PCs Slam Wab Kinew’s NDP for Cutting Green Valley School Expansion Plan
GRUNTHAL — As Manitoba students head back to class this week, school divisions continue to sound the alarm about the NDP’s staggering cuts to education and new schools across the province.
“Wab Kinew already cancelled nine new schools planned in Winnipeg, Brandon, Neepawa, Ste. Anne, and West St. Paul in one of his first acts as premier. Now, he’s cancelled plans to build a new gym and science lab at Green Valley School in Grunthal,” said Spruce Woods MLA Grant Jackson, PC Critic for Education. “Manitoba communities are growing and in desperate need of new schools and daycares, but the NDP don’t seem to listen or care. It’s time for Wab Kinew to stop the cuts and start doing better for students.”
Progressive Conservatives committed funding for a new gymnasium and classrooms at Green Valley School in 2021, which were supposed to be completed for this school year. Last week, however, Hanover School Division trustees were told by the NDP government that the project has been put on hold indefinitely. The school, which serves families from St. Malo to Steinbach, had already removed three portable classrooms as well as a community-funded playground to make way for the expansion.
“It’s incredibly disappointing and frustrating to see the NDP cancel the province’s commitment to this project right at the start of the new school year,” said La Vérendrye MLA Konrad Narth. “It takes a lot of time, planning, and work by a lot of passionate people to move school projects forward. The NDP’s delay now means Green Valley will be short of the necessary classrooms to serve families for several more years, jamming more students into less space with no plan in place, and making it harder to recruit new teachers.”
As the NDP cut funding to build and upgrade schools, they have also shortchanged operating funding for school divisions in 2024, Jackson added, with two out of three divisions receiving increases less than inflation, and ten divisions receiving increases of 1% or less. That has forced divisions to hike school taxes up to 17% this year, he said.
“It’s up to the NDP to choose whether they want to build schools and properly fund education or not, but what has become clear is that education is certainly not one of their top five priorities,” Jackson said. “After reannouncing only two previously planned schools in Budget 2024, Wab Kinew and his education minister Nello Altomare, quite frankly, should be embarrassed.”
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