My Coffee with Bender
Today, I went to Fassbender's open house. Thanks to some members of the BC voters group, I had some good questions. He spent a long time with me and listened to my stories of trying to find help for 3 kids (2 designated, the other needs LST help). Here are the questions as I had them in my notes. I think I asked #3 first. His answers are not verbatim quotes, but I've got the gist as best as I can remember.
1). Some classes are larger and/or have worse compositions than before. Wasn't Ed fund supposed to fix these?
PF: Money goes to districts in block funding.
me: do you follow up that up with the SD that the money goes where it's supposed to?
PF: we don't check up on them but we go over the spending annually.
2). Is the Ministry of Education going through with the Blueprint for Education for kids in K-12?
PF: (referred me to a poster on the wall behind me) Curriculum is changing for K-9. Students should be able to "find their fit". Said there will be focus on skills training for industries like movie making and tech industry jobs. Did NOT mention LNG *at all*.
[Not a lot of talk of construction even though I wore my SFPR jacket to the open house.
I'm told the Blueprint mentions LNG over 100 times]
3). Does Ministry of Education plan to eliminate Special Needs designations?
Essentially, no. (He says). He does say that he thinks there's a kind of explosion (not his word) of designations. That there are so many different designations, and they can't be looked at the same.
Every answer was vague. He told many anecdotes. We talked of his grandchildren and how the grade 7 boy says he wants to be a lawyer, but at this age doesn't really know what that entails. He needs to "find his fit".
Over all, nothing he said "sounds" bad. But most of it is vague and there's the ultimate question of funding. He gave the typical political comment that we can't just throw money at it. Pretty standard.
posted by Dean at 3:52 PM
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