The province’s Catholic school boards are a drain on dwindling Ontario resources and should be axed, a public school trustee says.

On Tuesday, Pam FitzGerald will ask the Ottawa-Carleton District School Board to pass her motion to ask the province to consider merging the public and Catholic boards.

“This is not new,” she said in an interview Sunday. “Our board has a position recommending the merger into one school system.”

Her motion is prompted by the government’s “draconian” Putting Students First Act, which froze teachers’ wages and stripped away the right to strike for two years.

Intended to save big bucks at a time of economic malaise, FitzGerald thinks the province is ignoring an easy way economize.

She points to a discussion paper released by the Federation of Urban Neighbourhoods of Ontario, which calculated savings of anywhere between $1.3 billion and $1.6 billion dollars if the public and Catholic boards were to merge.

In Ottawa alone, merging the public and English Catholic board would save $10.1 million, the paper claims. And that’s before factoring in other variables like reducing overlap in school bus transportation.

“While such significant savings would appear to be a strong economic incentive for pursuing the merg(er) … there seems to be limited political will to do so,” the paper’s author wrote.

FitzGerald believes exploring a merger would be more productive than the current slugfest between the province and its teachers.

These days, Catholic schools are largely indistinguishable from their public counterparts, she said.

“I don’t know why we’re clinging on to this idea that frankly is no longer particularly relevant in this day and age. Catholic school boards have to follow the same curriculum as public school boards,” she said. “Why not merge them and save millions of dollars each year?”

The merger is only the second half of FitzGerald’s motion — she is also asking the board to join the chorus of voices demanding the repeal of the Putting Students First Act.

The Act is actually harming students, FitzGerald said, and the $2 billion in savings is close to what unions had offered the province at the beginning of negotiations.

tony.spears@sunmedia.ca

Twitter: @ottawasuntonys