Supreme Court ruling brings extra moving parts to School District 73 budget

The numbers have been crunched for School District 73, with the preliminary figures for the 2017/18 school year shaping up to be relatively healthy.

“Good news this year, we are balanced without any reserves,” said Meghan Wade, Board Chair of School District 73. “Our budget is roughly $141-million.

“Our revenue this year, when you consider the enrollment is basically flat, is $1.7-million more than last year,” said Kelvin Stretch, Secretary-Treasurer for School District 73.

According to Stretch, around $1.2-million of that money will go towards an approximate 1% wage increase for the entire school staff as part of returning to the 2002 collective agreement.

However, it isn’t just teachers getting some extra cash.

As of this September, school bus routes will be funded by the province, with the district adding a special-needs route as well.

“We were actually subsidizing the cost of transportation out of general revenues, ” added Stretch. “We presented a case to utilize some of that funding to actually reduce the deficit or the expense from the other budgets so it was quite a good news story for us,” added Stretch.

The upcoming budget may include ‘good news’ but it’s also been a more complicated budget to put together.

“This budget is different simply because we have not had so much money to deal with under ‘special purpose’ so that’s really looking at the class size and composition peace,” said Wade.

As part of the recent Supreme Court ruling for schools to return to 2002 class size and composition, the province is investing up to $7.5 million to go primarily towards hiring 65 new teaching positions throughout School District 73.

“From September to now, we’ve hired over 45 teachers so our net we have to hire to get us to September is just over 20,” said Wade.

With hiring costs totaling around $6.5-million, the Kamloops Thompson Teachers Association says the remaining $one-million should go towards ensuring there’s adequate support for special need students.

“We do realize that whatever agreement is there is fully funded by the province so we aren’t sure why the district isn’t fully requesting more,” said David Komljenovic, President of the KTTA. Students with special needs need the full support in the classroom. What we used to have is to ensure there weren’t more than three students with special needs in a classroom so they have the full one-on-one attention of teachers.”

The district will present an official report detailing the total funds required to return to the 2002 language at the end of the month.

The final vote on the School District 73 budget is expected May 8th.

by Vanessa Ybarra

Supreme Court ruling brings extra moving parts to School District 73 budget

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