Q: Are public school buildings falling into disrepair in Quebec? What is the general state or portrait of the situation?
Pierre Rousseau
A: Let’s not mince words: many public schools are in a terrible state.
You have two options to see this.
First: visit one of these establishments. Our colleague Marie-Eve Morasse, over the summer, painted a portrait of Sophie-Barat high school in Ahuntsic. A part was outright condemned because it was dangerous!
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Second: browse the most recent Quebec Infrastructure Plan.
You will have proof of it, it is written in black and white.
The province’s schools are classified by age rating. And this ranking is demoralizing to anyone who thinks our children should study where conditions are favorable for learning.
In total, 54% of the infrastructures of the education network are considered to be in poor or very poor condition, and therefore are rated D or E respectively.
“This situation is mainly due to a period of underinvestment in the 1990s and early 2000s,” we read.
The Ministry of Education has given us the most recent figures for only buildings with students. For 2020-2021, 48.2% were found to be in satisfactory condition.
Small consolation: it got a little better. A year earlier, in 2019-2020, 47.5% of these buildings were in satisfactory condition.
It must be said that in Quebec, we are finally taking the matter seriously.
Even more, it seems, since a scathing report from the Office of the Auditor General of Quebec in 2019.
Imagine, we were starting from so far away that we did not really know, then, the real state of the housing stock in the education sector.
Moreover, the data is not yet up to date. We are currently completing the fifth and final year of a necessary inspection of the buildings in the network.
And of course, the more this work progresses, the more the number of dilapidated schools that we discover increases.
Fortunately, we did not wait for it to be over to inject massive sums in order to raise the bar.
At the CAQ, we pride ourselves on having already invested in the construction and renovation of schools in Quebec in three years “more than previous governments in eight years”. We are talking about an amount of $ 8.3 billion.
But it is a long-term job that has just started. And year after year, regardless of economic fluctuations and the many needs in multiple sectors, the challenge for Quebec will be to keep its foot on the accelerator.
In fact, you should even press a little harder.
At the Center de services scolaire de Montréal (CSSDM), it is reported that the budget intended to eliminate the asset maintenance deficit in the building stock remains insufficient.
It stands at 173 million for 2021-2022. However, the CSSDM estimates that it should rise on average to 390 million per year from 2023-2024 for all buildings to be in satisfactory condition by 2030.
It’s like in the fable of Jean de La Fontaine. We have lived too long like the grasshopper that sang all summer long instead of behaving like the ant that worked hard for its future.
The education network will pay the price for this complacency for many years to come.