The cost of competition? School boards in northeastern Ontario spend over $1M a year on marketing

Documents obtained through freedom of information requests show the 13 school boards in northeastern Ontario spend over $1 million a year in public dollars on marketing and advertising.

Some say this is needed to let parents know about the four different school systems they can choose from, while others see it as public money wasted on unnecessary competition.

The marketing money is spent on a variety of promotional campaigns, including school open houses and advertising on transit buses, the radio or online.

It's common in northern Ontario to hear English school boards advertising in French and for French boards to buy ads in English. 

"That says it all," said Geoff Botting, a retired education director, who last worked at the Near North English public board in the North Bay area. 

"There are a lot of people in the education system that want to pretend that school boards don't compete. In my opinion, that's very naive."

Botting said the money spent on marketing during his time on the job was often "cloaked" in the school board's budget and competing with the other boards was rarely discussed openly, but Botting saw it as part of his job.

"My job was not only to educate the kids and make sure the schools were open and heated and all that good stuff, but to make sure there were kids in there, because if there's no kids in them, you start shutting schools down, and that's a horrible experience," he said.

Botting said the advertising from the three other publicly funded school boards in the Nipissing-Parry Sound area "got more aggressive as time went on," and with a dwindling number of school-age children in northern Ontario, "splitting the pot four ways" resulted in the closing of some English public schools.

"A million dollars would buy you a lot of teachers and a lot of textbooks." 

While most school boards provided the records at no cost, the Conseil Scolaire de District Catholique Franco-Nord charged CBC $144, while the Near North District School Board said they required $480 to produce the documents.

The four top-spending boards — Conseil Scolaire Public du Nord-Est de l'Ontario, Conseil Scolaire Catholique de District des Grandes Rivières, Conseil Scolaire Catholique du Nouvel-Ontario and Huron-Superior Catholic District School Board — all either refused to speak with CBC about their marketing spending or didn't respond to requests. 

But Yves Levesque, executive director of the Association Des Conseils Scolaires Catholiques de l'Ontario, representing French Catholic school boards across the province, doesn't see this as a misspending of public dollars.

"That question is kind of unfair," he said.