and support role so that in cases like 100 Mile House, you have a physical location where you're providing support for students and helping them to find those courses from around the world?

A. Kershaw: A couple of observations. I don't think it's an either/or situation. I think you have do the support piece. No one institution and, for that matter, no system can be all things to all people in the short term. It's just impossible; it's not financially possible. My reaction is yes, if somebody can get a course or program from another jurisdiction, why not? But what we're doing if we don't do our own strategic development is essentially exporting jobs and exporting expertise. And what we're saying to our students is: "Don't look to British Columbia to provide your needs." I don't think that's right. In the short to medium term, given that we have financial issues, we need to be strategic. We need to look at the new-era agenda, for example, and say: "Okay, what elements of that can we meet through on-line delivery?" That's why the policy environment with the fiscal levers underneath it is so critical. That's the only way you're going to get institutions to say: "You know, we can cooperate on this particular piece." The leadership has to be there. I'll stop there.

R. Lee: My question is the e-merge project you mentioned at one university. Which one?

A. Kershaw: No, no. The sponsoring institution for the associate of arts degree is the University College of the Fraser Valley. The associate of arts degree is a precursor to all bachelor of arts programs in the province. It's a block transfer. At the end of it, it's for the student to then decide where he or she wishes to go. What I would like to see — and we'll get there eventually — is an opportunity for people to finish on line a bachelor of arts degree, but we're not there yet.

R. Lee: Are there any efforts to engage other universities to get in on these coordinated on-line projects in the future?

A. Kershaw: Yes. In fact, I've been in touch with the University Presidents Council and shared with them the paper on collaboration or cooperation that you have in your package. I'm expecting to hear back from them shortly. We're certainly, through the university colleges consortium, all going to be pressing that issue and pushing it along. I think the key issue is having a fiscal lever there to make it look attractive for people to get involved in this.

B. Locke: Thank you, Adrian, for a very interesting presentation. I just wanted to know what the success rate of the students you see is, on average, in completion of the on-line courses.

A. Kershaw: Through our distance learning study centre at 100 Mile House, it's around 75 to 80 percent. A lot of those courses have been taken, quite frankly, by correspondence. There isn't much available on line yet. What we do there is provide a suite of learner support. We provide tracking. The coordinator will phone up Jack and say: "Jack, you've got an assignment due in a week's time. What are you doing about it?" One of the things is that when people are studying on their own, it's very, very easy to say, "Well, I've got to do this. I'll leave it till next week," and so and so forth. Pretty soon they get way behind. Part of that business is to make sure that people stay on track and to give them a prod every now and then — help them with getting started on writing an essay, help them with getting access to UCC's library resources and so on.

K. Manhas: Thank you very much, Adrian. Your presentation was very insightful and forward-looking. You mentioned collaborative efforts on e-delivery of post-secondary courses. What method do you see for this collaboration to occur? What do you see as the best method for British Columbia to pursue this effort? I'll just give you the context of this. I know that in Alberta they have Athabasca University that focuses on this. We've heard about that. Here we have the Open Learning Agency. What are your thoughts on the best way to deliver these services in a coordinated effort?

A. Kershaw: My own feeling is that those kinds of unitary distance-delivery institutions have been overtaken by the technology. That's sort of a general, worldwide observation. What is happening now is that more and more institutions not only have the ability but the desire to get involved in on-line learning. So what has to happen is that there has to be a governance structure that brings all the partners together. This is not uncommon. In the international examples that I provided in the package, this is typically what happens. A consortium of interested partners is formed, and there's a governance structure where they collectively make decisions about what is going to be put on — again, often within the context of government policy. What typically happens then is that there is a kind of modest-size secretariat that provides the key coordinating functions for things like technology issues, harmonizing regulations, setting standards for the delivery templates and so forth. That doesn't have to be very big. It's the kind of role that C2T2 has been playing with e-merge, only writ somewhat larger because, of course, that project is a relatively small and circumscribed one.

A. Kershaw: No, it's not one of ours. It's a provincially funded organization. Without that support, we wouldn't be anywhere near down the line that we are right now. We've made huge strides. We've gone from 50 enrollees to 1,000 enrollees in this province, with respect to programs that e-merge is involved in, in just one year — an enormous increase.

K. Manhas: Does any of this currently happen under the auspices of the B.C. Open University? If so, how does that work? How could it possibly work?

A. Kershaw: To my knowledge, it doesn't. There may be some one-on-one relationships that have occurred around specific technologies. For example, a while ago there was some work being done with one or two institutions delivering OLA programs using interactive video. But there's no concerted attempt to work with other institutions in the province to develop, together, the range and richness of programs that are really required by the citizens.

T. Christensen: Are there any financial obligations on students attending these distance learning centres? If they're not taking a course from UCC, they're taking it on line from a university in Ontario.

A. Kershaw: Tom, I always get asked that question, and it's a very good question. The thing for us at the moment is that this is a pilot project. We're funding it out of a reallocation of funds. In these small communities, where there is a 40 or sometimes 50 percent unemployment rate and more, any additional dollar is a barrier. So what we've tried to do is not introduce user fees. It might become necessary in the future. Certainly, we have plans to expand to five of these locations over the next two or three years, and we may have to do that then. I don't know. Right now we're doing it on a free basis. In the full range of issues it's not very expensive. We employ what we call an instructional system, so it's not a full-cost faculty member. They work full-time for us. With the salary, benefits and office costs it's probably around $60,000 for that location — not a bad investment for what we're doing, quite frankly.

T. Christensen: How long has the program being going on in 100 Mile House? And is it too early, at this point, to track whether it's resulting in people getting full accreditation for a particular skill-set and then finding employment?

A. Kershaw: Good question. It's been going on for three years. No — we're into our fourth year now. It was funded initially through an HRDC grant, and then, because we saw the benefits of it, we rolled it into our base support. It was a slow beginning, and it's at the takeoff point now. We're now getting five people a day coming into the centre. This is from a community with a catchment area of maybe 6,000 people. There are five people a day coming in and saying: "I want to take a course on line. Can you help me?" Not all of those get translated into on-line activity, because the courses they want may not be there. We now have over 150 active students, and we've had several people graduate.

One woman took a correspondence course in medical assistant technology — medical secretarial work — actually from a UCC program. Without the support of the centre, she wouldn't have finished. She said that herself. She didn't have to leave her home. She stayed in her home, she stayed with her family, and she got a job in 100 Mile House as soon as she graduated. I think that's a really critical issue. You've got to recognize that there are huge opportunity costs to moving away. If you fund these things locally, where people can stay locally, you're actually putting a far less toll on individuals economically than if you say to them: "Yeah, you need to get education, but I'm afraid you have to move down to Kamloops." They can stay in their own home, hold down a job, as this women did part-time, and then move on to a full-time job in the community when they graduate.

T. Christensen: I'm going to follow up on that same question. That's one example of a success story. Is it something that you are tracking on an active basis so that after a couple more years or five years down the road, we'll be able to say: "For this small investment we're getting these great results for a smaller community in the province." I think it is critical, particularly for the rural areas of this province.

A. Kershaw: Absolutely. That's exactly what we're doing. In fact, we have one person now doing her master's thesis, looking back in time at exactly that, and then, as well, interviewing people in the community to see what their sense is of the impact of that on the community. I mean, the quotes I gave are from that study. They're actually exceeding our wildest expectations.

What it's done for 100 Mile House is that it's really gelled the community around the kinds of services that we can offer in that community. People see it now as a real value. I've been going around talking to the communities and saying: "What we've got to do in the future is have more community action and more community commitment to education and training. Let's see what we can do in terms of partnering." I'm having these conversations with the school districts as well. You know, 100 Mile House gets it because they've got this centre there as a beacon, and around it has developed a huge amount of other face-to-face service on a cost-recovery basis. It's extraordinary. When you add up what we call the student contact hours, last year we delivered the equivalent of 115 full-time-equivalent student-hours, which is an enormous amount of study and an enormous amount of stuff. That didn't include what was going through the distance learning study centre. It's a huge success from our perspective, and one we want to replicate.

K. Manhas: Do you have the same on-line participation rates in the urban centres, like Kamloops?

A. Kershaw: No, simply because people can get access. We don't provide that kind of support, although we will do eventually at the Kamloops campus.

I'm assuming there are lots of people taking courses. In fact, when you look at who's taking courses in the lower mainland and Victoria, it's students who are maybe taking two or three other courses face to face and need that additional flexibility to keep a part-time job down, so they take a course on line. It may not necessarily be from the same institution. So you'll have people taking three courses, a degree program at SFU and picking up a second-year course from Douglas College on line. That then frees them up to keep working and yet finish faster.

R. Lee: I'm looking at your paper there…. In this chaotic environment there are long-term and short-term developments, and the time scales sometimes are different to deliver the most effective programs. I know that developing an on-line program takes a lot of time, but you can also reach out to a lot of people at the same time. What do you perceive as the best delivery model in the future — a classroom model of development?

A. Kershaw: If you're starting from scratch with a course, to put it on line is expensive. But as I said earlier on, lots and lots of faculty members are now using technology in the classroom and actually using WebCT. We have about 3,000 students and 150 faculty using WebCT in a face-to-face environment on the campus at Kamloops. It doesn't take much, then, for people to take that stuff that they're doing in the face-to-face environment and translate it into the on-line environment. It's not quite as expensive.

As well, there's lots and lots of opportunity for what we call hybrid delivery. In some courses, total on-line delivery isn't that appropriate. You may actually want to bring people together in much the same way that the Open University does in the United Kingdom. They bring people together for face-to-face interaction. Now, it's not always possible, particularly given the distances in the interior of British Columbia, but you can get over that using interactive video, as we do. So there are a number of different ways you can use technology to overcome problems as well as to assist in teaching and learning. It doesn't all have to be on line. It can be a combination of approaches.

R. Lee: There are a lot of good teachers and good professors teaching excellent courses. Are there any plans to use the best in B.C. and to get them involved in developing certain programs?

A. Kershaw: In fact, that's what we've been trying to do, generally, through a variety of different means. A group of us have been sort of prime movers in the development of on-line learning and the use of technology. What we've tried to do is put together…. The Centre for Curriculum, Transfer and Technology plays a key role in this coordinating function. We're trying to bring together the keeners, as it were — the people

who are good at it, who have done it first — and use those people to encourage others to get involved and to train them.

Certainly, we've got that kind of mentoring process underway. That's certainly what's seen…. I'll give you a classic example in the applied business technology program. The prime mover for that on-line program started about 18 months ago. She's from Northwest Community College. It took her about six months to gather a group of people around her. One of the women who got involved was somebody from my institution. When I talked to her, she was really jaundiced about it. She said that she was doing it under sufferance. She's now one of the biggest supporters and one of the best instructors that we have. So you can go through a transformation with people as well, which is really exciting.

W. McMahon (Chair): Thanks so much for the presentation today. On behalf of the committee, we really appreciate your input.

A. Kershaw: I'd like to thank you all for your patience and the opportunity to speak to you.

W. McMahon (Chair): Our next presentation this afternoon will be from the Confederation of University Faculty Associations. Presenting on their behalf is Robert Clift. Good afternoon and welcome. I'll have you introduce the gentlemen who's with you today.

R. Clift: I have with me today Dr. William Pfaffenberger, who is the president of the University of Victoria Faculty Association and a professor in the mathematics department at the University of Victoria. The president of CUFA BC, Darwyn Coxson, is speeding his way from the airport. He's a faculty member at the University of Northern British Columbia. Unfortunately, Prince George is not well served by Air Canada these days, and there was a further mechanical breakdown in Vancouver. But he did phone me just before we came in to assure me that he's on his way, so he should be coming in shortly, I hope.

R. Clift: He was supposed to do the front part, so I guess I'll just shift all my stuff to the front, and then he'll do his front part at the end.

W. McMahon (Chair): Okay. That's great. Well, whenever you're ready. I'm not sure whether you were both here when we did the introductions earlier.

W. McMahon (Chair): You weren't. So why don't we start, and we'll introduce the committee to you.

W. McMahon (Chair): And I'm Wendy McMahon, MLA for Columbia River–Revelstoke.

R. Clift: Well, thank you. We very much appreciate the opportunity to present to you, particularly in these longer sessions where we can get into a bit more discussion and detail. I did the provincial Finance committee two weeks ago, I guess, and 15 minutes isn't much time. I'm sure 45 minutes will get exhausted very quickly also. I've had the opportunity to read the transcripts of your hearings on the 16th and 17th, and there was some very engaging conversation and discussion. I look forward to the discussion that will come out of this presentation.

Just to tell you who we are, the Confederation of University Faculties Associations of B.C. is the organization that represents university professors at five of the six public universities in the province — that being UBC, SFU, UVic, the University of Northern British Columbia, Royal Roads University and, hopefully, the Technical University. But that's a decision for somebody else to make if we're going to have it much longer. We do hope so. We think this is an exciting project in Surrey and believe it ought to continue. They're doing a lot of good work there. That's my plug for the Technical University; I probably won't come back to it unless you ask questions later on.

What I've distributed to you are two documents. Unfortunately, with the volume of committees meeting and the ones we want to present to, I'm afraid one of the briefs you're getting is a recycled brief from the Finance committee, but it hit all of the points that we would want to make to you today. Rather than just simply changing title page and attempting to fool you, we're telling you we recycled that brief for you. Also, we've distributed to you a copy of a letter we've sent to Gerry Armstrong, the Advanced Education Deputy Minister, in response to Minister Bond's request for

Our organization is essentially advocacy. We don't take care of any labour relations; that's dealt with by local faculty associations. We advocate for a system of high-quality post-secondary education — obviously universities in particular, in our case — but we look forward to having a system in British Columbia that serves the economic, social and intellectual needs of all British Columbians, regardless of what they need or desire in terms of post-secondary education.

As you well know, having seen the comments that Don Avison and Charles Jago made to you in their presentation last week, you have a keen appreciation of some of the challenges we're facing in the system. Certainly, we appreciate the new government's commitment to maintaining education funding — maintaining up would have been better, but maintaining zero is good too — in light of what colleagues in other provinces have endured as a result of trying to control government costs.

We have the difficult situation in British Columbia, as Don Avison will have noted to you, that we're starting from a position back in the pack. The decision was made in the 1970s that rather than expand the post-secondary system in British Columbia to deal with the number of educated people we needed for the workforce, we would import people. For a time that worked very well.

Sorry, I'll just stop here to introduce Dr. Darwyn Coxson, who's the president of CUFA BC.

We started from a system that was too small. There was a deliberate decision to do so in the Bill Bennett government — a decision by, as a matter of fact, one of our colleagues, Dr. McGeer, who is now a retired professor at the University of British Columbia. In light of what government spending priorities were in that day, it was a good strategy. Unfortunately, as time has gone on and the evidence has accumulated, it's turned out to be, in the long term, the wrong choice, because we now have a system that is too small to deal with the demands that we have for higher education.

Certainly, as you all well know and I'm certain have been told several times already, people who go through post-secondary education have much better life chances all around. Specifically for the needs of the economy, they tend to be better paid and have lower rates of unemployment. If we get into issues such as health care usage, they tend to be smarter consumers of health care. They tend to be healthier on the whole. A well-educated populace is a good thing for the province. There's no doubt about that.

We've also run into the situation, as you well know, that there's a transformation happening in our economy. It's not merely a matter of well-educated people getting good jobs; it's a matter of the jobs that were there for people who did not have extensive education declining. Certainly, growth figures that you'll see in the brief indicate that the greatest growth in the number of employed people in the province between 1976 and 1996 were those people with university degrees. There was significant growth in people with other post-secondary qualifications. The smallest growth, which will not surprise you, was for those people who had less than high school. High school graduation was not a great growth area, also, in terms of the overall growth rate of employment in the province.

Furthermore, looking more specifically at the early nineties, those numbers are magnified even further. Between '90 and '96, which is the time that we're seeing the substantive shift in the economy and the blooming of what we're now calling the knowledge economy, employer demand for workers with high school graduation or less dropped by 3 percent, while demand for workers with some post-secondary education increased by 15 percent. Workers with trades or technical diplomas saw a 34 percent increase. Then again topping out, demand for workers with university credentials increased 54 percent between '90 and '96.

The problem is further magnified by the fact, as the Presidents Council has pointed out to you, that we have a larger than average growth in comparison to the rest of the country in terms of the 18-to-24 age demographic. I believe the number is that over the next five years we are expected to add about 35,000 or 45,000 young people into that category. Here it is: "Today the 18-to-24 age demographic in B.C. is 135,000. Over the next five years that's expected to rise to 180,000." These are young people who read the papers, watch television, are taking a look at what their employment prospects are and know that they need higher education in order to succeed in the changing economy.

On top of that, of course, we have the challenge in front of us of retooling people who already have training or didn't take training and are finding themselves along in their lives, that their communities may have changed and that their economic aspirations or their career aspirations may have changed. They need to re-enter the post-secondary system to get the kind of training they need.

What position this leaves us in is that we're severely undersized in comparison to the rest of the country. As the Presidents Council will have told you, we produce only about 80 percent of the national average of undergraduate degrees. I believe they provided you with detailed figures about some other fields. For instance, in medical degrees we're at about 50 percent of the national average. Certainly those numbers are striking.

Furthermore, there have been economic projections done by Robert Allen at UBC, which are a couple of years out of date at this point but were based on information from the early to mid-nineties, where he was suggesting that the labour market needs about 35,000 university graduates each year in B.C. if you look at current growth patterns in what the demand for university graduates are in the economy. Currently we produce on the order of about 16,000. The problem is

What is the answer to that? Well, what we've certainly been aiming for, for many years — Dr. Pfaffenberger will speak to this in a moment — going back to the late 1980s, has been a substantial expansion of the post-secondary system. Under the Access for All program, which Dr. Pfaffenberger will speak about, we saw an initial expansion in the system. Unfortunately, we don't live in a static province. Not only was the 18-to-24-year age group growing, but the demand was growing, so those projections that we saw back in the late eighties as to how fast we should grow the system may have been adequate for that time but are no longer adequate.

We've barely been keeping ahead. We've moved ourselves up from the bottom of the pack to No. 9 or No. 8 in terms of degrees produced per capita in the country. Certainly, in terms of overall participation including all types of post-secondary education, we moved from No. 9 up to about No. 5. We're just about on par with Alberta in that respect. We've seen a lot of success coming from that Access for All initiative and subsequent initiatives, but there's still some room to go.

In recent years in the increase in university places — in fact, also in the colleges, for that matter — we've run into the situation that the increases in spaces have not always been fully funded. We've certainly found many efficiencies and have been finding efficiencies since about 1984 in our system. We're getting very good at it now. For 17-some-odd years we've been trying to extract more for less from the system, but we've certainly gotten to the point that we're getting less for less. We meet twice a year. All our member associations meet to discuss what's happening in the system. The stories are very common and very similar between the institutions about what we're losing in the institutions in order to deal with the fact that our overall per-student funding is not keeping up with what our costs are to provide that education. On that note, I'd just like to turn it over to Bill for a few minutes.

B. Pfaffenberger: Since I've actually been at UVic since 1969, I've seen all of this kind of rollout over time. I just wanted to give my impressions of what's happened since the late eighties. It turns out that CUFA was one of the main movers in actually — it was the Vander Zalm government — doing the study that came about with Access for All. That university and college model has really served the province very well. It's worked well. It's actually distributed education out into the province where, before, it didn't exist. I think it's raised expectations, which has been one of the difficulties in terms of just facing the costs.

I also wanted to home in on what actually happened during the nineties at UVic as the impact of the way the NDP dealt with encouraging participation. Typically what we would see was a frozen budget but basically being able to get incremental funding by taking in students. It's not a bad mechanism, but what took place during the nineties — in the mid-nineties I was the department chair in mathematics and statistics, so I got a very close-up view of what would actually happen in a year — year after year, after everything was announced, was that each faculty would be given a goal of cutting their budget between 2 and 3 percent. The impact of that, since most of our budgets are salaries, is that we saw a tendency not to replace retirements. Basically, in our department during that time we actually saw a decline in faculty. We went from 27 faculty members down to 26 faculty members. This happened year after year.

What you're doing is basically saying that in one measure you're becoming way more efficient in terms of what you're doing, but you only have so much capacity in doing that. You do it year after year. We saw an increase in enrolment of 50 percent. We saw many of our first- and second-year sections double in size, basically up to room capacity. Now, that's where you sit at the present time — that is, being able to respond to actually taking in a huge number of students, at least at UVic. I mean, it physically is just not possible on campus. You couldn't do it.

To point out, one interesting thing that happened in our department and many others was this idea of wait-lists. Certainly, one of the pressures that was put on students was what they face now. Typically what happens is you have a capacity of, say, 100 in a room in a first-year calculus course, and we allow, say, 135 students to register at the beginning for that section, with 35 being on a waiting list. We keep our fingers crossed, in the fact that normally during that first five or six weeks there's a huge movement that goes on in terms of students dropping. Actually, some students cleverly find ways they can use the system to register for more than what they can possibly take, just so they can get a program that works. What you end up with is a classroom that's going to have 95 students in it. If you had originally just let 100 students register, you would only have had maybe 75 students in that classroom. It's a very high efficiency but also an extremely stressful situation that goes on. Now it's just par for the course. It's the way we operate.

I also wanted to point out, in terms of UVic, that one of the things we have needed is more large classroom space. The way the university was originally designed was with small classrooms and a target of about 5,000 students. The whole place was designed that way, and we have adjusted over time by knocking down walls and, when we do build buildings, putting in more large classroom space. One of the things we need is large classroom space. Actually, the science building that was proposed, and now the funding has been delayed…. That was one of the purposes for that building: to get us more large classroom space to be able to take some of the pressure off in first and second year.

The space problem at most of the universities is just something that, again, has become a part of the environment. This year in mathematics we have graduate students that actually share desks. Someone gets the desk in the morning, and someone else gets the desk in

the afternoon. That was one of the other things that the science building was designed to take the pressure off. We were actually one of the departments that was going to move to that building. Our offices are now in a building that's mainly housed by humanities departments. As we moved in there, it would have reduced some of the pressure that exists in other departments that are facing exactly the same thing.

I guess the really critical issue is that the new government has basically said they expect to turn the economy around, to have growth in the economy. With this bulge of students that's coming from the baby-boom echo, I think we're really facing what will be a crisis in terms of students just not being able to get into our universities. When the public realizes that the real problem is…. It's really a question of capacity. It takes time to do these things. It takes time to plan to get these things in place. We'll react to it. I mean, the fact is that if we're put in a situation of basically just raising our entry requirements or making whatever choice we have in terms of transfer students, we'll do it and try to do it as fairly as we can. The real problem is the impact it will have on the economy, because it will have a real impact.

I was around in the eighties to make a presentation to Bill Bennett's government. It may have been in '84 when we brought up the point that at that time we could really see the shift. We could see what was happening in the rural areas where the lowest participation rates were, where good jobs existed for a long period of time. People didn't want their kids to leave there. They basically said: "There are good jobs here. Why should they go off to improve their education while as a matter of fact there are well-paying jobs here?" But they were disappearing. That trend was there.

One of the advantages of access is that it has improved the situation of those students being able to get access to the system. It's a fact that that same trend has continued on and on. Now we're at the point where we have to face up to the reality that the system we have is too small and the way we're going to handle the demand that's out there really will have a positive impact on the economy.

I think it's a little different than the argument that would come from people in health care. Health care is certainly a necessity for everybody in the province, but when it comes to the economy, it's an issue of the decisions being hard decisions. When it comes to this particular problem, the correct decision would be to make it a priority — get through the recommendations of this committee or whatever — to get the right formulation of a policy to attack this problem. I think just saying, "Okay, for the next two years we won't have enough money; therefore we'll do this or that," is really passing it off, when it actually is a long-term problem.

In solving it, again the demographics will be important. If this is just a bulge that will go through, but it's going to take ten years for it to go through, maybe the planning is that you make sure the expansion you do is one that doesn't ignore that maybe the demand will go down after ten years, but something that fits into a long-term plan for the system, which, in reality, I don't think has ever existed. We've always just been attacking one perceived problem after another but not facing up to the fact that I don't think it's right for people to have the expectation that their children can get into university and then all of a sudden finding you have to have a 95 percent average to get in. As someone on this committee said the other day, it would have meant I wouldn't have gotten in — right? — which is, for most people, absolutely correct.

It's not just a fairness issue either. That was the other thing I was going to bring up about this discussion with the earlier government. We have depended for a long time on being able to import our talent. Now, of course, we're going into a very competitive environment everywhere in terms of not being able to do that. It is true. It's not in all areas, but it's in enough areas where you have to worry about the fact that you simply will not be able to depend on other jurisdictions supplying you with the wherewithal to make sure that your economy works.

Anyway, it's a historical statement from somebody who's seven years from retirement, but a worthwhile one to make. Someone has to take a long-term view and put their mind to solving the problem in the long term instead of some kind of piecemeal — this is what we do in the next year or this is what we do in the next two years.

R. Clift: For the record, Reni — I know that was your comment the other day — I, too, wouldn't have been able to enter university under the current admission requirements.

D. Coxson: I'm not sure I want to touch that one. I'm probably in a similar category in my field in the sciences. The employers tell me that the most valuable part of what I deliver to my students are my labs, where theory has to hit the ground running, and they figure out whether it works or not.

I only arrived in the province in '93, when UNBC was set up, and we're now into about our third round of going back to all our courses and saying: "Can we take a lab out of here? Do we really need labs every week? We can have labs bi-weekly or maybe just once a month." The students don't see this — it's just sort of an incremental reduction of the quality — but the employers tell me. They're quite vocal with me: "I have to train my student in such-and-such a technique. Why aren't you guys doing that?" It's getting to a point that when students come and say to me, "Where should I go if I want to get a job in biology?" I sort of have to say: "We have this great program. It's all laid out here. On the other hand, you'll get more on-the-ground training if you go to U of A, but it's tough to get in there."

We had meetings with my colleagues from across the western provinces a week ago at UNBC. It was interesting talking to the Alberta faculty associations. Both Lethbridge and the University of Alberta are planning for a doubling of their physical capacity, a doubling of their capacity for intake of students, in the

next decade. They face the same demographic bulge that we do — we're both relatively young populations in our provinces — but they are looking ahead at how to deal with that. I'm not sure we should take Alberta as our safety valve, though. I don't think it will be. There are perhaps two other safety valves that people sometimes think about in post-secondary education. One of those is: can private institutions meet that demand? The other is: what about distance delivery techniques? I'll let Rob talk in a second about private institutions.

Distance delivery techniques are a wonderful tool in terms of enhancing delivery of post-secondary education, but they're expensive up front. They're not something you can simply pull off the shelf and whip up in a short time. They're better for niche markets. They allow us to get access into communities that otherwise wouldn't, perhaps, have educational opportunities, but they still require face-to-face support. The students who do best with that are students that are highly motivated. Many of the students in a traditional university class find it challenging to go into that context. I'm not sure there's an easy safety valve there. They're both approaches that will be useful in specific contexts, but I think the bigger picture is that you've got a demographic shift happening in this province, and we're going to have to deal with that access constraint.

R. Clift: On private universities, I'll be very brief. As you know — unless this has changed recently and somebody hasn't told me — there are currently only two private universities that have authority to grant B.C. degrees, these being Trinity Western University in Langley and the Seminary of Christ the King in Mission. There are a number of institutions operating in the province granting degrees without B.C. authority to do so. This, in our view, is a violation of the University Act, but that is a matter we will take up with the minister, as we've taken it up with all the past ministers on this point for many years.

I don't know if it's a perception, but I think there's certainly a desire or a wish that if we were to expand the opportunities for private degree-granting in the province, this would somehow solve our access problem. The answer to that, I think, is that if we're not paying directly, we're paying indirectly. Trinity Western University, from very early on when it got its degree-granting authority, was given special dispensation so its students would have full eligibility for the B.C. student assistance program. Those students were eligible for both loans and grants, whereas students at other private institutions at the time were only eligible for loans.

Certainly the municipality of Langley has invested infrastructure costs in servicing the Trinity Western site. Indeed, there are also tax implications for the students being able to claim tax credits for the expenditures they make. I say that not to criticize Trinity Western — I'm from the valley; Trinity Western offers excellent programs, and many people from my graduating class went there — but to offer it as an illustration that simply because it's a private institution doesn't mean there's not a cost directly to government or indirectly, through reduction in taxation revenues because of taxation rules.

Furthermore, I think there's also an expectation, because in Canada we have a very high-quality university system across the country…. We still have a high-quality university system. There are some pockets that are starting to become problems because of lack of funding. The expectation is that these institutions would come in and be the same as a UBC, an SFU, a UNBC.

You need merely look below the surface of what happens in the U.S. to understand that that's not necessarily the case. In the U.S. we have everything from the K Mart of universities to the Saks Fifth Avenue of universities. There's a lot of variation in the private system in the U.S. Some of those institutions are very well-meaning and try and do a good job, but they simply can't get the student base or the fundraising or whatever they need to support them. There actually are institutions that solely exist for the purpose of making money. The students get an inferior product, but they get to say they have a degree.

We've not had this problem in Canada to this point and certainly not in this province. With a few exceptions of institutions from outside of Canada coming in and offering their programs, we've not had to deal with this problem. That is the social cost to an uncritical expansion of private degree-granting opportunities in the province.

It's not something that should be taken lightly. It may be something this government wants to do. We would look forward to further discussions with the government on that and certainly with this committee, if you want to revisit this question, but it's not an easy answer. In fact, I will submit to the committee a discussion paper we prepared two years ago on the economic and opportunity costs to the province in private degree-granting institutions.

Finally, on tuition. I know it's a subject this committee is very much interested in, and certainly the minister is. You have our written submission to the minister on this. It's unfortunate that the discussion on the tuition issue has been framed in terms of the tuition freeze having caused the problems at our institutions. This simply is not the case. It may have exacerbated it in recent years, but there has been a long-term funding difficulty in the institutions.

If you take a look at the submission, there are two graphs, No. 1 and 2. This is the one that's on letterhead, without the title page, to Gerry Armstrong. If you take a look at graph 1, this represents the total funding we have per student over a period of 15 or 16 years. The dotted line would be in current dollars, and the solid line is in constant dollars — that is, inflation-adjusted dollars to year 2000 dollars.

As you'll see, not only are we operating with fewer dollars on a per-student basis when we take into account inflation, but in fact if you look back about seven years there, we actually have less money in current

dollars now on a per-student basis than we had back that time ago to do the job that we're doing. The dip in recent years might be laid onto the tuition freeze, but if you look at graph 2, this is a graph of what the government operating grants have been on a per-full-time-student basis. As you see, although the tuition freeze may have allowed that dip to go down, there has been a bit of a downward slide here. This particular graph goes almost 20 years. There has been a bit of a downward slide for over 20 years in terms of the operating grant contribution from government on a per-student basis.

The reason why, in graph 1, the line remains fairly flat for a period of time is simply because we hiked up the students' tuition fees so we could have some consistent level of funding. Now, the question you may well put to us, which I probably can't answer today — it will take some more work — is: what is the optimal level of funding per student? I don't have an answer to that. I think you can certainly take from the examples given by Bill and Darwyn that there are a lot of stresses in the institution and that the quality of our programs and the services to our students are suffering because of that.

At lunch, before Bill and I came here, we were actually having a discussion about student dropout rates. We were recognizing the fact that even when I started — gosh, almost 20 years ago now — in university…. The rates of student dropout in universities are much smaller than they were then. This is part and parcel of the fact that we've raised the entrance standards so high. Students recognize that it's quite a privilege for them to be able to get in the door, having earned it through that academic standing, and they don't want to lose it. They don't let themselves drop out.

The problem is that that comes at great personal cost. During this same period where the academic standards have been increasing in order to control capacity, frankly, we have been taking away their support services. So students don't have as good counselling services or as good advising services.

We were just having the specific discussion about UVic, about how incredibly overloaded the financial aid office is. Although a number of years ago student loan administration became centralized within government, which was an excellent move, the financial aid offices are now overloaded with students looking for bursaries at all times of the year. We simply can't provide them with the bursary money that they need, and because we've focused on providing our core academic service to them, we don't have enough people to give them timely answers on the fact that there's no money for their bursaries — adding to their stress.

We recognize fully that this government is in a tough situation. We understand that. We're not expecting manna to drop from heaven. I think the message we would leave you with here today is…. We've shown you the demographics and explained to you some of the stresses in the system. We would say, as I said at the outset, that although it's nice to have some predictability, zero funding left over a number of years is not going to make things better in the institutions.

That money will have to come from somewhere. We don't think it's particularly fair that it come from the students entirely. I think it's fair to say that our council believes that students ought to pay for some portion of their studying. That's not in question. But simply to turn to the students because we don't have sufficient government funding or other sources of funding isn't fair to them. If we have zero percent growth in government funding and zero percent growth in other forms of funding, as an example, because students pay about 20 percent of university instructional costs at this point, in order for us to keep the level of funding today that we have on a per-student basis, this means that student tuition fees will have to rise at five times the rate of inflation each year — just to keep us at today's level of funding. We wouldn't accept that as consumers of other products. I'm not sure the students should have to accept that either.

What we have said to the minister in our submission is that we need to sit down and have a serious discussion about what levels of funding are necessary and appropriate to do our job well and to provide the services and instruction that students need and the services to the province. We need to figure out what the appropriate mix should be between what the government should contribute, what the student should contribute and what other sources of funding should provide and then work on a plan to make that happen. As Bill was saying, we've suffered a lot from trying to jump from one year to the next, and we hope that this government and this new Legislature will take the opportunity to start thinking about this in the long term and to do the long-term planning that our post-secondary system needs if it's to succeed.

W. McMahon (Chair): I will open the floor up for questions. We will go a little bit over on our question period this afternoon if we have the questions coming forward. We'll start with Richard Lee.

R. Lee: One of the criticisms for the arrangement in universities right now is that some students take longer to graduate than before. Are there any plans for, say, giving priority to students so that they can finish their programs? Sometimes they cannot take the required courses. Is there any way to move the students faster in the system?

W. Pfaffenberger: At UVic during the nineties one of the pressures was basically just in terms of section sizes. When you look at section sizes, of course, your third- and fourth-year courses are the ones that have the smaller section sizes. Many departments actually trim their third- and fourth-year offerings down. It was basically just an efficiency move. The difficulty with that is that when you actually look at a calendar, yes, it is possible to finish your degree, but when you actually look at putting the courses together, you have to be

Well, one thing you find now is that students have very different things going on in terms of their scheduling. I don't think the average student that's still there, who enters from high school and goes straight through, has any difficulty at all in being able to complete their program. All the others — which is a very large number — that have any delay in terms of going out and working for the fall or doing whatever can really foul their programs up, especially in the third and fourth year, because of the offerings. We found lots of students that we have to do some kind of special arrangement for in order to be able to accommodate somebody who says: "Well, it's really only one course that I need, and I'll have to come back for a whole half-year in order to complete that course." We try to accommodate them by giving them a course that we look at as being equivalent and allowing them to complete their degree. I'd say that's where part of the pressure is coming from.

The other is that I'm not really sure, at least in terms of my observations, that whatever the statistic is, is really reliable. In looking at our students, I actually think that all the way through the seventies, eighties and nineties it's been pretty much the same in terms of students wanting to complete their degrees as fast as they can. I can't really think, in terms of significant numbers, of students that have had more than the anomalous problem of not being able to complete.

You also have things like co-ops that have come in and become more popular, which do extend the length of programs — period. I mean, if you're going to do a co-op degree, it's going to take you normally a longer period of time because of your work terms. The other is combined programs. The universities have really expanded the number of combined programs. They have a huge impact. We have many combined programs. We have a program with physics; we have a program with chemistry and with computer science. These programs take longer, simply because you put the requirements together of several departments, and normally what happens is that the requirement is higher. A student is not normally able to complete those programs in four years. Those are all positives; they're not negatives. I'd really have to see what the material is that says that you have a huge number of students saying: "Hey, you know it's just impossible for me, with my plans of getting through in four years, to get through." I think some of the extenuating circumstances may actually be positive when you start to see students having to take four and a half or five years.

D. Coxson: In my discipline there are some negatives. I sit yearly on the B.C. biology articulation meetings. We have representatives from all of the institutions around the province. What we've reported in the last year or two is that to respond to pressures four or five years ago, UBC, which is the big player in our field, has let more students in at first year. They stream through, and they hit this bottleneck at third and fourth year. The labs are harder to get into. More UBC students have gone through, and that's raised the bar for students transferring in from college. It's this capacity crisis we talk about. We sort of plug one hole in the dike, and it comes out somewhere else. We've let more students stream through at UBC. That fills more of their own third and fourth year courses, and that leaves less capacity for transfers. UBC turns around and says: "Look, we're doing a good job. More students are coming in the door. We have greater student access; we're more productive — all those good things. What they didn't tell you is that it's simply a displacement, and students somewhere else now can't get in.

That's my worry about the next five or six years. We'll do some damage control at specific institutions, but for the student taking training in Castlegar and wanting to travel in to UBC or UNBC, it's going to be tougher for them. I don't want to create a sort of urban-rural split in how we try to fix the university system in the province.

R. Clift: To answer your question, we've been dealing creatively with how to address this for over 17 years. When I was a student in computing science at Simon Fraser, when the first restraint program came in, in the early eighties, the departmental decision was that instead offering the required courses in both the fall and the spring semesters, they would divide the required courses between the two semesters in order to try…. They would increase class sizes and reduce the offerings. A student who wanted to take a required course in the spring and found it's only available in the fall obviously had some difficulties. The department at that time took great pains to let all the students know that this was the schedule of courses.

As Bill has pointed out, that's fine if you're studying full-time. If you're studying part-time, for whatever reason, then this is much more challenging. This may be what we're seeing. My impression is — and I don't have a study to back this up; I'll admit that right up front — that the problem has not become any more severe of late. It's a problem we've been dealing with for a long time — that you can't complete in four years. That's my impression of the situation. If somebody has some studies on that, I'd like to see them myself.

R. Masi (Deputy Chair): I enjoyed your presentation. It was excellent, as usual. Thank you.

You brought up the question of expansion and facilities and accessibility. I was wondering what the position of the confederation is on going outside of the box here with the five universities and looking at a broader expansion in terms of the university colleges and perhaps the colleges. Have you selected a position on that at all?

R. Clift: As Bill pointed out, the Access for All initiative, which came out in the late-eighties, was a result of a campaign that we did in the early-eighties to increase access in the province. That resulted in the university colleges. Certainly, our position has long been that there needs to be university-level offerings avail-

able throughout the province. As I think your previous presenter noted, when people study in their home community, they're more likely to stay in their home communities and bring the benefits of that studying there.

This certainly also relates to the distance learning or learning through technology point that Darwyn raised. I think what's important for us to recognize is that we serve a very diverse population in the post-secondary sector. You have a lot of people sitting next to you in the Legislature who come from a lot of different backgrounds, who are different ages, who bring different experiences and training. This is the same thing we're dealing with in the post-secondary sector. The answer is not always the same. For students directly out of high school, certain university programs may be exactly what they need and what they want to do. For a re-entrant learner in Kamloops — somebody who's been displaced from the local pulp mill — they may need some skills upgrading. For a single mom on welfare, she may want to start her whole life new again and see what she can do academically and will need a bridging program before she can get into a formal post-secondary program.

That's the challenge. We have to look at and talk about expansion. Certainly, we recognize that not all those degrees that are being demanded by employers are necessarily degrees in physics or degrees in mathematics or degrees in philosophy. Those employers are looking for technology degrees. They're looking for applied degrees. To that extent, the universities' particular mandate is not in applied degrees. We've given that over to the university colleges, to BCIT, to Emily Carr. Those opportunities should be available.

I read Dr. Lee's presentation to you from last week. He has some exciting ideas about how he can offer programs there. The point is, and has always been, not to make the expansion wholesale and cheaply for the sake of filling a need. Let's do it well. That's always been our desire with the university colleges and working with them. It's to make sure that what they're doing they're doing well — and to cooperate in doing so.

K. Manhas: Thank you for the presentation. I think we can all agree that a university education is far more than a job-training prerequisite. Yet I find there's still quite a lot of focus and discussion about university providing job-ready skills. What is the confederation's position on diverting some of those individuals to institutions focused specifically on training students with job-market skills, increasing the number of applied programs outside of the university focus and allowing universities to move back towards research and more towards the traditional university mechanism that we've had in the past?

D. Coxson: I'm not sure if a traditional university exists in that sense anymore. There's such an overlapping set of skills mired between theory and applied science and such student movement between the different sectors. I really have to step back and look at the whole post-secondary system. I'll have a classroom with students from eight or ten different colleges within the province and from across the country as well. The lines are blurred now. There isn't a distinction between this course, or this degree is just a technical training, or this one's just a theory one. Certainly in my institution they're very much working hand in hand.

R. Clift: I think it's hard to get around because in some aspects — and we talk about job training and job-ready skills in the universities — we're actually talking in new ways about things we've always done: people learning how to work together, to be self-motivated in their learning, to exercise critical thinking skills and these types of things. We're talking about those in different ways because this is what the political dialogue has required of us. It's not that we're creating applied welding degrees at UBC. It's not that type of thing, but we are thinking more about what it is we do and how it prepares people. We are focused more in that way, but I don't think it means that we have taken up areas that maybe we shouldn't have taken up. Post-secondary opportunity needs to be expanded at all levels.

I know you had an excellent presentation last week from Kerry Jothen from ITAC. Even though I sometimes slightly disagree with him on his wording with respect to universities, he makes an excellent point: our society by and large has undervalued workplace-based training and apprenticeships. As a consequence, we have a lot of young people who leave high school and think that they should go to university. When they can't get in because their academic standing isn't there — or they get in and find out that it's not for them — they become very disappointed and discouraged. We have to find ways to help those people make good decisions about their post-secondary opportunities. If it means not going to university, that's okay. As a matter of fact, it's good for everybody that they choose the path that's best for them. I don't know how we answer that. I know Kerry has lots of good ideas, and I hope you'll take some of those to heart. We're not only talking about universities here; we're talking about a whole system and finding the right education for what people need and want.

D. Coxson: It's not a competition. We're woefully under capacity in so many areas that increasing capacity in a whole range of areas will help our province.

E. Brenzinger: I'm just curious. We were discussing the high standards for getting into university these days. I know that when I went, it wasn't quite the same, and we had small classrooms. I'm just wondering what the other side of the equation is like for professors who now have an increasing number of papers to mark — if the standards are being lowered because of that.

W. Pfaffenberger: That's a very good question. I think the quality of the degrees we put out is well tested in the marketplace in terms of the way we compete for where our students go for graduate work. I don't think that's changed at all. I really think that we put out very high quality degrees. I know that's not true about some other jurisdictions, where you actually get comments from people who do a comparison and say that the degrees that are put out in the province are very high quality. I think we've kept our standards there as we've gone through it, but if you actually look at the stress levels that exist, they're the same as you would see for school teachers. It's the same thing. When you look at it, it's a dramatic difference from the way it was 15 years ago. Of course, a lot of times where everything gets cut is in the support structure, so we have less in budgets for markers, less in budgets for all kinds of support things that we had before.

W. Pfaffenberger: Yeah. You know, that suffers because of the way cutting is done. The way the cuts take place is that, sure, some things are the last to go, but once they go, they don't come back.

I think one of the reasons that we don't hear a lot of student complaints is the fact that they're also under stress. The situation in the seventies was so different, in the fact that students had very high paying jobs that they could go to. They could actually finance their education by getting jobs in the summer. In the eighties that changed.

I think one fortunate thing, when the freeze was on tuition, was that the stress level probably stayed about constant during that period of time, but all the costs continued to increase for students. There are students that certainly can finance their education because of their family background, but the ones you really worry about are the ones that are on the edge all the time. Of course, as Rob mentioned, the support services at the universities in terms of counselling — all the things that are fallbacks for people to get help — haven't expanded, but the number of students has expanded — right?

It really is just the stress level. You can feel it. It exists there for faculty, and it exists there for students. It's the way it is. I mean, I don't think we'll see workloads decrease. What we'd really like to see is workloads stay the same. It's the same thing for students. We don't really want to see the stress for students go up, but the fact is that if that happens, it's probably something that just doesn't back off. The world is way more complicated now in terms of what people are trying to do.

I don't think the seriousness of the students has changed at all. I find that almost all the students I have contact with are extremely serious about what they're doing, especially the ones who've come back to university. They're absolutely serious about what they're doing. It's a positive influence on what we do, because we get that feedback in the classroom all the time. People are going to question things if they really believe that they're not there for a purpose. I think it's a very dynamic environment.

D. Coxson: That stress manifests itself in another way in that every week there's somebody in my office asking me: "Well, what do I have to do to give notice to resign at UNBC?" The fellow in the office next door has an offer from somebody in Australia. Down the hall they have an offer from somebody in Windsor. A third of the faculty just in my hallway probably have offers from somebody right now. The other universities are gearing up to deal with demand and to deal with retirements. This level of stress we've built into our system…. The faculty is just abandoning ship. I worry about who is going to do the teaching when the students do get in the door in five years' time.

R. Clift: As Bill says, the quality of the degrees and the quality of the education students are getting are still very, very good. But it's not the same. Let's face it: instructors who have had their class sizes doubled over the past 15 years, where they may have assigned three papers in a term, may now be assigning one paper and some essay questions. Students aren't getting the same kind of constructive feedback that they would by having these more intensive educative experiences. As Darwyn has said, students aren't getting the time in the lab they need to fully get a grasp of what they're getting in the lecture theatre.

These are the things that it's very hard to get a grasp on and communicate to the public and even to you, because students are coming out, and as the Presidents Council has told you, our students are very successful and are largely very happy with their education experiences. They would do it again. They go on to be the leaders in our province. They go on to be entrepreneurs, to become politicians, to become workers, to become academics themselves. So it doesn't look like anything's wrong. That's because in the system we've taken it all upon ourselves, as the funding's been constrained, to keep up and do our best for our students.

Frankly, we got to a point two years ago — I don't remember if the Presidents Council mentioned this to you — where the question came back to us again, as Bill was alluding to earlier: "We would like you to take this many more students this year, but we're not going to give full funding for them." The presidents and we and the students said: "No. We can't do it anymore. It's to nobody's benefit for us to take unfunded student spaces. Yes, more students will be in the door, but we're at the end." So for the past two years any increases in student spaces have been fully funded. It took a long time for us to finally get that message through.

We would certainly hope that with the new government, this message will also come through loud and clear. If you want us to do more, we need the resources. We're at the end, and really, we need repair of what's happened.

W. McMahon (Chair): On behalf of the committee, thank you all so much for presenting today. We appreciate it.

Our next presentation this afternoon is by Dale Dorn, president of Vancouver Community College. We'd like to welcome you. We apologize; we're running a bit behind. We appreciate your patience.

Madam Chair and committee members, I think a brief written submission is being circulated to you. It's my intention to just touch briefly on what I would say are some highlights of my presentation. I don't think I'll require the full half-hour, so I might even assist you in getting back on schedule somewhat, depending on the level of questions you might wish to ask me.

Some of the themes I will be addressing will be familiar to you. I've taken a look at some of the transcripts of earlier presentations that have been made to you. I certainly listened with interest to the presentation that you've just heard and agree with much of what has been said, although I might be coming to some of the topics from a slightly different perspective.

When I look at the mandate of this committee, I applaud you for the work that you're undertaking and your ability to remain alert and listen to so many presentations from so many perspectives and from so many educators. I encourage you as you move toward the synthesis phase and try and work through what is clearly a volume of information.

What I want to talk a bit about today is the topic of access and quality. Then I did want to share with you some perceptions of our system of colleges, institutes and university colleges. I won't be directly speaking to how it is that we interface with our university partners in the system. I think other speakers have addressed that.

I'd like to remind you that the vision for community colleges when they were first established some 40 or 45 years ago was really to try and meet learners where they the learners were in terms of the geographic location and also in terms of where the learners were from the perspectives of their readiness for education and their cultural, social and economic backgrounds. Vancouver Community College has chosen to remain fairly close to that early vision. We're one of the few colleges that maintains the word "community" in our name, and certainly our mission statement does speak to addressing students and meeting their needs from where they are rather than presuming that they need to somehow prepare themselves to meet our requirements.

We're known at VCC for a wide range of applied programs in the areas of technologies, trades, hospitality and tourism management and for a very wide variety of the health professions. What we're particularly proud of in the work we do in those areas is the close ties that we have to the employment sectors that we are serving. Each of those applied programs, for example, has a program advisory committee made up of people drawn from the employment sector that we are preparing graduates for. Every one of those programs has, as a part of its graduation requirement, a work experience component, be it clinical placement in a health care facility or a practicum or a co-op or some other kind of component, and this is not restricted to VCC. There are lots of other colleges in our system that undertake to do this work in similar ways.

I think it's important to remind ourselves of how community colleges have worked very hard to be connected with their communities, including the employment communities, and that we do have very strong ties and connections with the industry and business sectors. In fact, it's critical to our whole notion of how it is that we educate students.

You've heard lots — and I'm sure you're going to hear lots more — about access issues and how there are not enough seats and that there is not enough funding for the needs that are out there. I'm sure you'll hear more about demographic bulges and lots of detail in that regard. All of that is true; access is a major challenge for our system. I think fewer of your speakers will be talking about other aspects of access and the fact that access is not just limited to the availability of the spaces, but they also need to address the issues of the social, cultural, financial and other kinds of barriers that prevent students from either entering an education or training path or being successful if they are able to get into it.

At VCC we probably speak to this a little bit more than some of our colleagues in the system, and I think that reflects in the volume of the work that we do in this area. We are probably the largest ESL school in Canada. It could be argued that in Ontario there is perhaps one that is over a huge geographic area that is larger, but we do a great deal of the English as a second language training in the province. At VCC we do approximately one-third of the adult basic education done in the post-secondary system in the province.

This kind of developmental activity, this preparatory work, is very much at the front of our minds all the time. We live on a day-to-day basis with the reality of how important this work is for students to be able to gain access directly to employment, to participate in the wider community and, very importantly, to access higher levels of training.

Included in that group are large numbers of students who have special education needs. We serve literally hundreds of those students who are identified as such, and I don't know how many hundreds of others who do not identify as having disabilities. We take pride in some of the partnerships we have with the employment community that allow those students to not only do well within their programs but move off whatever kind of assistance program they might be on and become self-supporting and employed. It is important not just for the obvious financial and community reasons but in terms of the impact on those individuals' sense of self. It's truly remarkable to see what happens to them.

Another important aspect, I think, of the developmental studies that take place in colleges is the fact that

they do take place in colleges. While students are preparing for further studies, they're in an environment where they are exposed to exactly what those further studies are going to be. In fact, a great many students begin to access a fair amount of the skills-training that they're seeking or the higher education that they're seeking while still completing some aspects of the prerequisites or corequisites.

These students tend to be quite savvy about what their paths are and where they want to go. We're constantly surprised at how few students actually seek the adult grade 12 completion certificate at our college. Despite the fact that we have hundreds and hundreds of ABE students, there are very few students coming across to get their Dogwood. We, of course, have asked them why. They've said that their interest is in getting the prerequisites that will allow them to go on to further study. Often their focus will be grade 12 math or grade 12 biology as they seek to meet the entrance requirements to go into training for the health sector, for example. That is very much enhanced by the fact that we have those programs side by side within the same institution.

Community colleges are at a place where they, like all of our institutions and societies, need to evolve. They need to change. But I did want to get across my perception of the appropriateness of comprehensive community colleges remaining. It's a bit tricky to explain, because I am now going to shift from the comprehensive community college to talking about differentiation of delivery.

There used to be a notion that colleges should be all things for all people. I think that's something that we cannot necessarily afford or manage anymore. We do need to look to an analysis of what our institutions do and be as "planful" as we can be in terms of managing the resources available. I think there is an important need for differentiation of service among the institutions, but I would argue that this differentiation needs to be done in a planful way. The way I see that perhaps playing out the best is through a review of institutional mandate.

We have much to be proud of in B.C. in terms of our ability to work together as a system. In fact, I'm sure you've been told that the B.C. system is very often held up as the primary example in North America of a system that has functioned as a system. The work that the B.C. Council on Admissions and Transfer has done to ensure good articulation and transfer opportunities for learners is important. The Centre for Curriculum, Transfer and Technology has assisted us in sharing best practice and sharing curriculum. Organizations such as the B.C. Centre for International Education have allowed us to coordinate our efforts in that important area of enterprise as well.

Despite our strength in terms of being a cooperative system, I think there are some stressors within the system that should enjoy some attention. Certainly other speakers, including the three gentlemen that preceded me, have talked to some of those stressors in terms of funding issues, access and the stress that teachers and students feel within the system. Although I agree with all of those, I want to bring a perspective of what I think are some of the stressors amongst and between institutions.

One of the earlier speakers said that the access issue, the number of seats available, is so critical and so pressing that it is not a matter of competition. I would agree but disagree in part. I think competition is useful when it drives us to provide a better service. It is not competition when there are two suppliers of the same program and both programs are oversubscribed. That really is an issue of access. I think competition is helpful when it offers choices to learners, but I think it is not helpful if it begins to distract us from the core work we're doing.

I think there has been some ambiguity of mandate within the system that has evolved over the last few years. I've been in the system as a faculty member, as an administrator and more recently as a college president for some 20 years, and I have seen institutions begin to move into new areas that they didn't necessarily have an interest in before. There's nothing wrong with that as long as the areas that they're moving into are areas where there is need, where it's appropriate for them to move and where they are not moving into competition with one of their public sector colleagues within the system.

I think it's important that we review mandate from the perspective of determining what every college should do and what should be available in every community. Then we'd look to those programs that should be available to every region and find a way to distribute our resources so that we ensure that availability is there. Similarly, we'd look to the same kind of analysis for what should be available provincially. I've already talked about some of the skill programs that VCC does and some of the developmental work that we do. I would say that many of those programs and certainly the developmental programs are core programs that should be available in every community. Others, perhaps, can be seen to be distributed amongst providers on a regional or provincial basis.

I think it is not helpful if we find ourselves with similar programs in neighbouring institutions that are both — or more, even — trying to speak to the same industries, asking for the same kinds of support. It becomes very difficult for our industry partners to sort through how they can respond to that. I've already outlined to you how I see those industry and business partnerships as being crucial to the way that we deliver skills training in this province.

I would now like to add my voice to a voice that you've already heard, which is Dr. Greg Lee's from Capilano College, when he spoke to you about the notion of colleges moving into degree-granting ability in certain vocational, professional-based degrees, in applied degrees and in niche degrees. I'm not going to repeat his arguments; he's eloquent with them. I did want to add my voice of support to that.

It's clear to us who are involved in the college sector that there are real opportunities for our learners if

there is a degree path at home in the institution where they began their studies. I am not talking about degrees based on a discipline such as physics or biochemistry. I really am talking about those degrees that address the employment sectors that we work so closely with.

There's always a danger of credential creep. That is that we begin to require from our graduates more and more education, just because it seems to be a good thing to do. We have to be on guard against needless credential creep, but I think there are ways of structuring exits for students at the certificate and the diploma levels, where they can move into the workforce but also have a predetermined degree path for them.

That's one where, if they choose and if it's appropriate for them and for their career choices, they can complete a degree in that same field of applied study, and importantly, if they move into the workforce, they have an opportunity at a later time to return to a degree completion. Ideally that's at a part-time level so that they are able to support themselves, make contributions to their community and afford further education without interrupting their work.

In closing, I'd like to return to my opening comments and say that we've got a lot to be proud of in terms of how this system has functioned cooperatively and has worked well together. That should never be set aside, but I think there are further opportunities for us through some sense of mandate review to be very clear that we are deploying the resources that are available for the public post-secondary system as planfully and as carefully as these times would suggest we need to. Thank you.

T. Christensen: Thank you very much for the presentation. Can you comment on how, in the absence of a very prescriptive, top-down approach, we can move towards avoiding duplication or non-constructive competition between institutions? At a provincial level, what can we do to promote or facilitate going in the proper direction, as you've defined it?

D. Dorn: There are a couple of methods that are available. Actually, if the system were encouraged to begin to do some of that work themselves, they would be able to make some progress in that area. I'm not suggesting that this be top-down, prescribed "you can do this and you can't do that." I think that would not be helpful, although certainly the allocation of funding, in effect, has a great deal to say to that. If you choose not to fund an institution to do a particular piece of work, they're less likely to do it than if you fund them to do it.

There are some methods already in place. It's really an issue of definition, of clarification. It's been a long time since we really returned to the discussion of what we expect colleges and provincial institutes to do. More recently we have had the conversations around mandates for university colleges, but I would suggest to you that that wasn't, in and of itself, a thorough review. That was kind of an additive response. The ministry and the system together, if given the assignment, could make some progress in terms of finding those definitions. Then those definitions could guide each of the institutions in their planning.

R. Lee: Thank you for that presentation. I have a similar question: what kind of model do you think will strengthen the link between the university colleges and universities? What kind of model should work the best in this province?

D. Dorn: If I had a good and easy answer for that, I think I would be seeking the minister's job.

D. Dorn: I think part of it is to seek the clarification of the definitions and to understand the differentiation between the various providers but to try and understand that differentiation from the perspective of what each of the partners is contributing, not from assigning different kinds of status or roles to each of the different kinds of institutions. That's part of the argument that Dr. Lee put forward to you in terms of the wisdom of applied degrees being granted in limited numbers at colleges. I think that then makes us more similar to university colleges and less dissimilar.

In many areas of undertaking, where the boundaries between institutions have become blurred, and although there are certain benefits to that, I think my presentation has tried to outline that there are some potentially unpleasant consequences to that. Universities move into doing shorter programs, continuing education–style programs, certificate programs — something that used to be, in large part, the purview of colleges. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but if we end up having three or four different types of providers within the public system attempting to deliver these similar kinds of opportunities for learners, I'm not sure that's the best way to proceed. Sure, if they're all oversubscribed, then clearly we've all read the market in the same way, and there's room for everyone to be there.

I don't know, Mr. Lee, if I can offer much more than the notion that we do need to have the clarity of role for the providers of public post-secondary education. That should be at a relatively high level. Ideally, there would be a great deal of buy-in to it and a great deal of pride in all of the roles. That would serve as the platform for us to build the kind of cooperation and partnerships amongst the institutions as well as with other partners in the community.

R. Lee: In terms of resource-sharing, do you have any thought on that or any suggestion for what kind of resource would be sharable?

D. Dorn: There are some opportunities for greater resource-sharing, and I think there would be a willing-

ness to undertake it, but it's a little bit more difficult to accomplish when people see themselves as either a junior partner working with a senior partner or as potentially on a path to competition. It's kind of hard to look towards what kind of resource-sharing there could be.

I'll give you an example that's kind of close to home in downtown Vancouver. It's an example that has not played out to be, but it was certainly a discussion that we had. The Institute of Indigenous Government is in leased space in downtown Vancouver and had an interest in remaining in downtown Vancouver. VCC has very much outgrown our space. We're probably about 35 percent under what our current space standards are in terms of our current activity. Up until the recent hold on capital expenditures, we were exploring what we hoped would be a major facilities expansion for us. We were quite happy and quite willing to talk to IIG about whether or not some of their space needs could be married with ours and whether we could share some facility. In that particular case the clarity of mandate is already there and was quite clearly there. We do not do programming in the area of aboriginal governance, and that's what they do. I think those opportunities are there, but again it's an issue of clarification of roles and responsibilities.

R. Masi (Deputy Chair): This topic interests us greatly in terms of the expansion and roles of post-secondary institutions. I understand that the Advanced Education Council is not operational now — is that correct? — or it's on its last legs or something to that effect.

D. Dorn: That's right. The Advanced Education Council of B.C. did recently vote for dissolution.

R. Masi (Deputy Chair): Right. So I certainly understand your suggestion that colleges and university colleges should in fact establish the guidelines for organization. I believe that you're right on target here. However, it seems to me that this would be a very difficult thing to do from a self-motivating point of view in terms of the colleges and the university colleges. There has been a suggestion that there be a university college act established. I just wondered what your feeling is in terms of legislation relative to new acts for colleges, university colleges and institutes in terms of providing…. It is top-down motivation — but perhaps something to get it underway. I agree with you that something is not right out there.

D. Dorn: I would argue against the creation of more acts. That does not mean that I would not be supportive of the review of the existing legislation. I think a mandate review preceding consideration of a legislation change would be useful, and I agree with you that on one level it would need to be top-down. I believe it would need to be led by the ministry. There would need to be some sense of what the vision — your vision, your government's vision — is for the post-secondary system, what the priorities are and then, growing out of that, a ministry-led discussion of how it is that all the players can play a useful, important and effective role in achieving that vision. I don't know that legislation would be required off the bat. It might be something that would evolve from that review of mandates, and hopefully the clarity that I think is necessary would get captured in the legislation.

W. McMahon (Chair): In closing, we'd like to thank you very much for your presentation and for taking the time to be here and sharing with us today.

W. McMahon (Chair): We have with us this afternoon, for our last presentation, members of the B.C. Confederation of Parent Advisory Councils advocacy project committee: Janet Phillips, Cathy Bedard and….

J. Phillips: We've asked Lyse Burgess, who's a member of the B.C. Confederation of Parent Advisory Councils board of directors, to join us.

W. McMahon (Chair): Thank you all so much for being here this afternoon. We'll let you start.

J. Phillips: Thank you. Good afternoon, Madam Chair, members of the committee and observers. We're really pleased to have this opportunity to speak with you. We really hope that many parents and students will take advantage of the upcoming hearings in communities around the province. This is a wonderful chance to express our views about the B.C. public education system.

We're specifically here this afternoon to share information on the B.C. Confederation of Parent Advisory Councils advocacy project and to help you understand, through the experiences of that project, some of the concerns that have been brought forward to us from individual parents and students. The advocacy project hears a lot about what doesn't work in the education system. We wanted to make it clear that we know, as individuals, that there are many, many people working in schools and school districts who truly go to bat for children and strive to meet children's needs as the true clients of the system. The nature of advocacy is such that it is people with problems who come forward and speak to us.

We believe the advocacy project of the B.C. Confederation is a wonderful stay-in-school initiative, allowing parents and students who've become, for whatever reason, disillusioned with our system to come forward. We help communities build their own advocacy network and empower parents and students to solve problems in a positive way within the system.

Actually, the B.C. Confederation of Parent Advisory Councils has an advocacy project to help people help themselves. The project is a major undertaking in support of the confederation's commitment to ensuring that parents and students are represented in B.C.'s public school system. The advocacy project reaches out into

the community. Many of the people we deal with are not aware of the parent advisory council and district parent advisory council system that was spoken of by our president this morning. We deal with a lot of parents whose involvement is limited to coming forward when they're in conflict with the system. They may not be positively involved in any other way.

We also work with many parents and community members who volunteer for this project. We have volunteers in individual schools, school districts, the community and parents who volunteer provincially. All of these parents have shared their experience, knowledge, encouragement and dedication with us. In so doing, they really inspire us to keep working for those who are in conflict with public education.

We couldn't help but notice that many of the committee members are in school districts where district parent advisory councils have chosen to commit to BCCPAC's advocacy project. We have active initiatives in greater Victoria, Vancouver, Vernon, Coquitlam and Surrey. We deal with parents in virtually all the school districts in British Columbia, whether or not they have a district parent advisory council or parent advisory council that is a member of the B.C. confederation. They come to our project as individual parents and as parent leaders looking for support and information to deal with issues that arise for them and their children in public education.

C. Bedard: Whatever the concern, whatever the problem, advocacy really works to help facilitate communication, remove barriers and help people achieve resolution. Advocacy is really a tool that helps people communicate. The advocacy project is all about improving advocacy for students and parents in our public education system. It really means to speak up on behalf of yourself or others. Parents today are really interested in taking that step and speaking to issues that are happening in public schools on behalf on their children. They want to be involved in all matters affecting their students. The BCCPAC advocacy project believes that parents can be highly effective advocates for their own children as well as for children and youth in our schools.

J. Phillips: I think a really important point is that the advocacy project is based on a resolution focus. Our advocacy assists people in using the processes available in the school system, either in their school or school district or provincially. It's founded on the right of parents and students to be treated with dignity and respect. It supports the right of parents and students to express their views and to participate in the decisions that affect them, because many of the decisions made in public education have a huge effect on the students that we serve.

We strive to ensure that students have fair process and that that fair process is open and understandable to the people asked to participate in it. In all honesty, sometimes that creates a huge problem for our project. We encourage parents to stay within the processes of the education system, and sometimes, quite frankly, our experience is that those processes don't work for them.

We're a member-driven project. The district parent advisory councils and parent advisory councils of British Columbia saw that individual parents and parent leaders needed far more support to be heard effectively in public education. They have come forward time and time again and said that it's important for our members, the parents of British Columbia, to have assistance as they strive to fulfil their role, whether that's a role as a parent leader having input into processes or as an individual parent who wants to have input into decisions surrounding their child. We're really looking at helping parents to be heard surrounding educational goals, policies and services. So we have a really broad base.

C. Bedard: It is really important for organizations to have a vision. The BCCPAC advocacy vision guides everything that those participating in the advocacy project do. Everyone involved with or affected by the project can look back to this vision for clarity.

The vision of the BCCPAC advocacy is threefold. It's to have all parents and students in public education respected, with parent and student needs and opinions reflected in school district and provincial decision-making.

J. Phillips: It's to have parent advisory councils, district parent advisory councils and BCCPAC working together effectively in the best interests of B.C. students and parents, with recognition and support from the Ministry of Education as well as school districts.

C. Bedard: It's to have school districts provide the information and support that parents and students need to resolve their issues effectively within the school district processes.

J. Phillips: I think you can see from the vision that we're very interested in perhaps phasing out the need for advocacy. We're really not trying to maintain an advocacy bureaucracy. We would like to see the system respond to parents in a way that enables the vast majority of parents to go forward and be heard without assistance.

C. Bedard: BCCPAC really supports advocacy that is community-based. This project promotes local advocacy as really the best form of advocacy, helping member district parent advisory councils — DPACs — to set up and maintain local advocacy projects, and helping parents within those school districts become better advocates for children and youth.

We also work with students to support them in becoming better self-advocates. It is our opinion that the best form of advocacy is for students to speak up on their own behalf. That's really our ultimate goal: that every student within the public education system can feel confident that they can go to the system and

have their views heard, be treated respectfully and have action taken when necessary.

L. Burgess: One of the things I'd like to add at this point is that it's very definitely not an adversarial approach. It's very much resolution-based. As a matter of fact, it's an empowerment approach for the people who are being served by the system as well as the people working in the system. It seeks to add capacity to the parent involvement component of the system in education.

J. Phillips: We're just going to quickly tell you our four goal areas, because we really want to move on to the issues and concerns that have come forward to us. We're fundamentally serving district parent advisory councils and parent advisory councils to provide advocacy services in their local communities. We assist parent leaders with information and support for their role as representatives of parents at their school. I think this speaks to one of the questions that was made this morning to our president surrounding parent advisory councils and their role as representatives.

Really, the advocacy project makes everyone uncomfortable in a way — parents as well as people in the system — because we push our parent advisory council leaders to be the best possible representatives they can be, which means that we really talk to people about issues surrounding diversity, access, what happens to parents who can't make a parent advisory council meeting, how we hear that voice and how we bring that forward.

We also talk to parent leaders about processes that are available to them once diversity arrives at their parent advisory council because diverse views are much more difficult to hear and to respectfully represent.

C. Bedard: In this way, the advocacy really challenges the parent community. We really help PACs and DPACs strive to be the best they can be and challenge themselves to represent their diverse community. We also work with parent leaders in their role as mentors for individual parents because helping parents be effective natural advocates for their children is so important. When parents are effective natural advocates for their children, their children learn from them. Children can become excellent self-advocates.

J. Phillips: We know that when a parent arrives at a parent advisory council meeting with a personal issue or concern, it's not appropriate to have that discussion in a public forum. However, we also recognize, as a confederation, that parents need their own association to welcome them, even when they're in conflict with the system. The advocacy project looks to helping parent leaders and parent advisory councils to have strategies and processes in place so that they are not turning away those members of our community that are coming to them for support.

We also assist district parent advisory councils who wish to promote ongoing and early resolution of parent issues through the appointment of individual advocates. This is one of the most publicly known aspects of our project in that there are many advocates in British Columbia now who have been appointed by their district parent advisory council. They work with Cathy and me in the advocacy project to provide one-on-one services to parents and students who are in conflict with the system. Again, we see this as a wonderful way to provide service to individuals who otherwise might not have the assistance they need to come forward to school districts.

Because we are community-based, each community is challenged to provide advocacy services to all members of its community. As a result, advocacy services are provided in British Columbia in nine languages including American Sign. Those volunteers in our district are committed to reaching out into communities that are not clearly represented and talking to those communities about our public education system and about how they have a right, a need and an ability to access it.

C. Bedard: The project's fourth goal area is to promote self-advocacy for students. We have a pilot project in the Nechako Lakes school district where students have participated in an orientation session to act as advocates within a high school. We've realized over time that no matter how respectful and well-prepared students can be, they may be shut down by people within the system if they don't have support within the system and people do not understand the value of student views.

J. Phillips: We're really looking at providing practical information and direct assistance. Our project is about hands-on work that we're doing provincially and volunteers are providing in communities. Thirty-eight district parent advisory councils have committed to this form of resolution-based advocacy. They recognize that most parents are not wanting to either run the school or be in conflict with the schools. They are simply looking for a high-quality education for their child that meets their child's needs and is respectful of their family.

We'd like to talk to you about some of the thousands of parents who have contacted our project over time — quickly running through some of their concerns, because as you can imagine, we'd love to talk to you for an extended period of time on that. Then we'd like to touch on a couple of things where we truly believe we could use your help to make it better for parents and students.

C. Bedard: Parents often call the advocacy project in tears. It's not uncommon for us to receive calls on our line where parents are extremely upset. They're frustrated with their inability to make things better for their child within the school. We speak to parents who have gone all the way from a complaint at the level of the classroom up to an appeal and still have not managed to resolve their issues. Although people in the

system tell us that they want to encourage parents and students to stay within process and bring their concerns forward, many parents tell us that they feel they're blocked at every step of the way. Many speak of the reluctance to receive and handle their concerns.

J. Phillips: We're talking about really specific comments that parents make to us, and we're learning from those cases. This is from a classroom teacher who tells a distraught parent whose child is being bullied that the child needs to buck up through to the administrator who suggests that if a parent's unhappy with the quality of education in the school, they're free to go down the road to another school, to the trustee who tells the parent that although they will hear an appeal and understand there are serious issues, they would never dare to express concerns over the decisions of their staff.

C. Bedard: Parents have expressed many concerns through the advocacy project over the years. We're just going to give you some examples of some of the really common concerns that come forward: treatment of students by staff, appeals, bullying, services to special needs students, transition planning, confidentiality, accountability of staff to policy and curriculum, union contracts and their effect on students, student discipline including suspension and student behaviour contracts.

J. Phillips: Each one of these is a rich ground for discussion. What we'd like to bring forward today, though, is that all of these callers have something in common. Hundreds and hundreds of parents and students from around B.C. have been unable to solve their concerns within our school system as it stands today. They do not believe that their concerns were heard, and their concerns were often not resolved in a reasonable and timely way.

The fact is that our school district processes and the individuals who receive those concerns need to be enabling parents and students and welcoming concerns. Parents and students should not need help to have their issues addressed in public schools. The system should not be that complex for them, and there should not be as many barriers to them as we are seeing today.

C. Bedard: Our hope is that through the issues that we deal with with the advocacy project, we'll not only be able to help individual parents, district parent advisory councils and their advocacy networks. Through these issues, the system will be able to adjust itself, learn and better deal with complaints and concerns from parents. Many of our callers have been trying to bring concerns forward for some time and feel the system is absolutely unwilling to hear their concerns. Many were given insufficient information on the internal processes: for example, the complaints process or the appeals process. Many are not given enough information.

L. Burgess: I would say that despite the reassurances and the rhetorical assurances they're receiving, many fear retribution and do not bring forward their concerns, or they will only after it develops into quite a serious situation.

C. Bedard: Without this information and support, parents feel disabled in being effective advocates for their children. They feel it's very difficult to build trust within a system.

J. Phillips: Many of our callers feel labelled by the system. They feel they've been judged by the system. Many of them state that they've been called irrational or that they're perceived to be extremely difficult people because they would not give up on pursuing their issue. These parents felt that to be considered reasonable, they would have to trust the system, even though they were not given any identifiable action that would take place to investigate their concern, much less given any reasonable assurance that something would change to help their child. Many of them, having been heard, remain very dissatisfied with the way they were personally treated during the process, even if their issue was finally resolved. I think that's quite telling. Also, many commented on the fact that they see protection of staff as the system's highest priority. The safety and welfare of students, they tell us, has become a very distant second.

We're looking at a couple of things that have arisen out of our advocacy project since December of '94. These are issues that the B.C. Confederation of Parent Advisory Councils has brought forward in its public reports and reports to members. We've shared with you the year 2000 report. Every year there's a calendar year report presented by our board of directors. Certainly in past reports we've brought forward information on investigations. This is a huge area of concern for parents and students who come forward with complaints. If parents and students are to trust that our schools and school districts are open to hearing their views, persons receiving complaints must do so respectfully within an understandable and open process. Many parents have expressed concerns that when they bring forward issues that are seen as questioning either the competence or conduct of an employee, the system becomes even more unwilling to recognize and accept their concern.

C. Bedard: Most of these parents were not informed if or how their concerns would be investigated. These parents were not satisfied with the way their concerns were investigated and didn't have trust in the system. Most were not informed of who would take responsibility for the investigation. Even fewer were given any idea of what to expect the investigation to conclude and what they would expect to be told about the findings. As a result of these case calls, BCCPAC is looking to ensure — and that's published in one of our reports — that there's a clear commitment to effective investigations as an important part of dealing appropriately with concerns raised by parents on behalf of students.

J. Phillips: We're also looking for a provincial investigation process to provide consistent expectations throughout British Columbia for investigations. It's very disconcerting and disheartening for parents to recognize that if they live in a certain district, their concerns will be handled a completely different way than were they to live across a school district boundary. They are looking for a justice that's universal in British Columbia.

C. Bedard: Parents are often told that investigations are sort of a grey area, and they are led to believe there aren't clear black and white answers for how an investigation will be conducted. Yet we know that people within the system have clear processes. In the teachers' collective agreement there is a process set out for how issues concerning harassment and sexual harassment will be addressed. There's a clear investigation process, a time line, lots of details for people to follow. Yet when these sorts of concerns involve students, parents are often told that it's a grey area.

J. Phillips: We're also looking for a commitment that educators will inform parents and students of the investigation process they will be using in advance of undertaking it. This is a huge concern for parents and students, and that concern is even greater when outside agencies suddenly are involved and the parents do not know why or how they're involved — agencies or individuals from the police, the Ministry of Children and Family Development, lawyers. Informing parents of the purpose for involving outside agencies and of the processes that those agencies will use is crucial to having parents develop the confidence they require to come forward and disclose what's happening to their children in our public education system.

C. Bedard: Many students and parents who are involved with different agencies really feel their concerns are lost while the agencies are trying to decide who has what role and what responsibility.

J. Phillips: We're also looking, as a confederation, for effective appeal processes. Our cases show that given parent experiences within the current appeal processes in school districts, many parents no longer believe that school boards should have the final decision as stated in section 11 of the School Act. They indeed have lost their trust in the current appeal process and feel it is not an appeal but rather an administrative review of decisions that staff members have made. That's a significant difference.

C. Bedard: Our cases demonstrate that the way in which school districts handle appeals differs from district to district, and the fairness level differs from district to district. Parents tell us that they would like to see consistency in these sorts of appeals.

J. Phillips: We've seen huge differences from our casework. For example, one woman told us about being locked out of the building, and it took her five minutes of throwing stones at the window to get the trustees to recognize that she was there. She finally got in, to be told that since she was late she would have less time to give her presentation.

Others have told us that they entered the room to see the superintendent chatting with the trustees and shaking hands with the person they had a complaint against, and they lost their trust that they would be heard and considered in that appeal. They likened it to arriving in court to find the judge having a drink with the prosecutor and chit-chatting about their case before they came to defend themselves.

L. Burgess: There's also another aspect to consistency. It's not only district to district. Even within districts, if you have changes in staff or changes in the major players in the system, all of a sudden the process of procedural fairness or justice seems to change. The appeal process can change, depending on who the players are. An advisory council, whether it's a parent or a district or whatever level, regardless of how well they've developed a relationship at developing policies together, if the staffing changes, then that's to start all over again. It's not based on any recognized standard form in any one place. It's very given to a lot of vicissitude, depending on who is on staff or who is in position.

J. Phillips: In our advocacy project, because we focus on helping parents help themselves and we look to processes to enable them, we often look to see if the principles of administrative fairness are visible in the appeals process. Through our casework we've come to recognize that many people in our school districts are unaware of the importance of administrative fairness or are unable to demonstrate it.

C. Bedard: Parents are particularly frustrated when school districts choose to ignore policies and/or regulations set provincially. Parents do not feel they should have to go to court to challenge school districts and hold them accountable. Yet parents are often given that sort of advice: "If you can't challenge your school district, take them to court."

J. Phillips: We're really looking at a review of the appeals process, since many of our cases have led to extreme frustration, and parents have questioned why other service providers such as the Ministry of Children and Family Development have a high accountability rate provincially and school districts do not. That really confuses them.

We hope that through our discussion you'll recognize that we deal every month with hundreds of parents and students who feel that the system, for whatever reason, is not working for them. Many of these parents go on to have their issues resolved. However, we know that many more parents never make it as far as coming into the school. They really do not believe there is any use in coming forward. Somehow we have

to have a system that welcomes these concerns. The issues of parents and students cannot be solved in parking lots and arenas and over the media. We need to speak directly with the people, and we need to assure them that those who are able to make change in the best interests of their children are listening. Thank you.

W. McMahon (Chair): Thank you for the presentation. We'll start our first question with Brenda Locke.

B. Locke: You spoke about retribution, and I wondered if you had any documentation about retribution. I certainly understand that parents do feel that. I'd like to know if it's real or perceived.

J. Phillips: It's real. When the project first started, we, like many others, were skeptical about retribution. We knew that it was a major fear of parents. However, over time I feel we can say that unfortunately, some parents and students do suffer retribution. Things get worse because they went forward. We've developed material through the B.C. Confederation, some of which is in the binder that you received this morning, where we've put processes in place to help parents and students deal with the fear of retribution and, should it occur, to help them come forward and solve that issue as well. It is a real issue for parents and students. Sometimes it's very difficult to tell whether it's intentional or not. A child is going to see some of the activities that a teacher undertakes to improve their learning as making matters worse for them. We really strive to have parents and educators communicate about what impact their actions will have on the child.

S. Orr: Thank you for that presentation. I'm just trying to make something very clear. We know there are good teachers and that things in the system work, but by the time it gets to your process, it's on a different playing field. By then you're the front-line person dealing with the parent and the student, who we all agree is the most important part of this entire equation. What I'm hearing is that there doesn't seem to be a mechanism or a process that has been approved by everybody for you people to work through for the province. I hear an awful lot about process and the fact that there's no real…. I guess what I'm really asking you is: in a perfect world, what would you see as the perfect way for parents to be able to have their say and make sure that it's in the best interests of the child? Everything we're talking about in these entire hearings, I assume, is in the best interests of the child, so…. Can you see where I'm coming from?

C. Bedard: In a perfect world, what we look for and we hope for is that people who work within the system will welcome concerns and that when a parent goes forward to a teacher or a principal with a concern, rather than receiving barriers and hitting a wall, they will be welcomed into the system, and they will be welcomed into the process. We see that as very positive not only for the student and the parent but for the people within the system. Parents need to be heard, they need to be treated respectfully, and they need to see the process as fair. People within the system need to be able to demonstrate that their processes are fair.

S. Orr: Sorry, Madam Chair. I just want to make it clearer. I'm trying to be more definitive. Is there something you have thought about, a process that has not been put into place but that could be put into place so that there's a mechanism which is standardized throughout the entire province?

J. Phillips: I'm sure we could go a long way towards standardization. Let me tell you what we perceive to be the problem with the processes we currently have. They appear to have been designed from a staff perspective. When we look at the complaint processes, while they are processes that parents and students are expected to enter, they are often part of collective agreements and have been specifically designed for the purpose of protection of staff. They have not been defined for the purpose of welcoming concerns. I believe that's the difference that Cathy is speaking to. Parents feel like they're forced into someone else's process.

Now, in all fairness, I'm sure that defensive processes were developed because some people in the past have been attacked. I'm not suggesting that we should have processes that allow people who come in with concerns to act inappropriately.

However, what we're suggesting is that we need to review the processes we currently use from a public perspective. It's a public school; it's a public system. "How can we enable the public to be heard?" rather than "How can the system ensure that those coming into the school act with respect?" — you know, put their concerns on such-and-such a form in such-and-such a time line. It seems to be more systems needs.

J. Phillips: Yes, and that the students' interests are preserved while the process takes place. You're bang on.

Right now the process, I think, is that first you call the teacher, then the principal, then the superintendent or school trustee. You stop at the school board level. In some cases, I think you still can go to the Ministry of Education. You want this process to be formalized, and someone might appeal to a commissioner to handle some cases all across the province. Is that what you're proposing?

L. Burgess: There are a couple of things that can happen at the moment. Once you've gone to the level

of the superintendent and made a formal appeal to the board of trustees and there has been a ruling, you may appeal that or bring that to the ombudsman, who will not reverse or change the decision but make recommendations which can in some cases lead to some systems changes. Or you can proceed to the courts or to the Human Rights Commission. Those are what are presently available, even though they require a certain amount of emotional investment for an individual to pursue a complaint through that whole process. I just wanted to add that.

C. Bedard: What parents tell us is that there needs to be fairness and that fairness needs to be equitable throughout the province. A parent in Cowichan Valley should be able to feel as comfortable accessing the system as a parent in Nelson. Our processes need to be uniform and have the same basic fundamental principles of fairness enshrined in those processes.

J. Phillips: I think your question leads to the concern that no matter how good the process, we're dealing with individuals who are carrying out the process. I would say that parents look one step further toward expectations of the behaviour of those receiving the complaint. It's not just the process itself, but it's an expectation of those working within the system that they will accept the fact that what they are doing may improve with input.

J. Phillips: In some cases, yes. Some of our cases demonstrate that many of the people who need to hear about problems are not the people who hear about it. For example, if you have a very open, friendly teacher working in a classroom, a parent might feel very comfortable popping in with the least suggestion or complaint. If you have an intimidating, very imposing individual who's very strict about when they will or will not listen to a student, the chances of being challenged are decreased.

We're looking for a broad-based system commitment to opening all the doors, with an expectation that all staff members treat complainants respectfully and demonstrate how the input of the complainant was taken into account when their decision was made.

C. Bedard: You made reference to the Ministry of Education and their involvement. What we can tell you is that parents express to us great frustration when they believe they have committed to resolution and followed all the steps within their process in their school district and are still unable to have their concerns heard. They are frustrated that the Ministry of Education will not take action, and they don't understand it.

L. Burgess: In jurisdictions other than B.C. there have been different approaches. I know there's the Ontario approach of an educational ombudsman or kind of a review process for these kinds of decisions. In New Brunswick they've legislated various things such as the pupil protection policy, which addresses some of these aspects of building in some provincial policy for dealing with certain types of complaints. There are precedents elsewhere as to what would work or would not work.

I think there's an underlying discussion. We were talking about how to deal with complaints, but it's the other side of the coin of having parental involvement in the decision-making and building structures to which the complaints are applied later. If you have that participation on an equal level and an interaction that is a genuine partnership, then dealing with complaints will be more of a continuous process than it is at the present time, so there's another aspect to that.

B. Locke: A real quick question: can you give me an idea of how long that complaint process may take if you're starting to go as far as the ombudsman, but maybe in chunks?

C. Bedard: It can take anywhere from days to years. Certainly one of the things we do to help parents is build in time frames, because they often feel that their destiny is in the hands of the process and there are no set time frames. Often things seem to take a long time going from one step to another. This is a real concern because we know that a day or a week is a very long time in the life of a child. It's not unusual for us to have parents who come and say their child is crying every morning before going to school or throwing up in the morning before going to school. They've gone from a child who loves school to a child who hates school. To tell a parent like that or a child like that that they need to wait three weeks to visit with the principal just isn't good enough.

K. Manhas: Just to be clear, are you suggesting or advocating that the committee look at districtwide ombudsmen or the Ontario or New Brunswick examples that you suggested, or are you suggesting that your structure be expanded?

L. Burgess: I'm not sure we're making any recommendations in that way. Those are ideas that have worked in other places or are being tried. The advocacy project was an initiative as part of BCCPAC's expanding parental involvement in education as part of our mandate, and this is one aspect of parent involvement in education that seems to need some support, some continuity and some training. There's constant education; it's capacity building. Whether down the road you looked at how you seek to make that whole process better is really, I think, not so much a recommendation made on the part of various single organizations but a process that people work at developing together. I think the whole thing that we're learning is that you can develop any structures independently, but if you

develop them together, they're more likely to meet the diverse needs that B.C. is addressing every day.

W. McMahon (Chair): Thank you. On behalf of the committee, I would like to extend our thanks to you for coming today with your presentation.

For the committee's information, we have one more presentation. We have No. 9, which is Saanich school district.

W. McMahon (Chair): I think we'll start. I'd like to welcome you. From the Saanich school district we have with us Ellen Slanina.

E. Slanina: I'm Ellen Slanina, chair of the school board, and this is Helen Parker, the vice-chair. You almost have Saanich's entire board here before you. We have Hanne Kohout, Nancy Mitchell and Marika Townsend. This is the face of Saanich. Two apologies — they couldn't get out of their work commitments.

E. Slanina: These folks represent over 100 years of parenting and over 80 years in our school — just so you know our involvement level.

I'd like to open by pointing out our white ribbons. We invite you to share in our advocacy around safety in the schools. This week has been declared Safe Schools Week in Saanich. This is an initiative brought forward by our students, and it was in response to the Reena Virk tragedy.

Our superintendent meets with our students monthly and listens to them. They have some interesting conversations. They're representatives of all the middle schools and the senior levels, and they give the superintendent input from their perspective — what's working in school and what's not. I think it's really a powerful council — that our superintendent will take his time and value their input. This was their initiative. This was the students' idea of making it a focus for a week and really getting behind safety initiatives.

We have a lot of stuff happening in the district. If you watch Vancouver Island TV tonight, you'll see our STAND performance students. They came out to cover their activities at the elementary schools. They are Students Teaching Awareness Not Destruction, and they go out and model how to deal with racism, with bullying, what's acceptable, what's not, why it's hurtful. It's very powerful. I'm moved to tears every time, and it's just acting. It's wonderful to see the kids telling kids. That's why it's so powerful: it comes from them. They have a dog named PAWS, and actually, he looks a lot like this. He stands for "Pause and Ask What you'll do to Solve it." I think that's how it works. Anyway, it's a message to the kids. They see the dog, and it really sticks in their minds, I think.

I've prepared a document. I apologize. It's not as polished as I'd like. I only knew about this appointment a day ago, so I stayed up late and gathered together everything I could. It's an overview and a little taste of what's really powerful in Saanich — what's good; what's working — which we value and hope to hang on to and some suggestions and areas of concern that we have.

We're a district of 8,450 students, and those are FTEs. That represents full-time students. Kindergarteners are counted 2-for-1 — I don't know why; I guess it's because they're funded — so we actually have about 9,000 students. But kindergarteners are, like I say, 2-for-1. There's a $53 million budget, about 1,600 staff members, seven board members — five of which are before you here. We bus half of our students every day — 23 schools; one of the distance education schools, South Island Distance Ed, which I'm going to speak about a bit later; two storefront schools, Broadmead and Sidney.

In case you don't understand, the configurations are different all over the province. We are K-to-5; in middle schools, which we value dearly, 6-to-8; and 9-to-12 in high schools. We encompass four municipalities, and we work hard to keep those liaison teams working. As Sheila Orr knows, we meet with our municipal leaders, listen to them about what is working and what's not working and work together towards problem-solving. We have four native bands: Tsartlip, Pauquachin, Tsawout and Tseycum nations. We meet with them and representatives from the Saanich Indian school board regularly and find out what we can do together to help support our first nations students. Those meetings are powerful and, I think, moving forward in helping our first nations students, because we all have a lot of work to do there.

Our career prep programs are vital in our district. We were very upset to get the cut last year of 26 percent. We lost over $300,000. Over half of our students in grades 11 and 12 are involved in those programs, and they are so vital to our students. They keep a lot of kids in school. For some of the kids that's the only reason they're there. They're getting help and support in real life skills — students that may not be headed for academic endeavours. They may be headed for technical or trades, and they get the help and support they need through these programs, which of course will not be happening to as great an extent in the future if those moneys stay gone. A lot of our students were quite upset. We actually had some petitions on the board about losing those funds, and unfortunately, we had to say we lost them from the province. We're bringing that message: it is a very powerful program. The kids love it, and it keeps them in school. I think we've got to do more of those kinds of programs.

We have a technology education renewal program. By the way, because we have 40 minutes and so much to tell you, I brought support documents for the majority of what you see before you. I will leave them with you, if there's something further you want to know

about it. Technology education renewal is a focus this board has taken for the last couple of years. We feel there is a lot of work to be done in that area — hands-on woodworking, metalworking, automechanics, all that kind of thing. We sold one of our premises about two years ago and managed to keep the funds in our capital fund, because it was our property and we put all the money into it. We managed to prove that, so we hung on to that money. We've targeted the majority of it to this endeavour.

We're rejuvenating all three high schools in the tech ed, and it is a huge focus for us. We've been meeting with local employers, local businesses, tech ed teachers, and administrators and principals of the high schools. We all sit down and talk about how we're going to help our students, how we're going to support them, how we can get them into work opportunities. What do we have to do so they're job ready? What can the businesses do to help give us more of those opportunities? We have students that would just love to get the work experience.

It's working. We've gone from three apprentices to 25 in one year. We have 50 options of placement for them now, but it is a focus that's only begun. We hope to do a lot more in that field, because there are students that come out lost. They're not headed for university. Most parents would like to think our students are headed for university. In reality, provincewide, there are only 15 percent headed in that direction. In our district it's about 26 percent. We have to meet the needs of all of our students, so we've made that one of our focuses, tied in with our district focus. We're meeting the needs of all students. We're trying hard in that field.

We have endeavoured to meet with Camosun College — that started over a year ago — to help our students into the programs, ready, and to help get them spots. There aren't enough spots. I know you've heard this from a few representatives from the post-secondary. The average entering age at Camosun is 27, after finishing some university time. Our students spin their wheels in the meantime, or they may be lost or become disenfranchised from the whole idea. So we have a lot of work to do there.

We've had representatives from our high schools and our superintendent sitting down with Camosun, trying to find out how we're going to ladder them from our apprenticeship so they move smoothly straight in and there are spots for them, and around articulation of the courses to make sure they marry up properly. When they leave grade 12, they enter at the appropriate level and then go from there. As well, it's to make sure our counsellors understand what's expected of the students when they head for college and, hopefully, to inform the college a little more that this is what's happening at the secondary level.

Along with that focus on apprenticeship, co-op, work experience and career prep, that was the focus of our annual district parent meeting. We work in wonderful cooperation with our district parents. They picked that theme up on their own and had one of our head coordinators from the high school come and present: "These are options for you as parents; these are viable for your students, and we recommend you look into these and encourage your students to go forward in that."

It was a wonderful meeting. We had representatives from all our schools and all our principals. It's just one more way to help support that focus and help encourage students to look at that area, when we all bring it together and work together. I thought it was a very positive meeting, and it helped support parents to understand that there are more options out there for the students.

Along that line, we have a wonderful cooperative atmosphere and approach with our parents. We have extensive parent involvement in our schools. They sit at our board table during our board meetings and ask us questions, and we give them the best answers we can give them. We attend their district parent meetings every month, explain what's happening in the district and take their input. They're in our schools all the time, doing an extensive array of activities from making sure the students are getting there safe in the morning to helping with lunch programs, driving, art projects and reading support. You name it — they're in there, keen to do it.

As you can see in the document, they sit on regular standing committees of the board for community relations and education directions and give us input directly through our committees as well. They sit on a selection board when we are choosing our principals. They give us their input. They sit through the interview process and give us their opinions about the situation and their feedback about who they're looking for. They also do that when we're choosing an executive member for our school district. They also sit and evaluate the superintendent, along with ourselves, on an annual basis. We sit down and interview them and say: "How is our superintendent doing, in your opinion? Where can we go from here and how can we grow?" So we take parent participation seriously and give it great emphasis.

I feel very disappointed in myself — I prepared this about midnight, and I dropped the parent advocacy project off this — especially following Cathy Bedard and Janet Phillips, because we support their project in our district. In fact, our vice-chair helped with their project in her earlier life and helped write some of their documents.

So we're in strong support of their advocacy project, and they are alive and working within our districts. We have a few parents trained. It's a very good process to help solve problems as early on and as close to the source as possible. We definitely support them in those efforts. Like I say, I'm sorry we dropped it off the document. It was my oversight.

The SIDES L-Learn program — this is a fabulous program. I could talk to you for about three days just on that program alone. I have given you a document. It's a wonderful new initiative from our South Island Distance Education School. There are only nine of those

schools in the province. We are very lucky to have one. It's wonderful at meeting the needs of students.

The L-Learn is this wonderful new initiative. We signed on as a founding partner, along with CANARIE. It's a federal government granting agency. Our contribution to it is about $200,000 worth of labour — the two specialists in languages who've developed an interactive electronic delivery of the French language. We have brought about 14 partners onboard, and it is a project that will come to about a $5.8 million price tag in the end. We've done it all for about $200,000 input. A lot of people are keen to get on board. The DND is going to use it for training adult learners in French programs around the world. We're trying hard in initiatives and new approaches and new ways to deliver services to all students.

Our storefront schools have been wonderfully successful, grown to capacity, and we're absolutely full. We're thinking maybe we need to look at a third now. There's one in the south of the district in Broadmead and one in the north in Sidney. They are very flexible. A lot of times, you're one on one. It's targeted for 14-to-19-year-olds, although there are adult learners in there. One of our graduates was almost 90 years old last year. We went and celebrated with her. It was great. It's flexible to the students' time frame and for the students who don't fit the normal stream, who have trouble coping with the noise and the clatter of classrooms and just can't keep up with the normal pace and the normal structure. It's been so successful. We've heard all kinds of wonderful success stories out of that. They're at capacity right now.

We do have open boundaries and catchment areas. Our students have the choice to attend any school within the district. As long as there's a spot for them, they're more than welcome to do that. Quite often, because a language is offered at one high school and possibly not at the other, or drama may be a little more appealing at one, there is that opportunity with our district to move amongst the different schools, and many of them do that.

We have locally developed courses that are offered in the senior levels, 65, and they have been a wonderful success. As it says here, it's been the result of keeping students in school, because it speaks to the uniqueness of what they are interested in and what they may be thinking about for a career.

Two recent research projects that are happening in the district are examining leadership responsibilities and roles and teaching practices and motivating aboriginal learners in middle schools, and strengthening relationships between teachers and aboriginal parents — a mouthful. It's a focus of ours. We are definitely trying to focus on how to help support our aboriginal learners. I'm looking forward to having a read of that research project when it's done.

Our community relations committee is a very active committee. It's out there in the community, trying to bring the community into the schools and the schools out into the community. As you can see, a lot of the efforts are down there, and I've already spoken to many of them. A lot of it is communicating about what's happening in the schools: what's positive, what we need to hang on to, what we value and what we want to work together with the community to support.

One thing I do want to point out in there that's unique, possibly, to Saanich is our community forum. We hold one at least once a year. We beat the bushes and get as many community members in as possible. It's a real struggle sometimes to get your community members in. They're busy people — business leaders and what not. We take an evening, a four-hour session, at one of the high schools, and we bring in community members, seniors, business leaders — everybody that we can possibly bring in — parents, teachers, staff and students, of course, as well. We make a focus for the evening. We sit down and work through issues and problems and solutions. In the documents I've given you an example of the last one, which was on restorative justice. It gives you a little flavour of what they're about. We do an exit survey, and we ask these people what their opinions are of the evening, of Saanich school district and of public education generally in B.C. We use those feedbacks to inform ourselves on what we're doing right and something we may possibly need to turn our attention to and fix. Just so you know, we do that within our community as well.

Our middle school model is something we're very proud of. I brought the task force report. We took another long look at it last year, because we celebrated 25 years in middle schools. I think we were the first in the province. I haven't been able to check that anywhere, but that's what I have been told — that we were the first to embrace this model. It has been very successful. I just thought you might like to take a look at that report. It goes in depth about the philosophies and why it's good and what we need to do to support the students.

We have a numeracy project happening to help support different ways to teach math and how to the reach the students — different profiles, teachers come together and share their strategies — and it's been a very successful effort.

Balanced literacy. There's also a document in there. The running reading records have been so successful that we actually presented it to Dr. Dosdall. He was very impressed with the success between grades 1, 2 and 3. It's incredible how much it's helped support those students learning how to read. He actually asked us to share it on the provincial network, so we're going to do that, but I wanted to bring it to your attention.

Our grad surveys. I don't know; I think we may be unique in that as well. We survey our grade 12 students as they are leaving and say: "What could we do differently? What went well? What works for you? What was good about your schooling years?" We would ask our students what they would do differently. Many of them say: "I would have studied harder. I wouldn't have had so much fun" — things like that.

It helps really inform our secondary teachers about how we're going to serve those students better. We sit down and go over it for a whole evening at the board table, and then it's put out to the high schools.

They take it seriously, and they look at it. Like I said, they inform their practices with their students and how they are going to help those high school students.

We have an exit survey, as well, on our middle schools and our grade 8 students. We want to find out what's happening in the middle schools from the students' perspective, and as well, we inform our staff.

We have a local education agreement which has happened for over ten years now with our four native bands. It's been very successful. We meet monthly and go over initiatives. We help support our students. Because of the native school, they come from their school quite often into ours in grade 5. Our students are their students and back and forth. It's been a very positive effort on how to reach the native bands. We're going to go out and visit with each of the four villages in the next month and talk to the parents and find out what we can do to help support our first nations students.

We have a pro-growth committee, which I think is also unique to Saanich. It was an initiative for teachers to come together to share their practices and to organize their thoughts around what's important around education and best practices in the classroom and educational strategies. We collect our level priorities that come out of our accreditation process, and the teachers come together to share that. It helps us put a focus on the initiatives within the district. It has been wildly successful with the teachers, and it helps form activities for the Pro-D days so they're organized and cohesive.

We have a wonderful athletic program. We've won all kinds of national awards and titles. You may have read that Stelly's and all of our high schools took rowing championships recently.

We are committed to inclusive schools, and we believe that all learners belong in their neighbourhood schools, and they are embraced by our staff. We believe in equity in public education, and that's the strongest reason not to go towards local taxation. We may be winners in that scenario, but all students deserve the same education in this province and the same level of standard of education.

We have areas of concern for our multi-year funding systems. Trying to make it through year to year is a very tough situation, especially when we find out what we're getting a few months into that time line and are left with a few weeks to scramble and come up with something. We've mentioned several concerns around the funding level. What is very difficult is when we don't have funding for legislated costs. WCB goes up and pensions go up and all of these things, and it's not put into the envelope. We're scrambling; we're pulling it out of supply budgets or heating budgets or busing. It's a very difficult situation.

We believe in local autonomy and representation. We're the closest to the schools and the community, and we strongly support having locally elected school boards.

We have real concerns around targets and capping of funds. Our distance education has been hugely successful. We have people clamouring to get in there, but we were capped at 252 students for full time for the B.C. CoNNect program. We could probably fill that four times over. It is an electronically developed education system. You get it through your home through a computer. You get virtually one-on-one at times. The demand is very high, but we can't offer it to more than 252 students. Please look at that cap, because we would love to have that lifted.

We found working with contracts that are imposed from the provincial level a really troublesome and burdensome effort to overcome. In the most recent CUPE contract we have four-hour minimums for CUPE members who don't necessarily even want four-hour minimums. They've had to quit their job because they didn't want to work more than two hours. We have to tell them: "No, you have to work four hours or nothing." Those types of situations make it very difficult to administer.

There's flexibility and choice. I've mentioned a few items down there. The one thing I really want to state is that it's very difficult to provide the middle school model, because it's not recognized in the School Act or legislation or regulations or funding. To me, it's the best practice possible in this province. At least half or more than half of your districts within this province have embraced the middle school model.

I really hope that in the near future it will be reviewed, because we are not funded and are not regulated from a middle school model. We have schools that have 6, 7 and 8. The 6s and 7s are supposed to get a certain amount of instruction hours; the 8s are supposed to get something else. You could have a ludicrous system of bells ringing all over the place because these two groups of students are supposed to get different times. It's the same with funding; it's the same with learning resources. It is a very difficult situation with that. I'm hoping that will be reviewed, because it is the model of the future. Victoria's just got on board.

We have concerns that the FSA process will be stabilized. There have been shifts and changes in that over the past few years, and it makes it very difficult to compare and do a running record of results of tests that are continually changing. The accreditation process is a powerful process in our district. We take it very seriously. It is a self-review of each school. They take it very seriously and are very proud when they are accredited. It is a very clear accountability tool. Through that tool, I bring to your attention that there's an annual survey of parents, and we always take that very seriously. It would be good to utilize the tools that we already have.

The other items I will skip over. There are transitional problems, particularly with math and with TPC. I've included a memo from one of our principals. They are still struggling with this math problem. I've included in this document the resolution we brought forward at the last AGM. We were unanimously supported by other districts. There is a real problem with the math curriculum in that the ministry will come out…. We had Bruce McCaskill come out and speak to parents. They support applications in math. They say: "This is appropriate for 85 percent of your students."

They have to help us out with this situation where if we are going to promote this course…. It is a provincially examinable course. It's a grade 12 level math, but it's not accepted by the majority of the post-secondary institutions in this province. Students are led to take this course, and maybe it is most appropriate for them, but it is causing problems when they go to their next step. We are continuing to soldier on in this area. I've included a memo in there about that. We just had a memo back from UVic yesterday saying that it's not accepting it. It is a grade 12 examinable course, and they won't even recognize it as such.

TPC is an English 12 course equivalent. It's called technical and professional communications. It is a powerful course. It is most suitable for a lot of students that are heading for engineering, accounting and professions like that. It helps them with communication skills — written, verbal and presentations. It is a very hands-on, applicable course. It is, again, an examinable course. It is said to be equivalent to grade 12. But again, post-secondaries aren't recognizing it nearly enough — not at all or not enough. For those students that are going into professions, it is that much more applicable than learning poetry and Shakespeare. As lovely as those subjects are, they're just maybe not as practical as TPC. I wanted to bring that to your attention.

Our special needs students are underfunded, of course. You'll hear this throughout the province. There's a cap of 4 percent, but the students that present themselves to us are about 15 percent of the population. We continue to struggle, pinching money out of paper budgets, heating budgets, paint budgets or whatever, to keep those special needs students looked after because they are near and dear to us. They are valued. We embrace them, but we have to have the money to meet their needs.

In this new era of accountability we can't lose sight of all the important work that we do. We can't be measured in dollars and percentages. The relationship-building between students and teachers is critical to their success, and it's not easily measured. One of the single most significant indicators of success for our students is for the student to have a significant adult in their lives that cares about them.

I'd like to close by asking you all to please come out to our schools. We would love to show you around and remind you about who's going to benefit from all your hard work as you embark on this project. Our students are awesome. Watch Channel 12, and you'll see them. We'd love to share their talents and their accomplishments with you.

I also encourage you to take up Gordon Comeau's invitation to come and join us at the BCSTA academy the first weekend in December. It's a wonderful opportunity. We just get loads of professional development heaped on. We would love to have you there. I know all the trustees in this province would love to network with you and give you their input. They would love to see you there, so please come along.

We wish you good luck in your deliberations. Remember, we are all in this together. We're all doing it for the kids of B.C.

W. McMahon (Chair): Thank you so much for the presentation. As a parent whose son started at Saanichton Elementary many years ago, it's great to see you here.

S. Orr: I have to say this, of course. This particular school district is a model school district. As we go through our deliberations, I think that if we take what Saanich has done…. I know this from experience, of course. I've had my children in many school districts, including Vernon. I just had to put that out there. I wanted it on the record, because this truly is a model school district. Their successes are amazing. They do the most incredible job as a board, administration, schools. Just the whole thing works. I think we should take a real good close look at this.

B. Locke: Thank you, Ellen. Your enthusiasm is certainly recognized. Your school district does sound wonderful. I wanted to specifically ask you about a comment you made in here about CAPP, the career prep program. You were talking about the bad behaviour of some districts in resolving how they deliver, I'm assuming, the CAPP program. I know that's an issue. So can you…?

E. Slanina: Well, I wouldn't name any districts, but rumour has it that all their money doesn't go into career prep. I have heard of districts polishing and refinishing gymnasium floors with the funds. I've heard of districts holding back a certain amount of those funds from their high schools. Of course, that's not right, but don't punish us all. We put every penny into the high schools. We get recognized for that by our high school councillors. They know they get every penny that comes to us. We pass it on. It is such a powerful program for those students. It keeps them engaged. It is something where they come out with real-life experience, be it welding, electrician, pastry chef — you name it. They get something that's going to engage them and something they can hang their hat on that they're going to go forward with. It feels like we're being punished. I know some districts haven't spent the money appropriately, but we have. We could stand up to scrutiny; we're audited.

The other piece with CAPP, which I forgot to mention, is that you can't measure it by people graduating with their CAPP marks. Success may not always be a full completion at grade 12. Sometimes they can't finish their 100 hours because they are the students that are volunteering, that are on student council, that are writing 100 percents on their math exams — you name it. Sometimes students spend a year in a career prep program and find out that this career is not for me. I wanted to be a veterinarian, but I can't stand the thought of cutting a dog open. Better to know that now in grade 11 than know that after two years of college;

better to learn that early on. There's not as much time spent and not as much money spent. To me success can't always be measured on the hours completed, the courses completed and your i's dotted and t's crossed by grade 12. A lot of the students take one year and find out, "This career isn't for me," and they'll move on to another career option. If the students don't complete, you're not funded for any of that. That's another problem.

There's a lag of funding in our apprenticeship program as well. We can get students coming in. They'll only take a snapshot one year to the next in January. We sometimes have students in that program for almost an entire year before we get a penny to support them. Again, we're pinching from other areas. Those are all problems with putting that program together.

K. Manhas: Thank you, Ellen, for the passion that you so clearly put into our education system. I just have couple of questions here. Could you just explain what storefront schools are and, secondly, why middle schools work so well?

E. Slanina: We have two storefront schools. They meet the needs of students that don't fit the mainstream. Sometimes there are students that need time out from their high schools for one reason or another. They're on the wrong track, or they're just distracted. They may be young parents. They may have work that they can't blend with school. They may be students who are already seriously pursuing an athletic or music career, and the time lines of school don't work. It's a very flexible system. It's drop-in between nine and three. We're actually extending the hours because there's such a high demand on the Broadmead site. I think it's going nine to seven at night. Quite often they're one-on-one with teachers. Teachers are there that entire time, meeting the needs of those students — working one-on-one on maybe just two courses at a time that they're struggling with or want to focus on. It's a very flexible program. The demand for it is very high. Like I said, we are at capacity in both schools, and more people are clamouring to go there. We would probably really like to put a third in, if it could be funded, but it remains to be seen.

Middle schools. We have this whole document to tell you why they're important. In a nutshell, preteens are a different kind of animal — if any of you have children. They're wonderful children, energetic, enthused and just out there. Middle schools are full of life. I invite you to come to any of them. Their energy level is a little different than senior level or elementary level. They are coming into their own. They're finding out who they're about. They're going through puberty, hormones. They're almost young adults. They want a little more responsibility, but there are still elementary elements there as well.

We have fabulous leadership programs in those schools to help them learn how to be independent and think. They're just such a powerful way to develop a program that suits children 12 to 14. They want to spread their wings, but they still need a little bit of extra support. They're miles apart in maturity from a five-year-old and kindergarten level.

Because the middle schools are there, the grade 4s and 5s get a chance for leadership earlier on. You would be blown away to see the leaders in the elementary levels. They get those opportunities because the 6s and 7s aren't there. They're the older group, and they lead incredibly at their level. It just gives them both so many more opportunities. They go through a maturity.

The staff are there because they really like working with adolescents, and they do a fabulous job of meeting the needs of those kids. They're just a different age group. It really works well to give it in a middle school delivery because you can focus in on those transitions. You can focus in on what the needs are. Because your school is just 6, 7 and 8, you have the population base to offer programs. Our kids get to do home ec, woodworking, fine arts and applied skills that kids don't get to do until grade 8 in other school districts. The kids just love that. It might be just pizza bread, but it's so neat to get in there and do that and get a few life skills happening.

J. Kwan: I just have a quick question. You mentioned that the universities or post-secondary education doesn't recognize some of your courses like math and others. Can you explain that to me? I actually don't understand what you mean when you say they don't recognize it. They don't recognize it as university-credited?

E. Slanina: It's a very difficult situation, and that's why I raise it with you. It's crazy-making. It's recognized as a provincially examinable course, and it's a stream that is recommended for the majority of the students — applied math as opposed to principles of math. Universities may say they recognize this for entry, but you try to enter any of their programs beyond entry to the university. The majority of the time it's not accepted as a requirement of entry into that program.

Kids are encouraged to take that course by the ministry. It's put together — recommendations on learning outcomes, etc. — by the ministry. They recommend that students take it, but at the same time they're not accepted into post-secondary with that. It's a difficult situation. It is appropriate for the students. It's just not recognized in the programs they want to go into, so we force the majority into the principles of math, which may not be appropriate for them and which may have nothing to do with what they're going forward with — maybe into fine arts or archaeology or what have you. It's got very little in relation to principles of math.

Principles of math is appropriate for engineers and scientists and computer specialists, but all of our students feel the pressure to take that. It's unfortunate, because they may not succeed very well at that. Their mark brings them down, so they wouldn't have entry anyway. It's a real dilemma.

The rate and change of curricula in math has just been crazy lately. There have been over seven changes over the last five years, and to resource that we don't

get new funds. We get $60 or so per student. One textbook is more than that, so every time you change the curriculum you have to somehow magically come up with class sets of textbooks with no money. That's been a real problem.

TPC, like I say, is an applied course, and it's most appropriate for many students heading for professions that need skills more tailored to that profession around communicating, presentations and business letters. As opposed to writing poetry, they're going to write business letters. That's the skill level they need. We need that course. We offer it, but students hesitate to take it because it's not recognized by enough of the post-secondaries. Then they're denied entry — with the most appropriate course for that field. It's very frustrating.

J. Kwan: You mentioned that you just got a letter from UVic not recognizing, I think, the math course.

J. Kwan: Is the acceptance or the recognition of the course different for different post-secondary institutions? Or is it across the board, like UBC and SFU?

E. Slanina: It's pretty well across the board. I've heard that at SFU it will be accepted for some courses but very few. It would be safe to say that by far, the majority don't recognize applied skills — applied math 12.

R. Lee: I have a similar question to follow up your answer. I think students inside universities sometimes can transfer from department to department. To safeguard the quality of students that can go to university courses, I think the math requirement should be there to guarantee they have some kind of minimum academic preparation. That's an argument I perceive for study at the university level.

I think the solution is that we probably should advise those students in grade 12 that if they are going to an academic stream, they should take the regular principles of math instead of advising them to take otherwise.

E. Slanina: I'm not a skilled math teacher, so unfortunately I can't go into the curricular differences, but I've been told that it's very similar math. It's not general math; it's not dummy math. It is high-level math. It's just another approach to learning it and teaching it. You know, it's the ministry's push that 85 percent of our kids take that, so I think it's incumbent on them to see that it's accepted for those students when they get to post-secondary. I hesitate to push students towards something, even though it's most suited to them, if it's going to cut off options for them. We've got to look at being realistic about the entry requirements and be up front. If this is what it is, then this is what it is, and let's get on with it. All this middle-road stuff…. It's very difficult for counsellors to help our students make the right choices with the situation as it is right now.

R. Lee: I think right now, with that kind of course, the universities still have the final say on…. I think this is true for all universities, not just B.C. universities. As you said, I don't know if it's true or not. Probably two courses are similar but with different names. In that case, why don't we just have one math course and say that will satisfy the university's requirement? If we have a university that will recognize that kind of course material, then that could solve the problem. Otherwise, students are going to points outside B.C., and this course may not be recognized either. I think it's fundamental.

E. Slanina: Well, it is in some places. That's the frustration. It is recognized in some places; it is not in others. Consistency is a real problem.

R. Masi (Deputy Chair): I was looking at your point here on the SISB, the Saanich Indian school board. This is very interesting in terms of working within a school board. Is it a school board within a school board or two separate school boards? I wonder if you could deal with that; then I'd like another supplemental to that.

E. Slanina: It's on one of the native reserves, and they elect their own board representation from their four villages, the four that I named. They support their first nations students in that facility and generally take students K-to-5. They have, actually, a preschool and day care working there as well. They support adult learners, and they've had a fabulous success rate with their adult learners. It has grown quite a bit — helping first nations children, some of them young adults. They can look after their babies while they have a chance to renew their skills and take them further.

Because many of their students — I'd say almost all of them — come to our school system, it's very important to sit down with them and work through ways to transition those students to make sure they're prepared. We support each other. We offer professional development for their teachers. We invite them to the programs that we put on for our teachers, because those students will be our students, and it's really important they come prepared to learn.

One other thing I forgot to mention that's unique to Saanich is that we've developed a local language. We teach them their language in the middle school and offer that to them, as opposed to French. It's Sençoïen. It's something I'm very proud of. It helps them feel empowered and valued for what their identity is all about, and it has been really successful. We have an

elder who comes in and teaches them the language, and it has brought it back to life for them. It's important to work with them.

R. Masi (Deputy Chair): Further to that point, we have a severe dropout rate and a lower level of academic standing, largely in the northern school districts, relative to the aboriginal population. Have you made any inroads into that problem? If you have, could you give us some help on that?

E. Slanina: We're struggling with that, and actually, we've clearly identified that in our accountability agreement with the ministry. We've put some very high standards and targets there. We've turned our attention to that for the last couple of years. Our FSA results came back, and they weren't good. We knew they wouldn't be good, but we were surprised that they were that poor. It was very unfortunate, and it has gotten our attention — full, focused attention.

Our LEA meetings — the local education agreement meetings — focus on that almost 100 percent of the time. That's why we're going out to the villages in the next month to meet with the parents, because the problem is both of ours, and we have to work with the families. That's the thing we're struggling with the most: how to get the trust and the working relationships established with all of the families there. That's where we have to make it work from.

We did a community forum on first nations about a year ago. We invited past graduates of our system that were first nations to come and speak to us on a panel. Some were currently in the schools. They gave us their full, honest evaluation of the system: where it needs help, what's positive, what got them through.

The successful graduates gave us input. Almost always, it was a valued family member, friend or staff member who valued them and made sure they were there — kicked their butt out of bed in the morning and made sure they got to school. It was a very successful event. We had over a hundred first nations fam-

ily members there, and we intend to do a lot more of that in the future. We have a lot of improvement to do there, but we are giving it a strong focus. We really hope in this next year the FSA results will show that effort. It's not going to be easy, and it's not going to be a quick fix. But over the long term we've put some high standards there, and we're really hoping to meet them. As Michelangelo said, it's better to set your goals high and fail to achieve them than to set them low and be successful. So we're setting them very high.

W. McMahon (Chair): On behalf of the committee, we'd like to thank you, Ellen, for coming and bringing your board with you too. It's great to see the representation here. We really appreciate your presentation.

E. Slanina: We really appreciate the opportunity to come and meet with all of you. Please come out to our schools. We're nearby — just Mount Doug and beyond.

J. Kwan: I wonder if just before we adjourn I could ask the Clerk to consider doing this. We get agendas coming to us fast and furious, four and five of them. I get them confused as to which is actually the most current one, especially for the meetings that are subsequent. I wonder if they could attach a time. So then, when there's a change or a revision of the agenda, we'd know which is the most current one.

As an example, if there's a revision of an agenda that came in at 11 o'clock today, and then there's another one that came in at three. It would actually say the time, so then we'd know the 11 o'clock is now outdated and the 3 o'clock is the one that's in use. I know that you're trying hard to schedule it all, and therefore it changes rapidly. But I just get confused, because there's so many pieces of paper.

REPORT OF PROCEEDINGS (Hansard)

SELECT STANDING COMMITTEE ON EDUCATION

REPORT OF PROCEEDINGS
(Hansard)

SELECT STANDING COMMITTEE
ON EDUCATION