Just give us the facts

Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "A conundrum": It’s not the SAC can’t pay the Town of Aurora for the development charges, it’s that if they can continue to defer it then it doesn’t come out of their bank accounts. In essence, they don’t have to pay at least for now and their money stays in the bank or gets put into other projects around their campus. They may be deemed non-profit and a charitable organization but these are just classifications to the government and how they run the school. In the end a private school, any private school is still a business. They have to collect revenue (tuition and gifts) and pay expenses (teachers’ salaries, administration and operational costs, marketing for new students, capital costs for buildings, etc). Being deemed non-profit by its very definition just means that any surplus revenue (after expenses) goes back into developing the school as opposed to going into some shareholders pockets. Being a charitable organization as defined by the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) means that they can issue official donation receipts for gifts to the school. So they can campaign their alumni for funds and give them tax receipts. You can look at CRA website and find that lots of private schools have charitable status including for example local to Aurora, Pickering College in Newmarket and Country Day School in King. They are set up to educate the students whose parents can afford to send them and want them in that school. Like any organization they will use the rules to their advantage. I am neutral to SAC, its students, their parents and alumni. Yes, it is good that they do work in the community. But if their argument is that they do so much good for the community and then ask for the tax break then essentially Aurora is paying (because it’s money out of the Town’s pocket, read as taxpayers) for the work that they do. The community work that they do would be deemed as part of the educational experience and the opportunity that they provide their students. Thus Aurora is subsidizing the students’ experience and essentially their tuition. If the tuition has to go up, so be it. Or find a way to reduce your costs. Don’t build such elaborate buildings, cut back on your programs. They are a business, be it a business of educating students for a fee. It is not as if their students don’t have other options – there are other private schools (also competing for students and their fees) and there is the public system. The school needs to pay their own way and this applies to any other school or organization in Aurora trying to do the same thing. What’s fair for one has to be fair for all. For everything that they do – they do it for their reasons not the Town’s. If they didn’t want to rent the soccer fields they wouldn’t or they would put the cost up so high the Town would say no. And if they did the Town would have to find another solution. Yes, hosting the Special Olympics is a good thing, but they still get something out of it even if they are doing it for free. It’s an opportunity for their students to perhaps volunteer, for their school to be associated with the Special Olympics - certainly that’s good public relations. In the end everything they do is towards getting and retaining their paying students. That is their purpose. Nobody (at least almost nobody) does anything for free, there is always some return for them be it experiential, emotional,