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Merge them? Nah, abolish them!
Every few years, another scheme for abolishing Ontario’s Catholic school boards surfaces. Here’s the latest - a study on a merger between the province’s public and Catholic school systems that projects annual savings of up to $1.5 billion. This sounds very good, of course, but unfortunately it turns out that the projected savings of amalgamation schemes almost never materialize - because the harmonization of collective agreements and services almost always leads to even higher costs. The Toronto experience is a case in point, according to this interesting Frontier Centre for Public Policy analysis.
If the goal is to save money, there is another option - namely, abolish the school boards completely, eliminating most of their cost in one fell swoop. The services currently performed by the school boards could mostly be devolved to individual schools, leaving the Ministry of Education to fund and monitor. Modern telecommunications and computer technology make this eminently possible. Here’s an article from our archives that shows what happened when New Zealand abolished school boards.