THE 43-PAGE REPORT by two educators who examined the spending

plans of the Dufferin-Peel Catholic District School Board should be required reading for all separate school supporters in Dufferin and Caledon.

A careful scrutiny of the document should leave the readers more than slightly puzzled by the initial reaction of the school board's chairman, Peter Ferreria, who termed its "allegations" concerning past practices of the board and board staff as "unfounded and ... a smokescreen of the larger issue of chronic underfunding."

The board's complaint about underfunding can be traced to the time when all school boards in the province lost their ability to tax, and with it the ability to spend pretty much whatever they wished, often competing with their neighbours to attract top-quality staff with better salaries and perks.

These days, almost all the boards' revenues come from the province and the challenge they all face is to balance their budgets while meeting targets the province sets for programs and class sizes.

All in all, the present arrangement seems to be working reasonably well, with the two public boards in Dufferin County and Peel Region - the Peel and Upper Grand district boards - managing to balance their books.

Not so the Catholic board, which raised a red flag in the form of a budget providing for a $15-million deficit and launched a postcard campaign aimed at having the province increase its funding.

It was in reaction to that campaign that then Education Minister Gerard Kennedy (who resigned the post last week to seek the federal Liberal leadership) ordered an independent investigation by William McLean, former director of education at the Niagara District School Board, assisted by Pierre Filiatrault, who had recently worked with the province's 12 French-language school boards.

Of all the troubling areas in the report, the one that really hit home concerns the

process that led to the board adopting the budget with its plan to spend so much more than it knew it was going to take in.

"We read all of the regular Board Meeting minutes, the In-Camera Meeting minutes, and the Administration and Finance Committee minutes from January 2005 to February 2006," the report discloses.

"It appears that senior staff never presented a deficit management plan for the school board trustees to approve, revise, or reject and the trustees never demanded that the staff present them with such a plan. The trustees were presented with a large document entitled 'Service Reduction Impact Statements' in which a long list of possible budget reduction items were identified by supervisory officers along with some impact that these reductions would have on the operations of the Board. This document was clearly not in the form of a deficit management plan, but merely a resource document which could have served as a springboard to the development of a deficit management plan.

"In our opinion, the trustees should have voted on a deficit management plan, with the specifics of the expenditure reductions clearly spelled out and quantified for them. They would thus have known exactly what was required to balance the budget before the Board submitted revised estimates which were in a deficit position."

Noting the board's contention that there had been chronic underfunding in salaries, special education and transportation, the investigators concluded that it should nevertheless be possible to prepare a deficit reduction plan, "and return as quickly as possible to a balanced position."

One fundamental question raised in the report is whether the deficit is really going to be anything like $15 million. The investigators were clearly left with deep, dark suspicions that the figure was more political than real.

For example, in the area of staffing, the report notes that although the board obtained provincial funding for 193 additional

teachers, in part to compensate for enrolment growth, it had actually hired only 146 by the end of 2005.

"Given the gap in new teachers funded relative to new teachers hired, it appears to us that the growth in spending for classroom teachers should have been less than the $24M increase in revenue in this area. The gap of 47 teachers funded but not hired suggests that expenditure growth should have been closer to $19M than [the budget's] $29M. This is consistent with the finding that there is a forecasting error in teacher salaries, which could be as high as $10 million."

In 2002-03, the board had a $ 19.6 million operating reserve. Since then, its revenues have increased by $100 million, but spending has shot up $137 million. The report found a major contributor was a 6.5 per cent salary increase given to both teachers and other staff members at a time when other boards held the increases to non-teaching staff to 3 per cent. (That alone cost the board an extra $4.6 million!)

In the end, the investigators found potential savings of $3.9 million within a bureaucracy that seems to have left the trustees unwilling or unable to do their job.

They also found the 139-school system could save another $2 million by getting along with fewer vice-principals and $2.6 million by returning custodial and maintenance staffing levels to those in place in 2002-03.

As for transportation, the report notes that another $1.5 million could be saved if the board did what most other boards (including Upper Grand) have already done - eliminate noon-hour busing of kindergarten students by having them spend full days in class.

Of course, a huge reduction in transportation costs would have been achieved if the board had opted to use the former Springbrook Public School in Orangeville as the temporary site of a high school for Dufferin students now being transported to Caledon's Robert F. Hall school.

Clearly, if there's a "smokescreen" here, it's not in the investigators' report.