No subsidies, no students: Mount Aspiring College Adult and Community Education (Ace) co-ordinator Jenny Merton is one of several Ace administrators across the district concerned about recently announced community education funding cuts and the impact it will have on small towns. They say many people will no longer be able to afford to attend courses and classrooms will sit empty.

The 80 per cent cut in funding for school-based Adult and Community Education (Ace) announced in the recent Budget has providers in Central Otago and the Queenstown Lakes district concerned.

National funding of about $16 million will be reduced to $3.8 million in 2010, with funds allocated to a smaller number of providers in the areas of literacy and numeracy by the Tertiary Education Commission (Tec), which manages the government's annual investment in the tertiary education system.

There are 212 schools nationwide receiving Ace funding - which pays for organising tutors, subsidising course costs and advertising - but only a small number of schools will receive funding from 2010.

Wanaka's Mount Aspiring College Ace co-ordinator Jenny Merton said unless people donated tutor time and the school supported someone to organise the courses, ‘‘low-socio economic people are going to miss out''.

She said Ace made a ‘‘huge difference'' to people's welfare, social interaction and mental health.

‘‘It means they're meeting new people, they're making new links, and the community becomes stronger for it,'' Ms Merton said.

‘‘That's one of the rich things about living in a community like this - being able to make contacts with all sorts of people.

‘‘It's really important that the community finds a way to continue these activities.''

The college's board chairman Grant Ruddenklau was disappointed the Ace funding cut decision had been made without consultation. The board wanted Ace to continue at the college and was open to any suggestions from the community as to how to make that happen.

‘‘All we [the board] can offer is support and facilities,'' Mr Ruddenklau said.

‘‘If there is a need out there we would support, in any way we can, initiatives of people to fill in the gap.''

One of the board's concerns was who would be responsible for paying redundancy packages to Ace administrators, as a lot had contracts with boards that included redundancies.

Dunstan High School principal Dave Smyth said hobby and craft-type courses still had educational and social benefits for people in small rural communities, particularly when a lot of those skills were not being passed on to the next generation because families were too busy.

Some courses had economic savings benefits for people and evening courses helped utilise empty rooms at the school.

Judy Henderson has organised evening courses at Dunstan High School for the past 20 years and said yoga would be the biggest casualty of the funding cuts, with seven classes run a week in Alexandra and Clyde.

Wakatipu High School Ace coordinator Judy Williamson said Queenstown's sporadic population meant only about 40 to 50 people would be affected each term by the funding cuts, but course subsidies were vital for those people because of the high rents and low-paying jobs that typified the resort town.

Language courses and those that raised ‘‘cross-cultural awareness'', would be the greatest loss to a multicultural community like Queenstown.

Mrs Williamson also expressed concern over classrooms sitting empty, when the space should be ‘‘given back to the community''.

She planned to spend the rest of the year looking into alternative funding and sponsorship while her position was still funded.

James Turner, acting director of the Private Training Establishments and Community Education unit of Tec, said in the recent Budget the government announced it was seeking enhanced value for money from tertiary education spending and in order to maintain key Investment Plan commitments for 2008-2010, it had been forced to reprioritise spending.

‘‘Therefore the government is reducing and refocusing its investment in Ace to areas more tightly aligned with its priorities in literacy and numeracy, and in providing pathways to higher-level education,'' Mr Turner said.

There would be more information available to schools later this month about how Ace funding would be invested in schools in 2010. It would be up to individual schools to decide whether to apply for some of that funding and whether they would continue ‘‘some or all of what they do now on a user-pays basis'', he said.

Community Learning Association through Schools (Class) has joined other organisations such as the Post Primary Teachers' Association and Ace Aotearoa to lobby against the funding-cut decision.

Other Ace providers in the district are Lawrence Area School, Roxburgh Area School, Cromwell College and Reap in the Maniototo.

- Additional reporting by Jenny Collier.

 

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