The chair of the Vancouver board of education, Patti Bacchus, says there are no guarantees that her district will receive any government savings from a fall teachers strike.

Speaking with reporters at the school board office, Bacchus said the province has informed the Vancouver school district that it will receive 20 percent of the strike savings to date.

"That was really the last few weeks of school," Bacchus noted. "That will be a couple of million dollars, if we add it up."

However with the provincial government planning to give money to parents if the strike continues on Tuesday (September 2), Bacchus worries that it might mean nothing for school districts.

The $40-a-day child-care payments are restricted to parents for each child under 13 years old in the public-school system.

"With the $40-a-day plan, we're not sure what that means [and] if all the savings will go to the parents in those payments or not," said Bacchus, a Vision Vancouver trustee.

She hopes that the teachers strike will be resolved before Tuesday, making this a moot point.

Meanwhile another Vision Vancouver trustee, Mike Lombardi, told the Straight at the board office that the B.C. government is experiencing a backlash from its $40-a-day child-care proposal.

"I think they were quite shocked to see the blowback they got from that, even from their own supporters," Lombardi said.

He called the payments a "version" of a voucher system.

Lombardi said that's because once a structure is created to give money to parents for education, it can be adjusted so they can choose their kid's school. That opens the door for more private education paid with public funds.

"We know the examples of that in America have been disastrous," Lombardi said. 

He characterized what's happening in public education as "classic shock doctrine".

It's a reference to the 2007 Naomi Klein book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, which explored how acolytes of free-market economist Milton Friedman capitalize on chaos to advance a privatization agenda.

"You underfund, destabilize, and you basically create problems," Lombardi said. "Then you encourage people to go to the private system and eventually, you give more money to the private system. That's a big concern of ours."

He added that his fellow trustees are big supporters of public education.

"We think it's one of the foundations of our democracy. Anything we do to pull back on that is very, very bad for our society."