Let's face it, times are not all that rosey for provincial governments trying to prioritize spending in all departments. But after primary healthcare, education needs to be a priority if Ontario is going to dig its way out of the financial mess caused by too much emphasis on too few industries!

An article in today's Toronto Star gives further evidence of a disturbing (but not new) trend in education – school fundraising for what were historically government funded school activities.

Last year alone schools raised $592 million through “a combination of fees, fundraising, vending machines, donations from businesses and other revenue sources.” Of that $238 million was raised in the GTA. That's a whole lot of chocolate bars and frozen Chicken Cordon Bleu!

And the fundraising was not simply for band and end of year school trips. 15% of school councils reported that funds were being raised for capital projects as well – that's renovations, and physical school upgrades – which have traditionally been part of the provincial budget.

So how does this all affect parents, as we get ready to send our kids back to school next week?

Education ministry spokesperson Patricia MacNeil said fees cannot be charged for textbooks, course materials or registration, but boards can charge for voluntary activities such as extracurricular sports, yearbooks or field trips. “To complete any course, if you require that material or that product or that equipment, then students absolutely cannot be charged for that,” she said.

Here it gets really muddy. If your child is taking Science for example and needs to see tadpoles in a pond for the course, the tadpoles in a pond part is free, but it costs to ride the bus to get there. Some school boards are getting even sneakier…

In the Niagara area a $50 per year activity fee is being charged to each student. Included in the activity fee is a student card, something we all remember as being necessary to get the student rate at the Cineplex. But in that area the student card is needed to access the school library! Ah whoops… reading the books is free, but getting in the library door will cost you 50 bucks!

The real fear in all this is that we are creating a two tiered education system – the schools with the capacity for large scale fundraising (urban) and the schools with lesser capacity for fundraising (rural). In some schools the monetary difference can be as much as $400 per student every year or close to $5000 over a 12 year public school education. That's like handing your child a new laptop every year on the first day of school!

The real crunch for this will come when our children hit post secondary education and have to compete with those 'advantaged' students for spaces in Ontario universities and elsewhere. Will they be able to compete?

Or will they end up in the jobs that the 'advantaged' students aren't interested in?

People for Education, a parent-led organization supporting education in Ontario's school, in a new report, says the picture is getting even muddier with user fees being added to the mix. According to People for Education more than half of Ontario's secondary schools are charging user fees for Art courses, more than a third for Physical Education and a quarter for Music.

And while all this extra dipping is going on where is our government?

In 2005, the Ministry of Education promised to develop a “fundraising policy [that] will guarantee school councils control over funds raised and limit fundraising by ensuring education essentials are provided by the system.”

But in 2010, that fundraising policy is still at least 2 years away. The Ministry is now consulting on guidelines for fees for secondary schools, and has committed that guidelines for fees will be in place for the 2011/2012 school year.

That's a total of seven years to develop fundraising guidelines, or more than half a public school education.

To me that's a failing grade!