File photo (image credit - CFJC Today)

By Michael Reeve

'There are going to be cuts'

Kamloops DPAC calling for provincial funding revamp as districts face budgetary challenges

Mar 19, 2025 | 4:33 PM

KAMLOOPS — School boards across the province are currently working their way through the annual budget process.

Unlike city council’s, the school board has no mechanism to increase funding through measures like taxation, with its dollars coming directly from the provincial government and much of the funding in presubscribed pots. That’s led to the districts having little ability to make meaningful changes in classrooms and address challenges.

In Kamloops, the local district parent advisory council (DPAC) is raising concern that students will be the ones left behind unless funding levels increase.

“We absolutely know there are going to be cuts in our district. There is no way — there is not enough money,” said DPAC Chair Bonnie McBride.

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The dollar figure school districts receive on a per-student basis has not increased despite external pressures being at an all-time high for the education sector.

“[Trustees] are running out of things to cut and it just comes to a point where you say, ‘We cannot bear the burden of this within communities anymore. We need to revamp structurally how we are funding education,'” McBride told CFJC News.

Kamloops’ public school district is growing at the rate of a mid-sized elementary school per year. Despite that, there is no new capital funding in the budget for SD73. That’s left the district to pick up the tab on moving students and infrastructure around.

“We talk about portable moves and things like that that are not covered through ministry funding. When we are looking at moving portables, in the last five years we have spent $5.7 million in terms of looking at portable moves and really trying to reconfigure adding additional space within our district that needs it,” said SD73 Board of Trustees Chair Heather Grieve. “It ends up being a lot of money that could be used in classrooms, but it’s used on portable moves.”

SD73 also faces challenges around staffing and busing students across the vast district.

“When you are looking at that and relief costs not being funded, it really does become very difficult to sustain,” added Grieve. “Eighty-nine per cent of our budget is (spent) on staffing and it leaves us very little to maneuver with. When you take another 3.3 per cent of our budget which goes toward transportation, the dollars gets smaller and smaller in terms of what we can actually allocate to our classrooms.”

So far this year, DPAC has been asked to fundraise more than ever, as the challenges trickle down from the district level.

“Parent advisory councils haven’t had an increase in what they receive from the gaming grant process in more than 20 years. We are dealing with the same amount of money that we were 20 years ago and expected to produce more and more opportunities in schools with that same amount of money,” said McBride.

Advocacy is the name of the game for both the board and McBride, who noted she has not yet received a response from government or opposition about the issue.

“We go to the premier, ‘It’s time.’ We need to stand up firmly. We need to stop softening our language. We need to say, ‘This is a crisis in education and we are getting to a point where we are actually excluding children from public education in B.C.’ It has become unattainable for districts to meet the needs of our most important resource which is our children.”

School boards are required to present balanced budgets each year, even if that means cutting services students rely on.

“The only way we can make an effective difference — as parents know — is to go to the province and demand better,” said McBride.