This Wednesday, the provincial government finally unveiled a grant program promised during last year’s election, which offers every Ontario student $150 to help cover textbook costs. The grant is slated to increase to $225 in 2009 and $300 in 2010. But if you hadn’t heard about this program, you aren’t alone.
“It would be nice, definitely. I just dropped over $700 on books,” said Kaitlynn Roote, a first-year with a reading list of eight textbooks.
OSAP applicants are automatically considered for the grant, but others need to apply separately for the funding.
“I never saw that at all, to be honest,” said first-year transfer student Jason Batchelor, an OSAP recipient who regularly checks the financial aid portal. “If it’s [on their website] they’re not doing anything to make it obvious.”
The grant program was supposed to roll out on Sept. 1 of this year. The Ministry of Training, Colleges and Universities has not offered an explanation for missing this target date.
“It seems to me at least that [the provincial government] made this promise without knowing exactly how to get it out to people so that they can actually access it,” said Dave Scrivener, the University of Toronto Students’ Union’s VP external. “It seems to be a program that they’ve quietly forgotten.”
Scrivener charged that the government kept important program details ambiguous until the last minute. Until Wednesday’s announcement, it was unknown whether students would need to save their receipts or purchase books only at authorized bookstores. The province has now clarified that neither of these steps are necessary. Shelley Melanson, chairperson of the Canadian Federation of Students’ Ontario chapter, confirmed that CFS-O has been in contact with the Ministry about the grant, “but basically we’ve been getting a lot of our [data] from the information that’s finally gone online today.”
On Monday, two days before the province’s official announcement, Admissions & Awards also had virtually no information to give on the grant. Asked by The Varsity whether students had come in with questions about the program, one OSAP counselor responded, “It’s news to me.” Another could confirm only that the government would unveil the grant within the next few days. When pressed, he admitted that he had been cautioned against speaking about the grant before the official announcement. “We don’t want to steal their thunder,” he said.
Scrivener contended that the program would have been more useful if it began before students had to pay the upfront cost for textbooks. “It would’ve been better if the provincial government could have got its act together and figured this out over the summer so that there was money for when people were actually buying the books,” he said.
Melanson expressed concern that the timing of the announcement, after books had already been bought and classes had begun, made it less likely students would go out of their way to apply for the grant. “The fact that it’s a ‘mail-in rebate’ is ridiculous,” she said. “How many people actually fill in a mail-in rebate and actually get [their money] back?”
“Well it’s a pretty complex thing,” said Karel Swift, the director of Admissions & Awards. Swift sat on a provincial working group that helped design the grant delivery system. “I have to give the government a lot of credit because they did a huge amount of work,” she said. Swift added that a patchwork of mutually incompatible student record systems at Ontario’s colleges and universities posed a major obstacle.
Swift told The Varsity that the university plans to publicize the grant with a link on the front page of the school’s website, and several other U of T web portals.
