VANCOUVER—A Vancouver School Board trustee is calling for “elite” private and independent schools to stop getting taxpayers’ money — and for those funds to instead help save teaching jobs currently facing the axe.

Carrie Bercic, the only trustee from the OneCity party, said she will table an “urgent” motion on Monday to stop plans to eliminate nine positions in the district. The motion comes as an earlier motion she submitted nears a board vote to redirect funding that’s currently subsidizing private schools.

She told StarMetro that both motions are connected, because they are geared toward fixing what she called a critically underfunded and understaffed public school system.

“There’s not enough being put into the system to give students what they need to succeed, especially those with complex learning needs,” she said. “It’s just not happening.”

Her earlier motion, tabled last month, is expected to head to a vote on Monday night. If passed, Bercic argued, it could help solve what she sees as the VSB’s perennial money problems, which she said have forced the board to pull cash from one department to urgently patch holes in another.

The current funding formula for schools in B.C. allows what the province categorizes as “Group 2” schools — which include private schools such as St. George’s and Crofton House — to collect 35 per cent of the per-pupil provincial funding received by the district’s public schools.

Group 2 schools also include those with an Indigenous focus, or for students with complex learning needs, but Bercic said her motion excludes those institutions and focuses only on what most British Columbians might label “elite” private schools.

Bercic’s newest motion — which she plans to also bring forward Monday — seeks to save nine “non-enrolling” teaching positions, such as teacher-librarians, teacher-councillors and resources teachers. The positions are set to be eliminated this year as part of the board’s 2018-19 budget, due to an expected decline in enrolment.

This second motion has been deemed “urgent,” meaning if it is seconded by another school board trustee, it need not be sent to committee, in which case a vote may be held on the same day it is tabled.

Bercic said the impending loss of teaching positions is an example of how a diversion of taxpayer funds to “elite” private schools is at odds with providing a quality education for public school students.

“Public education is supposed to be the great equalizer,” she said. “Every student should have the same opportunities as every other student in the system.”

Instead, Bercic said, public schools remain perpetually underfunded, with fewer teachers forced to rely on fewer resources to meet a more diverse range of educational needs than those in private schools who also get public money.

She said the two motions are connected — the first is meant to help provide a remedy for a lack of public school funding that leads to a loss of the kinds of teaching jobs the second motion is aimed at saving.

If the school board votes to pass her first motion, she said, the VSB would be asked to write a letter asking the education minister to reconsider taxpayer money going to private schools.

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Bercic said she hopes seeing Vancouver make this bid would bring other school districts on board, adding additional weight to the request, for the betterment of the education that public students receive.

“If students aren’t getting the things we know that they need,” she said, “we’ve failed.”

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