Webber Academy Fined $26,000 Over Religous Issue

[J-D]

Originally posted by Sugarphreak
Private school... they can accept or refuse anybody they want. So long as they don't get public funding of any kind, I am totally OK with that.

.... so, do they get public funding?

I'm pretty sure they get a subsidy, but it's nothing major. The religious schools get it too.

[Sugarphreak]

...

[blairtruck]

^^^ damn straight.

[mazdavirgin]

Originally posted by Sugarphreak
IMO they should cut off Catholic and Private schools from any kind of tax payer money.

It's enshrined in the constitution so good luck with that...

The Constitution of Canada does not establish separate school education as a natural or unconditional right available to all. Only Protestants or Roman Catholics, whichever is the minority faith population compared to the other in a community, can consider the establishment of separate school education. The separate school establishment right is not available to citizens of any other faith (such as Orthodox Christians, Jews, Mormons, Hindus, Muslims, or Sikhs).

[speedog]

All accredited schools in Alberta can receive collected school tax dollars - this probably means all schools including private/religious. While this has been beat to death elsewhere in these forums, here's the highlights...

• Public school tax dollars and separate school tax dollars (Catholic and Protestant) are kept separate. You are required by law (Canadian Constitution) to declare your tax dollars as separate if you are of the Catholic or Protestant faith where those school systems exist.
• Collected separate school tax dollars only fund those particular separate school systems and are not pooled - in other words, school tax dollars collected in Calgary stay in Calgary and are directed 100% to the Calgary Separate School Board. None of those dollars go to other separate school systems in the province.
• Collected public tax dollars go into a provincial fund out of which formulas are used to determine how much every school/school system gets - this includes every public school system (english, bilingual of any type, immersion of any type, sports schools, TLC, charter, assisted learning, special education, etc) and all private and/or religious schools. This means a Calgarian's public tax dollars could be partially funding a public school system in Peace River while a similar Calgarian's separate school tax dollars go 100% to the CSSD.
• Catholic students can attend any public tax funded school while still designating their tax dollars as separate - I believe if one opts to attend a separate school, the opposite is true.
• You can be taken to court if you declare your school tax dollars as public even though you are of the Catholic or Protestant faith as this has been enshrined in the Canadian Constitution.

Alberta Education Property Tax: Facts and Information - link.

Funding rate formulas - link.

So it is a relatively fair system in that public tax dollars are meted out on a formula based system - what is unfair is that the Catholic/Protestant students can attend any publicly funded school without designating their tax dollars as such and also that all special interest schools outside of main stream english or french schools (our two official languages) are 100% supported by the public tax dollars and not by separate school tax dollars.

Personally, I believe the constitutional rights for Catholic and Protestant school systems should be abolished and provinces should establish one school tax system with parents able to designate where the bulk of their school tax dollars go to. There would still have to be some formulas in place to subsidize schooling in rural locations as they would never have enough of a tax base to be able to effectively support an adequate schooling system in those rural areas and that would mean everyone regardless of faith or where their children would got to school would be subsidizing these rural areas. Special interest schools of any type including any immersion or bilingual schools outside of our two official language schools should receive a reduced subsidy - one public school system with all other schools receiving reduced subsidies (including Catholic/Protestant) with parents/guardians who opt to send their children to these other schools paying out of pocket any extra costs it takes to keep these special interest schools viable.

Ninja edit - please note that my wife and I, at the end of the 2015-16 school term when our youngest will have graduated, will have spent a total of 19 years dealing with the school systems. Our three children all attended english mainstream public schools in Calgary with the exception of ECS for which they attended a private community association funded private ECS which was the province's oldest and which did receive funding from the public school tax dollars, our community association plus additional fees that the parents had to pay. We also have very close family who had children that attended Catholic school systems and have got very close family that have been educators for many, many decades in both public and separate systems. We also have many acquaintances and close friends who are or have taught in bilingual/immersion/special interest and private/religious schools or have children who attend such. I am of the Catholic faith although not practicing for over 40 years and I have fought the battle with the Calgary Catholic School Board with respect to the designation of my school tax dollars, which by the way is public, and told them they would have to take me to court to have my tax dollars designated as separate - to date, no court action. We were also part of the first appointed parent's group in the province of Alberta that actually voted to shut down a school stream/curriculum in the best interest's of our children's education - we recommended to shut down our local community's public school english mainstream program and transfer those affected students to another english school in a neighboring community, this was due to the formulas used to allocate resources within a single school and when our local school was 20% english and 80% french immersion, it meant that the english stream children were being shorted on resources (specifically warm, breathing teaching bodies). We have also sat on multiple parent-teacher associations as well as our community association board and have gained many insights with respect to funding formulas and what is wrong or right in our schooling systems.

Never the less, our battle with the system is about complete and quite an interesting ride it's been for the past 18 years and no doubt the 1 to come.

I apologize in advance for this TLDR post.