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The Elephant in the Room: Merging the School Boards

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May 15, 2014

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For immediate release
May 15, 2014

Guelph — Mike Schreiner, leader of the Green Party of Ontario and candidate in Guelph, made the following statement today about the PCs’ education proposals on the occasion of Tim Hudak’s visit to Guelph.

“When people like Tim Hudak start talking about gutting our school system, I hear a big elephant stomping around the room.

We’re paying $1000 per empty seat in schools across the province. Some of those schools aren’t even half-full. Some of them are half-empty separate schools across the street from half-empty public schools.

You’d think that the herald of the new common sense revolution would have the courage to say hello to the elephant.

Tim Hudak is proposing to make classes bigger, put fewer teachers in the classroom, and cut nearly 10,000 support positions in schools. This sledgehammer will be taken to a school system that currently doesn’t have the resources to serve children with special needs.

Hudak would make all these cuts to your child’s classroom while maintaining public funding for separate schools, which costs the province about $1.5 billion every year.

The Green Party is calling for a merger of the Catholic and public school boards into one system with French and English boards.

We want to put money back in the classroom, especially for children with special needs. We want to keep schools open that are threatened with closure because enrollments are divided between boards. We want to support all teachers, Catholic and public. And we want to resolve persistent human rights concerns, once and for all.

It’s a better plan for all Ontario kids than the ones put forward by the status quo parties.”

The Green Party is on a mission to bring honesty, integrity, and good public policy back to Queen’s Park.

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Media contact: Candice Lepage
519.362.9472
candicelepage@gpo.ca