Budget Cuts: Education System and School Infrastructure

budget cuts: Montreal's public schools are bursting at the seams and, similarly to the highways and bridges across the province, the bill for decades of neglect has come due, according to The Chronicle Herald. As the first week of the Quebec election campaign comes to end and as thousands of children return to school, teachers and their unions want the four main political parties to make a pledge reinvest massively in education instead of dogmatically striving to balance the budget. A mini baby boom in the 2000s, increased immigration and a recent influx of refugees are putting enormous pressure on the education system in the city amid recent budget cuts and rapidly deteriorating school infrastructure. At Saint-Gabriel-Lalemant elementary school in Montreal's north end, the red, orange and grey-painted extension protrudes from the original building's backside, swallowing part of the paved schoolyard. We got to a point where we transformed everything that was transformable, she said in an interview, sitting inside one of the new classrooms in the extension. Marie-Jose Mastromonaco, a school board commissioner and its vice-president, said many of her board's 150 schools had been expanding internally over the years, turning less frequently used spaces such as libraries into classrooms. (www.immigrantscanada.com). As reported in the news.