Education Minister George Abbott announced this week that he is retiring from politics, but before he goes, the min-ister shared his thoughts on the "potential" cost savings of amalgamating school districts at his back-to-school press conference with reporters on Tuesday.
The notion of joining New Westminster to a larger school district has come up in the past, but the politically unpopular idea dwindled from a lack of support.
Still, Abbott applauded the question of amalgamating some school districts - though he didn't say which ones - when a reporter asked him what he thought about the idea as a way to save on admin-istrative costs. Abbott said it wasn't a topic he wanted to "burn a lot of political capital on trying to push" over the last year when teacher/government relations were mired by contentious contract talks.
"I do think there is some potential for amalgamation and some potential for administrative savings, whether it's actual amalgamation or, in some cases, sharing superintendents or secretary-treasurers," Abbott told reporters.
The Education Minister called himself a "big fan" of school districts and said the school-district system has generated a lot of innovation.
"The question then is: Is 60 the right number of school districts?" he said. "I suspect the answer to that is no, that in some cases there are districts that are of a size and configuration that would lend themselves to cooperation or potentially amalgamation with other districts."
The province should look at implementing "positive incentives" to either share positions or to amalgamate districts, Abbott told reporters.
New Westminster school trustee Casey Cook doesn't think it would be wise to join New Westminster with another school district, including neighbouring Burnaby.
"New Westminster is a unique community, and I think that should be reflected in its schools," he said.
Cook said he supports the idea of New Westminster school district pooling resources with other districts to save on costs, but doesn't want to have the district swallowed up by a larger one.
One of the clear mandates from the community is a call for more choices in the school district, Cook said, and he wouldn't want the district to lose its ability to offer a variety of education options.
The provincial government has previously kicked around the idea of amalgamating school districts to cut costs. In 2009, then-Education Minister Margaret MacDiarmid wanted school trustees to consider amalgamation as a money-sav-ing option, according to a Vancouver Sun article.
The province also raised the amalgamation idea after the Korbin report on public sector spending in 1993.
A committee recommended consolidating the province's 75 school boards to 37. The recommendation was modified, and in March 1996, 34 districts merged into 16 new districts, reducing the number of districts to 57. (Today, there are 60.)
Board of education chair James Janzen remembered the plan called for New Westminster to join the Coquitlam school district, an already amalgamated district that serves the cities of Coquitlam, Port Coquitlam and Port Moody and the villages of Anmore and Belcarra. That school district covers an area of 120 square kilometres and has 30,000 students. Trustees are elected for each area.
In New Westminster, there was no support for a move to Coquitlam, which hardly made sense from a geographical point of view, said Janzen, who was a trustee at the time.
