I am a parent with a son at Central Middle School in Victoria, only recently galvanized in both awareness and a strong feeling of civic duty to organize parents to keep pushing, in the aftermath of the strike, to pressure government to reverse its longstanding policy of underfunding public education in BC. I have no experience on PACs, but have worked in many grassroots activist campaigns and have seen the importance of clear, strong, principled and measurable objectives that can be used to rally public support and pressure governments to take action. I think there is almost universal agreement amongst teachers and their supporters that the collective agreement which brought an end to the strike, has not alleviated the many problems generated in our schools from thirteen years of severe funding cuts and many parents are deeply concerned about the future of public education in BC and the impacts of chronic underfunding on the most vulnerable kids and all that entails with regards to contributing to the growing class inequities between the haves and the have nots in society as a whole. So, without further preamble, I am fishing for a pithy, comprehensive campaign objective that calls for the long overdue re-investment into our public schools that was not accomplished through collective bargaining and which could become the battle cry of a parents movement that operates outside of the PACS. We all throw around the figure of per student investment in our kids being $ 1000 below the national average. Does anyone know where that figure comes from? Is it corroborated by more than one source? If it is indeed accurate, I am thinking that a province-wide parent-led campaign demanding that BC students receive the national average per student funding, may be a very effective target to organize around. What are peoples thoughts?
Posted on: Mon, 06 Oct 2014 23:21:53 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015