EDUCATION COSTS

Manawatu Standard, Volume LV, Issue 227, 23 August 1935, Page 11

EDUCATION COSTS

DIFFICULTIES OF BOARDS. Touching on the financing of education boards in the Dominion, in the course of an address to the quarterly meeting of fire Manawatu-Oroua School Committees’ Association, the chairman of the Wanganui Education Board (Mr E. F. Hemingway) said that they were not allowed to incur an overdraft, nor were they allowed to expend any moneys other than for the purpose for which the Education Department had given them. Consequently, with limited funds the hoard had to refuse requests for assistance again and again which it would very much like to grant. School committees should hear in mind that any sums they asked for came out of the taxnayers’ pockets, actually their own pockets. Partly owing to the requests made for additional buildings the cost of education was increasing enormously, said the speaker. The expenditure on school buildings, additions, sites,

and teachers’ residences in 1930-1 was £501,344. Hon. R. Masters, when Minister of Education, had reduced that to £57.128 in 1932-33 and to £56.656 in 1953-4. Those figures would not be believed unless one saw them in the Minister’s own report. Commenting on the figures later in the course of the meeting, the chairman (Mr W. G. Black) remarked that the disparity between £501.344 and £56,656 suggested two things: either that money had been needlessly spent in the first instance or that it was now reduced to such a figure that essential services were affected.