Questions to which answers are not always clear or uniform

Next week, thousands of men, women and children across Quebec begin their final preparations for the beginning of another school year.

This annual ritual of bittersweet renewal is received with mixed emotions, depending on whether you're a parent who's run out of creative ideas for constructive activities, a young person who lives for the swimming pool, the soccer field, or the day camp, or a teacher who's itching to get back into action but full of trepidation linked to overcrowded classrooms, too many special needs children, lack of adequate resources, and for some the daunting spectre of an educational reform that has reached, not without controversy, Secondary IV (Grade 10), alas, with a serious lack of resources or recourses to go with it, in English schools.

School Boards, although often much-maligned without justification, face enormous challenges in their efforts to help create school communities that must be safe, secure, productive and effective in assisting children to develop character, personality, skills and knowledge, all within what the taxpayer considers to be cost-effective policies, programs, and services, not the easiest scales to balance.

And parents, the first and last frontier of education, the ultimate repository and source of the support children need to live, learn, and grow into young men and women of substance needed by a world starving for honesty, integrity, and commitment to the advancement of the human condition.

And what about the private and semi-private schools – how do these houses of learning fit into the master plan?

With the tax payer dishing out 60% of the cost of a year's education in a Quebec semi-private school, such as Letendre or Loyola, are these resources well-spent? Is the taxpayer getting a fair return on these investments? Are these funds (as much as $7,000 per student), which are diverted from a public school system in dire need of resources of all kinds, effectively utilized?

Are these semi-private schools, with stricter prerequisites for admission, and much higher performance standards once in, undermining and profoundly weakening the public school system by attracting 'better' students (higher rates of literacy, greater ability to abstract, intensified parental support)? It is a two-fold consequence - the draining of funds from institutions which have no choice but to provide education for all often with inadequate resources and the erosion of the general atmosphere of public school communities that have lost quality students to the semi-private schools?