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Catholic schools to wean off gambling money

Schools in the St. Albert Catholic division can no longer accept the proceeds of gambling.

Schools in the St. Albert Catholic division can no longer accept the proceeds of gambling.

The board accepted a new administrative procedure at its meeting Monday night that division schools can’t “share in the proceeds from casino, Video Lottery Terminal (VLT), lottery, bingo and other large scale, commercial gaming.”

This means that schools and their fundraising arms can’t hold their own gambling-related events or take money from the Alberta Lottery Fund, which provides numerous grants for educational and community initiatives.

“Gambling is a source of dysfunction in our province,” said board chair Dave Caron. “We’ve had first hand testimony from our own families about that so we didn’t want to condone those sources of funds at all.”

The decision is both a moral stance and a message for others, he said.

“I won’t be naïve to believe that our action will result in a seismic shift but it’s one more voice out there,” Caron said.

The division has already directed schools to stop seeking gambling revenue and most have already held their last casino nights, said superintendent Jerry Zimmer. Those already scheduled for fundraising events can complete those but he’s asked that schools don’t sign up for more. He hopes the transition will be complete by September 2010.

The move is a response to a 2007 letter by Bishop Luc Bouchard of the St. Paul diocese that directed Catholic organizations to stop accepting gambling revenue within three years. Prior to adopting its new procedure, St. Albert was the only Catholic school board besides Edmonton to partake in gambling money.

The new procedure will hamstring schools in their efforts to raise money for things like playgrounds, which cost in the hundreds of thousands, said parent Chris Cooke. The board needs to bring forward a plan to replace the lost revenues, he said.

“I think it’s naïve in this day and age to believe that a school board or a municipality can replace amounts of money in the $250,000 to $500,000 range,” Cooke said.

“It’s all very good to debate it at a board meeting but the bottom line is the administration doesn’t replace playgrounds. The schools replace playgrounds with the help of their friends’ societies.”

Cooke has two children at Father Jan elementary school, which is planning to install a new playground this summer after three years of fundraising that included casinos.

“I firmly believe in trying to give my kids the best that they could possibly get,” Cooke said. “My main concern is that they will not have the facilities or the programs that their cousins or friends have simply because of the school division that I chose for them.

“The Catholic school division’s enrolment is already declining. I wonder if it will decline more because of this,” he said.

A local casino can net a group $18,000 in two nights, said Roger Krahn, another Father Jan parent. That money then becomes $36,000 thanks to a matching grant from the Alberta Lottery Fund. Without that gambling money, raising the funds for a new playground would take six to eight years, he said.

“The longer you drag it out, the less interested people become in it and it becomes increasingly harder,” Krahn said. “By us not using the funds, somebody else will. I don’t believe that we’re hurting anybody.”

Other Catholic school boards have lived without gambling money for years without being disadvantaged, said superintendent Zimmer. And sometimes doing the right thing means being “counter-cultural,” he said.

“We can’t witness to the rest of the world if we ourselves are not modelling that type of behaviour,” he said.

Parent Catherine Sarafinchan agreed.

“It is absolutely the right way to go,” she said. “Many families are ruined because of gambling.”

She thinks schools can get creative to replace the foregone revenue.

“At one time we never did get lottery money,” she said. “Where did we get our swing sets? We built them.”

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