New Brunswick's Department of Education has a dilemma.
It needs to cut costs, but it doesn't want to do so at the expense of what happens in the classroom, so it has launched a public consultation in a bid to gather ideas on how exactly to do that.
One of the ideas being bounced around is finding ways to share services between school districts, anything from IT and human resources to transportation, food services, and professional development.
"This is not a new topic," says John White, who retired as director of education in District 2 in 2008.
District 2 administers English-language schools in southeastern New Brunswick.
"That whole shared services business was talked about back when I was involved with the school district. I think it was called a common services review back then and they were focusing on payroll, HR, and IT ...
"I'm sure it can be done. In the experiences I've had, to be exposed to other jurisdictions across the country, I know it can be done, I think it is a matter of being prepared to throw the doors wide open and look at whole new ways of doing things."
In the discussion paper the province put together as part of the consultation process, it says how much can be saved through shared services isn't clear.
Some suggest savings of 25 to 50 per cent, others only about nine per cent, while still others suggest indirect savings or long-term savings.
Critics of shared services have suggested the projects can make it longer for a service to be delivered and create waste through work having to be done over again or through duplication.
Kevin Lacey, the Canadian Taxpayers Federation's Atlantic Canada director, can't see anything but good coming out of a plan to try to share resources.
"It makes all kinds of sense to try and combine these, even if sometimes there is an up-front cost because the long-term impacts are normally positive," he says.
Lacey says when it comes to IT services, for example, each government department tends to have its own programs.
"So none of them can talk to one another," he says.
"It's particularly a problem in health and education."
He says the transition to shared services can sometimes be rocky.
"But given this province's deficit issues are long-term, not short-term, sometimes it will take investment to save money and this very well may be one of those areas," he says.
Lacey says this review is a good thing and the federation particularly appreciates that government is looking at ways to save on administration costs rather than cutting the quality of service to students.
White says the size of the school district makes a difference in how much of a benefit shared services may have.
District 2 is the largest in the province and White says one thing that always struck him was just how very, very busy staff were.
"How do you share that service if people are so busy doing what they are doing already?" he says. "I can't remember how many computers there are in School District 2, but there are a lot and if I look at the number of technicians that were available, they were constantly on the go."
But many school districts in the province are far smaller than District 2, which has about 15,700 students and the equivalent of nearly 2,000 full-time staff.
Only four of the province's 14 school districts have more than 10,000 students; four have less than 5,000.
"If you look at statistics on the way the enrolment trends are going, it is pretty easy to see there are some school districts that are experiencing a greater decline in enrolment than School District 2 and 1," he says.
District 1 administers French-language schools in southern New Brunswick and is the only one with a growing enrolment.
"You do get to kind of a point as to how small do you allow a district to become before something has to be done in terms of potential amalgamation," he says.
That's something Sandi Urban-Hall can relate to.
Urban-Hall is the president of the Saskatchewan School Boards Association.
About a dozen years ago the school board she was part of at the time entered into a shared service agreement with two other school divisions in their area.
The school districts were just too small to effectively offer services on their own, so they started to share specialists like speech language pathologists.
"It worked well," she says. "The challenge is more administrative with a shared service. Three school divisions may have three different arrangements with staff, so perceived inequity was a bit of a challenge. It is more those administrative things you need to work out.
"The impact to students was very positive because students were accessing services they couldn't get before."
New Brunswick Teachers' Association president Heather Smith says as long as schools continue to have easy access to any services that are shared between districts she doesn't see a problem with the plan.
But she is concerned sharing certain services would make that access more difficult.
"We need to have access and quick access.
"We are working with very little time," she says, pointing out that when she was principal at a small school, 70 per cent of her time was actually spent teaching, leaving only 30 per cent for administration work, so timely access to the services she needed was imperative.
White says sharing services may require people to change their expectations of service.
If payroll is dealing with a larger number of employees, for example, it may take them a little longer to deal with your request.
It will also take some willingness on everyone's part to adapt to a different approach.
"Are people prepared not only to do things a little bit differently, but perhaps accept a different level of service for a greater good?" he says. "It is such a big question."
White says giving people the right tools to deal with larger groups of people is also a necessity.
He says the payroll department at District 2, for example, used to work with an outdated software program.
That may be manageable with smaller numbers of employees, but becomes untenable when a large number are involved.
White says not all services are good candidates for sharing.
Instructional-related work ought to be kept as local as possible, he feels.
But others make perfect sense.
"Purchasing is something that the schools actually have talked for years about, wishing they had someone that was more responsible for that so they didn't have to do the nitty gritty of that," he says. "Something like that I don't see a problem with perhaps doing it differently than it is done now."
The public is invited to submit comments online until Oct. 31 at www.gnb.ca/0000/consultation. Comments can also be faxed to (506) 453-3111 or mailed to Renewal Consultation, c/o Policy and Planning, Education and Early Childhood Development, Place 2000, P.O. Box 6000, Fredericton, NB, E3B 5H1.
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Autor(en)/Author(s): Aloma Jardine
Quelle/Source: Times and Transcript, 08.10.2011
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