The cost of competition? School boards in northeastern Ontario spend over $1M a year on marketing

Documents obtained through freedom of information requests show the 13 school boards in northeastern Ontario spend over $1 million a year in public dollars on marketing and advertising.

Some say this is needed to let parents know about the four different school systems they can choose from, while others see it as public money wasted on unnecessary competition.

Here's what each board spent on marketing in the last four years:

• Conseil Scolaire Public du Nord-Est de l'Ontario: $1,069,052.
• Conseil Scolaire Catholique de District des Grandes Rivières: $749,791.
• Conseil Scolaire Catholique du Nouvel-Ontario: $460,881.34.
• Huron-Superior Catholic District School Board: $432,567.89.
• Northeastern Catholic District School Board: $235,598.12.
• Conseil Scolaire Public du Grand Nord de l'Ontario: $228,154.75.
• Algoma District School Board:  $211,533.19.
• Conseil Scolaire de District Catholique Franco-Nord: $198,262.
• Rainbow District School Board: $171,850.36.
• Near North District School Board: $157,243.36.
• Sudbury Catholic District School Board: $127,652.
• District School Board Ontario North East: $103,679.90.
• Nipissing-Parry Sound Catholic District School Board: $83,844.

The marketing money is spent on a variety of promotional campaigns, including school open houses and advertising on transit buses, the radio or online.

It's common in northern Ontario to hear English school boards advertising in French and for French boards to buy ads in English. 

"That says it all," said Geoff Botting, a retired education director, who last worked at the Near North English public board in the North Bay area. 

"There are a lot of people in the education system that want to pretend that school boards don't compete. In my opinion, that's very naive."

Botting said the money spent on marketing during his time on the job was often "cloaked" in the school board's budget and competing with the other boards was rarely discussed openly, but Botting saw it as part of his job.

"My job was not only to educate the kids and make sure the schools were open and heated and all that good stuff, but to make sure there were kids in there, because if there's no kids in them, you start shutting schools down, and that's a horrible experience," he said.

Botting said the advertising from the three other publicly funded school boards in the Nipissing-Parry Sound area "got more aggressive as time went on," and with a dwindling number of school-age children in northern Ontario, "splitting the pot four ways" resulted in the closing of some English public schools.

"A million dollars would buy you a lot of teachers and a lot of textbooks." 

While most school boards provided the records at no cost, the Conseil Scolaire de District Catholique Franco-Nord charged CBC $144, while the Near North District School Board said they required $480 to produce the documents.

The four top-spending boards — Conseil Scolaire Public du Nord-Est de l'Ontario, Conseil Scolaire Catholique de District des Grandes Rivières, Conseil Scolaire Catholique du Nouvel-Ontario and Huron-Superior Catholic District School Board — all either refused to speak with CBC about their marketing spending or didn't respond to requests. 

But Yves Levesque, executive director of the Association Des Conseils Scolaires Catholiques de l'Ontario, representing French Catholic school boards across the province, doesn't see this as a misspending of public dollars.

"That question is kind of unfair," he said. 

"You know, what organization does not promote the objectives of their organization? I don't know of any."

Levesque said marketing campaigns are necessary for French school boards so that francophone families are aware of their four options for choosing a school, especially if they're considering a French immersion program at an English school.  

"There are four systems, there are four choices possible — there is definitely, we'll call it competition, for students," Levesque said. 

The District School Board Ontario North East — which runs English secular schools in Timmins, Temiskaming Shores, Kapuskasing and surrounding areas — is one of the lowest spenders in the northeast.

Director of education Lesleigh Dye said the board established a communications department in 2018, and she was surprised by the "significant costs" for bus and radio advertising.

In 2019, the board spent some $38,000 on promotion, which she described as "just shy of an educational assistant's salary," and is happy that since then, the annual marketing budget has dropped into the $20,000 range, targeted mostly at parents and students already involved with the board. 

"We as directors have an enormous responsibility to share with our families and our communities that the dollars that the ministry has provided are going, for the most part, directly to their children," said Dye. 

Asked for comment, the Ontario Ministry of Education provided the following statement:

"The minister made clear of his expectations that school boards prioritize student achievement above all else with a refocus on what matters most: reading, writing, and math," the statement reads. 

"We expect school boards to follow these provincial priorities as there is nothing more important than public education funding supporting the needs of Ontario students to help them gain real life and job skills that lead to good-paying jobs."

Chandra Pasma, an Ottawa-area MPP and the education critic for the Opposition New Democrats, said she finds the marketing spending figures from the northeast "high," but not surprising.

"I don't think people find it the best use of public dollars when we have crowded classrooms and kids aren't getting the resources they need in school," she said.

Pasma blames the province's funding cuts, in particular, not accounting for inflation with the $1,200-per-student subsidy.

She said that has "really squeezed" school boards financially, "and so they divert some of the funds to marketing to try to recruit more students so they can increase that funding," a situation she calls "crazy."

Pasma said she doesn't feel competition between the school boards has much to do with the four different systems, which exist for "historical and constitutional" reasons, and believes schools would still be underfunded even if some of the boards were amalgamated.