TORONTO, January 21, 2003 (LifeSiteNews.com) – The National Post reports today the W. Garfield Weston Foundation will announce this week its multi-million dollar Children First: School Choice Trust program. The program will cover part of the costs for lower income families to send their children to private schools. The startling new development is certain to give a big boost to the growing school choice movement in Canada. Galen Weston, Canada’s second wealthiest citizen, is president of the Weston charity but is not directly involved in the new education program. Administration of the program has been given over to the Vancouver-based Fraser Institute. The Post reports that Claudia Hepburn, director of education at the Fraser Institute, said Canadian parents have limited choice because provincial governments only partially fund private schooling. She added “parents decide what their children eat and how much exercise they get. They should be able to decide how their child is educated.” The Children First program will begin in September and the foundation has set aside funding for at least three years. Garfield Mitchell, executive director of the Weston charity confirmed to the Post that the trust will issue millions of dollars to families who will have to pay the difference between the trust’s contribution and the actual school tuition. Frequent use of the term ‘family’ by the trust and its emphasis that it is helping families will be seen as a refreshing change by many. There has been growing distaste with many public educators’ tendency to treat students as somehow autonomous and independent from their families, if not even in opposition to their parents’ wishes for their education. Opposition to the program from education bureaucrats is seen as inevitable. The Post says Doug Hart, a researcher with the left-wing Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, already dismissed the Weston plan as being part of “an ideological agenda”.
School choice advocates view Hart’s comment as bizarre, coming from a representative of an institution that has itself been very ideological. It’s multi-billion dollar, taxpayer-funded education experiments have often been criticized for crippling the quality of education in Ontario schools over at least the past few decades. See the National Post https://www.nationalpost.com/national/story.html?id=%7BEDA11249-1D37-4A4F-901B-3B168589D368%7D See the Children’s Scholarship Fund (CSF) which has been named among the 100 best charities in America by Worth Magazine. The Weston program will likely emulate many aspects of the very successful CSF program. https://www.scholarshipfund.org/index.asp
See yesterday’s LifeSite report CANADIAN NATIVES RECEIVE MOST GENEROUS EDUCATION VOUCHERS https://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2003/jan/030120a.html