Quebec schools fail to spend tens of millions of dollars each year that are meant to fund services that are key to student success, such as food assistance and tutoring. These lost funds then return to the state’s coffers to fund its “priorities” in various areas, it has been learned The Duty.
At the Ministry of Education, so-called “protected” budgetary measures exist so that all the sums intended for specific initiatives can only be used for that purpose, without the possibility of being transferred to meet other needs within schools.
These measures were put in place to facilitate the academic success of students and ensure their well-being at school. However, according to an unpublished compilation produced by The Duty (see our methodology at the end of the text), some forty school service centres (CSS) and school boards in Quebec, out of the 72 in the province, have accumulated, over the last six years, an unspent balance of $98 million for five protected measures.
The measures dissected by The Duty include food aid, tutoring, the acquisition of children’s books, cultural outings and extracurricular activities in secondary school.
In several CSS, more than 10% — at least — of the sums that had been granted to these measures have not been spent since 2018-2019. And the percentage is particularly high for some of them.
Examples of amounts slipping out of schools’ hands
Millions lost in education
Prior to 2020, the balance not used to fund protected measures was “retained by school bodies with the approval of ministerial authorities,” the Ministry of Education said in an email to Duty.
It is totally unacceptable to know that there is even a penny returning to Quebec while our schools in Montreal have enormous needs.
Since then, however, it has been returning in part to the Quebec government. Thus, between the 2020-2021 and 2022-2023 school years, some $121.5 million that was to be invested in protected education measures instead ended up in the state’s consolidated fund to finance “the government’s priorities,” the ministry confirmed.
“It’s totally unacceptable to know that there’s even a penny going back to Quebec City when our schools in Montreal have enormous needs,” says Catherine Beauvais-St-Pierre, president of the Alliance des enseignantes et enseignants de Montréal. Only for the five protected measures analyzed by The Dutythe CSSDM has accumulated an unused balance of $3.27 million in 2022-2023. “It’s very shocking.”
This unspent money returned to Quebec can then be used in education, but also for other purposes deemed a priority by the State. A situation denounced by school principals’ associations, who point out that the positive balances accumulated by school organizations for the financing of protected measures do not reflect an excess of money invested in the network, but rather problems concerning the management of these funds.
“It’s sad to see these large sums being returned to the government, but it’s strictly due to the inflexibility of the amounts. It’s not because there are no needs, that’s clear,” emphasizes the president of the Fédération québécoise des directions d’établissement d’enseignement, Nicolas Prévost.
“It doesn’t make sense that in 2024, we’re still stuck using the amounts” allocated to protected measures in a very specific niche, he continues. According to him, this mode of operation, dictated by Quebec, does not take into account the challenges facing the province’s schools.
A shortage with multiple effects
Joined by The Dutyseveral CSSs reported the role of the COVID-19 pandemic, which caused the unused balance to swell between 2019-2020 and 2022-2023, while the teachers’ strike was mentioned to explain the one recorded last year in certain places.
The shortage of manpower is, however, the endemic factor that most limits the ability of these organizations to spend all the money allocated to various protected measures. Tutoring, for example, suffers from the lack of school educators and special education technicians, while the number of cultural outings has been greatly reduced — particularly in the regions — due to the lack of bus drivers and the significant increase in costs related to student transportation, the organizations contacted emphasize.
“Ultimately, we are not able to take our students out for activities: the bus costs too much,” explains Carl Ouellet, president of the Association québécoise du personnel de direction d’école. “The flexibility we have been asking for for several years is to allow artists to come to school, to allow exhibitions to come to schools so that as many students as possible can benefit from them,” he continues. However, this solution is hampered by the government’s lack of “flexibility,” he laments. “We are told that it is complicated.”
In this context, “we are exploring online cultural offerings in order to diversify what we offer our students,” notes the CSS des Phares in Rimouski, which is trying as best it can to adapt to the repercussions of the shortage of bus drivers on its students’ access to culture.
As for food aid, some schools are short of funds, while others get more money than they can spend on the measure, it was found. The Duty.
“The last two years that I was a school principal in a privileged environment, the food measure, there is a good sum that I returned [à Québec]”I didn’t use it because I couldn’t deploy it properly — and we’re also aware of public funds, so we won’t do anything with them,” said the principal of a Montreal elementary school, who requested anonymity because she is not authorized to speak to the media.
Very rigid measures
“The reality is that we have sectors that lack money and others that don’t need it,” also notes Pascal Proulx, assistant director general of the Western Québec School Board, present in several regions of the province. He deplores the existence of overly specific directives in the allocation of sums dedicated to protected measures, which notably means that some small schools are short of funds granted by Québec for food aid, while other, larger schools are unable to spend all the money received for this purpose.
The rigidity of the protected measures has also led several CSS to be in deficit for some of them while accumulating positive balances for others, without being able to move the money from one box to another, noted The Duty.
This is how the CSS du Lac-Saint-Jean found itself last year with a positive balance of 16.25%, or more than $22,000, for funding cultural outings, while reporting a deficit of approximately $8,000 in food aid. For its part, the Western Québec School Board accumulated a positive balance in 2019-2020 of 30% of the envelope it was supposed to spend on extracurricular outings, or more than $105,000, and reported a deficit of $1,228 for the purchase of children’s books.
“The nature of protected measures no longer really has a reason to exist,” Mr. Proulx argues. “I think the ministry must review its intentions” and give schools the flexibility to invest public funds where the needs really are, he continues. A flexibility that the Ministry of Education says it is working on quietly.