General Urban Waterloo Updates and Rumours

[ijmorlan]

When you buy a house and start paying property taxes you pick which school board your want to support.

I don't think that has been the case for a long time. I think it used to be on the "Ontario" portion of the tax return, years ago. IIRC, I think it was Rae who got ride of that, but I could be wrong.

Now-a-days, most funding comes from property taxes, and is a per-pupil funding method. Whether the Catholic schools get extra money from the Church I have no idea. Also, now-a-days, you can send your kid to whatever secondary school you want within that school boundary (with exceptions) - kids don't need to be Catholic, believe in God or whatever, to go to a Catholic high school. JK - grade 8 can also attend with permission.

Unsure if the secondary schools are any better than the public schools - just based on where most lockdowns and fight occur.

Yes, there is still a property tax election. Every so often they send around a notification allowing occupants of the property to direct their education taxes. I think it’s actually supposed to be the occupants, not owner, in the case of rental properties, who determine which board (public, Catholic, French public, or French Catholic) they support, but I don’t know exactly how that works. And it makes me wonder how that applies to non-residential properties; do they have an educational portion of the property tax? Personally I think education funding should be moved to the income tax.

Here’s some information:

https://www.mpac.ca/en/MakingChangesUpda...esignation

Which actually, combined with what you said, makes me wonder if the school support actually controls the budget. Maybe it only controls which board’s trustees you can vote for? Is that what you’re saying?

Of course, we should merge the Catholic boards into their corresponding public boards. There is no conceivable justification for having a special publicly supported system for one particular religious group. The argument that it is in the constitution is bogus for two reasons: (1) the constitution can be amended and (2) we seem to have eliminated publicly funded schools for protestant families with no trouble (they are now the public boards, except in Penetanguishene) and I’m pretty sure they were constitutionally entitled to schools also.

Failing that, they should be required to teach the exact same curriculum in health class as in the public board. Catholic teachings should be required to be restricted exclusively to religious studies classes. Fortunately, Biology class should already be OK as the Catholics are not (institutionally) creationists.