(Image Credit: CFJC News)

By Sydney Chisholm

budget reduction

SD73 plan includes increased field trip rate, reduced supply spending to make up for $2.2M shortfall

Sep 24, 2024 | 6:30 PM

KAMLOOPS – The Kamloops Thompson Board of Education says reining in senior staff spending is just one of the ways the school district will be trying to make up the more than $2 million shortfall caused by an accounting error.

At Monday (Sept. 23) evening’s board meeting, Trina Cassidy, the school district’s secretary-treasurer, laid out the budget reduction plan.

“I am fully aware of the impact of this error and I’m working with Superintendent (Rhonda) Nixon and the senior staff to rectify it, and we will. We will do it,” Cassidy told the board Monday.

The budget reduction plan was approved by the board behind closed doors earlier this month.

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The plan sets out to make up the multimillion-dollar deficit in one to two years with limited impact on students.

“We are moving as quick as we can,” said Cassidy, adding that a concrete plan won’t be possible until this year’s enrollment numbers are finalized.

“You can imagine a district with 16,000 students and 49 schools, an overall budget of about $245 million does take some time, but we recognize that we need to know where we are financially with all of these metrics in place.”

District-level staff have been asked to rein back their spending on supplies and services by 15 to 25 per cent.

“Everything we cut could potentially affect students, and we’re aware of that,” said Nixon. “I don’t want to minimize that, but we stayed away from school-based reductions and we focused on district-based reductions.”

The district is also increasing the field trip charge from $0.35 to $0.54 per kilometre in order to recover the overages in transportation.

“We saw that the provincial average is a $1.29 per kilometre, and we thought, ‘All right, we’re at $0.35, so if we increase it to $0.54, that’s still 60 per cent less than the provincial average,” Nixon told CFJC News. “So that seemed to be, in our view, a reasonable change.”

Additionally, the district says it will be adjusting individual school carryover budgets each year.

According to Nixon, no punitive action will be taken for the costly error.

“I think the most punitive action that I can say is that everybody here is having to really recognize the seriousness of the error and make a budget reduction plan that is demanding and recognizing that we need to never make that error again,” she said.

The school district says improved budget reporting and increased monitoring of budgets by senior staff will prevent this type of error from happening again.

“With these increased measures, we can assure that we are accurately forecasting our year-end,” said Cassidy. “Parents in the community can rest assured that this has definitely been a learning exercise and that it won’t be happening again.”