By Dana Reynolds

Education Minister embraces daycare; dismisses underfunding

Mar 4, 2016 | 4:57 PM

With a provincial election roughly four weeks out, Education Minister Don Morgan came to the small community of St. Louis to help celebrate the local school division’s 10th anniversary.

After cutting cake and posing for photos, Morgan reminded attendees of his government’s promise to kids.

“We made a commitment when we formed government to add 500 daycare spaces a year. We’ve met that as we’ve gone through. But as we go forward and add more new schools, or we build and expand schools, we know that we would not want to do a new school that does not have a daycare as part of it,” Morgan said, adding there was a “synergy” locating daycares in schools as not only was it a common drop off point for parents, but younger siblings had the support of the older ones.

Morgan said existing daycares operated with a variety of different models. The province has provided the space and the capital, and daycares have been run through the school division or with a division partner like a community based organization.

“The government itself is not in the daycare business, we look to find partners with us that would work to provide it.”

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The provincial government has pledged to build nine new joint-use schools in four different communities – Saskatoon, Regina, Warman and Martensville – as Morgan said these were rapidly expanding communities. Each school will contain a daycare for a total of 810 spaces. A joint-use school is a building used by both the separate and public school divisions often including spaces for community use.

Prince Albert will receive two portable units because while there is growth in the community, it is not enough to warrant a new building. Morgan said the government will go through the budget in April and explore what else could be done in the city.

Morgan was incredulous of a report released by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives alleging the SaskParty was underfunding its schools. The report said Saskatchewan used to spend 3.08 percent of its GDP on education, but under Premier Wall this dropped to 2.6 resulting in $2.4 billion in lost education spending.

“I would just take strong exception to that. We have increased school funding, we have never had a reduction, we’ve never funded a school division less, there has never been a cut. We’ve increased funding to school divisions since 2007 from just over $900 million, to over $2 billion per year now,” Morgan said, adding his government has thus far built 20 schools and renovated another 25 to 30.

He said education spending made up roughly 20 per cent of his government’s overall budget and would continue this into the future. The province also wanted to maintain the number of child psychologists, speech language pathologists and other professionals currently in schools.

Morgan was confident all of this could be accomplished without raising property taxes.   

dreynolds@jpbg.ca

On Twitter: @danitska