ACCORDING TO EDUCATION Minister Kathleen Wynne, there's a difference

between a previous government's appointment of supervisors to run dissident school boards and her appointment of Norbert Hartmann to head a "management team" with instructions to balance the books of the Dufferin-Peel Catholic District School Board.

Well, the titles may be different but we suspect the functions will be pretty much identical. Any way you look at it, the school board's trustees have lost perhaps their most important responsibility, since budget control ultimately determines both the quality and quantity of the services it can provide to staffs and students.

It used to be that Ontario's school boards had complete command financially. Although they relied heavily on provincial education grants, any shortfall was made up by imposing property tax levies.

That all ended when the government of premier Mike Harris eliminated the boards' taxing powers and replaced local education levies with a provincial education levy on all properties.

At the same time, the Harris government came up with what has been described, rightly or wrongly, as a "onesize fits-all" funding formula that some of the province's largest school boards said made it impossible for them to balance their books without making unacceptable program cuts. Their deficit budgeting led to them being taken over by provincially appointed supervisors who effectively left the elected trustees with nothing to do.

It will be interesting, indeed, to see what the Dufferin-Peel board will have left to do now that Mr. Hartmann, a former provincial assistant deputy education minister, has been ordered in by Ms. Wynne to find ways to balance the board's books by cutting another $7.5 million from its $270- million budget, a task the trustees refused to do. Ironically, in 2002, as a Toronto District School Board trustee, the new minister fought hard against the decision by the Harris government to send in supervisor Paul Christie to balance that board's books.

As we see it, the major problem facing both the Dufferin-Peel board and the Upper Grand District School Board is the inflexibility of the current funding scheme, which both boards say fails to provide for the real cost of transporting kids to and from their schools. (The Upper Grand board did manage to balance its books, but only by dipping into its reserves, which barring an improved formula will soon disappear.)

Interestingly, even the former Progressive Conservative governments of Mr. Harris and Ernie Eves admitted the funding formula wasn't working and Premier Dalton McGuinty has promised to reform it but hasn't done so, no doubt in part because of its complexity.

Similar financial problems to those afflicting the local boards affect many of the province's other 70 school boards, including some of its largest. Both the Toronto public and Catholic school boards may soon face similar provincial takeovers, and the Upper Grand board is not alone in having managed to stay in the black only by dipping into reserves, staving off inevitable financial difficulties for at most a few years.

Sending in outsiders like Mr. Hartmann, at a reported salary of $1,500 a day, may temporarily balance a board's books, but it is at best a stop-gap solution.

Clearly, the time has come for the McGuinty government to make some major reforms in the funding area.

One option would be simply to revise the formula to make it reflect actual costs faced by each board.

However, we suspect that may be well nigh impossible, in part because of the way in which the existing school boards came into being.

Except in the case of a few large cities, the predecessors of the present "district" boards ranged from city- and town-wide school boards to boards in rural areas that were responsible for a single school "section" and usually had just one one-room school that offered only the elementary grades 1 to 8..

That situation persisted until after the Second World War, when urban high schools finally developed bus systems and rural students no longer had to board in the nearest towns. At about that time, the province permitted the formation of high school districts, with trustees elected to represent the urban and rural municipalities.

A little later, the one-room schools were replaced by elementary schools that took in students from one or more municipalities.

The next step was the creation of county and regional boards of education that were responsible for both elementary and secondary schools and could impose education taxes on all the county's or region's local municipalities.

The problem then became an absence of financial controls that led to huge increases in the education levies. The Harris government's answer to that was the creation of the district boards and elimination of their taxing power.

In our view, this was a serious mistake, a form of overkill that led to the current unsatisfactory situation.

We think the answer lies in a return to a form of county and regional school boards, with title to all the school properties resting with the county or region and the boards themselves becoming agencies of the county or region with an ability to seek supplemental funding from the county or regional council.

Such an arrangement would make it possible for the school trustees to make a case publicly for financing beyond that provided in any provincial funding formula. It would be left to the county or regional government to decide whether to including some or all of the funding requests in their over-all budgets.

For its part, the Province should make a commitment to gradually phase out the provincial education levy on properties and ultimately fund the education system from other revenue sources, principally personal and corporate income taxes.