The condition of the schools has continued to deteriorate this year: the proportion of schools in poor condition has risen from 59% to 61% within a year, despite record investments.
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Since taking office, the Avenir Québec Coalition has more than doubled funding for school renovations. In 2019, it set a target of reducing the proportion of ailing schools by 50% by 2022-2023.
Pictures QMI Agency, MARCEL TREMBLAY
However, it is clear that the Legault government is still a long way from its goal. Worse still, it hasn’t even managed to reverse the trend.
Several schools built more than 50 years ago are now “reaching the end of their useful lives” and need to be renovated or even rebuilt, a process that “will take longer than estimated,” we acknowledge in the budget documents.
A few years ago, the Ministère de l’Éducation also introduced a new standardized procedure for inspecting buildings. This has increased the preservation deficit of school buildings, which has been underestimated in some service centers.
The government’s efforts in this regard have also been slowed down by the overheating in the construction industry, said infrastructure minister Jonatan Julien.
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“We continue to catch up on what we started a few years ago, but it will take time,” he said.
Next year, Quebec will allocate an additional $500 million to extend the life of ailing schools. A sum that will increase to another two billion dollars within five years, as announced during the election campaign.
Not enough
However, the school network estimates that Quebec should have put more money into the school’s maintenance budget in addition to the sums being spent on their renovation. Quebec will pay another $200 million over the next five years.
However, according to the Quebec Association of School Executives, these amounts spent on maintenance are “clearly insufficient” because they do not allow for preventive maintenance work that would allow the “natural decay of buildings” to be curbed.
“We’ve been saying it for years: the maintenance of school buildings is underfunded,” says its president Jean-François Parent.
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