Cape Breton Island: Education Budgets

Darrell Dexter Dept: As a result, fewer and fewer children are spread out from Yarmouth on the southwest coast to the top of Cape Breton Island. The province is slicing education budgets, educators are wringing their hands and parents are fighting to save schools and spare their children the prospect of disrupted learning and longer commutes, according to Globe and Mail. In Nova Scotia, there are an estimated five million square feet of empty space across the largely rural province, the equivalent of 38 vacant high schools. Darrell Dexter s NDP government has realigned funds with the declining enrolment: Another $13.4-million was chopped from the $1-billion education envelope in the provincial budget delivered this week and it was a stark acknowledgment that school enrolment here is moving in only one direction: down. At its peak in 1971, when baby boomers were flooding into schools, enrolment in the province hit 215,000; today it is around 125,000 and, by 2020, is expected to drop to levels not seen since before the First World War in 1910, there were 108,000 students in the system . And the dwindling school population is symptomatic of much larger forces that are reshaping the country, and sharpening contrasts within it particularly between East and West. Rural Canada is being hollowed out, birth rates are declining and, in the Atlantic provinces, immigration is not making up the difference. Most importantly, money is moving West and Atlantic workers are following. (www.immigrantscanada.com). As reported in the news.