While the Toronto District School Board pledged to clean up its spending practices in the wake of a critical forensic audit, its Alberta counterparts were pushing back on provincial plans to use more consolidated P3s to build the 40 new schools required across the province.
A story in the Globe and Mail reported that the Toronto school board misdirected program spending in violation of its funding agreement with the Ontario government:
The Toronto District School Board has pledged to tighten its oversight of provincially funded programs for students outside the classroom, after an audit revealed lax procedures for overseeing spending.
The forensic audit, commissioned by Education Minister Liz Sandals, revealed the school board may not have followed provincial rules by using some funds to help balance its books. The Ernst & Young LLP audit also said financial reports submitted to the province for an employment program for at-risk youth were not approved by the school board’s chief financial officer.
The story states that the audit findings “clearly show that accountability has been circumvented at Canada’s largest school board.”
In the meantime, the school sector in Alberta is facing is own spending controversies as school boards echo prior concerns voiced by the construction industry over the provincial governments increasing use of consolidated P3 formats for school construction projects. A report in the Journal of Commerce noted that the Calgary School Board is calling on the province to use more traditional design-bid-build procurement formats for the construction of its promised new schools:
The Calgary Board of Education (CBE) has asked the Alberta government to use a traditional design-bid-build approach for new school construction, due to worries about delays with the public-private partnership process. “We are concerned that if a public-private partnership (P3) approach is used for any new schools, which are approved, that the schools would not be available until September 2017,” said Sheila Taylor, chair of the board of trustees.
The story concludes by stating that Alberta school boards remain in ongoing negotiations with the province over the administration of the new projects and that the Calgary school board has written the province stating that it wants to manage its own construction projects to better ensure that its new schools are built on time.
