Despite closing three schools, the Okanagan Skaha School District still needs to find almost $300,000 in savings for its 2016-17 budget.
Earlier this year, the school board voted to close elementary schools in Westbench and Trout Creek, along with McNicoll Park Middle School. The $1.187 million realized from those closures, along with savings from teacher pension changes, accounts for a large portion of the over $2-million shortfall the district was facing from unfunded cost pressures.
But the school district still has to find another $291,942 to create the balanced budget required by the Ministry of Education.
Secretary-Treasurer Bonnie Roller Routley listed a number of cost pressures not covered in the province’s calculation of the annual operating grant. Increases in power costs, inflation, and benefit packages all show up on this list, as does a $50,000 increase in the legal budget allocation.
Roller Routley explained that while the school closures have saved the district money, the threat of legal action related to the closures forced them to increase that budget line.
Speaking to the school closures, Trustee Ginny Manning, who also chairs the business committee, said it has been a hard year.
“Heartbreaking decisions have had to be made,” she said.
One of the bigger hits to the school budget is $258,000 the district is forced to invest in upgrading the school internet structure across the province. Roller Routley noted Okanagan Skaha has long been well ahead of the rest of the province when it comes to information technology, with a high capacity network between local schools. That capacity has been leveraged, she said and generates about $200,000 yearly income for the school district.
That comes to a bottleneck when it comes to connecting with PLnet, the Ministry of Education’s network, which operates at about one per cent of the SD67 network. Their solution is a contract with Telus, paid for by the school districts, to upgrade capacity.
“Our district has been paying for this for three years and not received anything as yet,” said Roller Routley, adding that SD67 is scheduled for the final portion of the project. “We are being penalized because we are ahead of the curve on this one.”
Roller Routley said the district could go directly to Shaw, Telus or another provider and arrange for the needed services at a lower cost, but that wouldn’t eliminate the line item.
“We could go out to Shaw and pay for it, but they (the Ministry of Education) would still take the money. I am in discussions trying to find a way to get the money to come to us so we can do what we would need to do.”
Electricity costs are another sore point. Roller Routley said they are expecting a $31,000 increase in power costs.
“Because of the monopoly of the City of Penticton on utilities we can’t go out and get other suppliers,” said Roller Routley. “We pay $300,000 more to the City of Penticton than we would to B.C. Hydro. It is only 3.2 per cent of our budget, but it is 3.2 per cent we can’t control.”
Roller Routley likened the school district to a senior citizen on a fixed income with little control over their expenditures.
“Ninety-three per cent of our funding comes from the ministry (of education),” she said. “We have no control over how much it is, or how they distribute it.”
Four options were offered for covering the shortfall. Roller Routley suggested $250,000 could be drawn from reserves with the remaining $41,942 either from a possible surplus in this year’s budget or by cutting next year’s budget by that amount.
A third option would see the entire amount coming from this year’s surplus. Roller Routley said making that option possible would require a careful overview of expenditures and belt-tightening.
The final option is to cut the entire $291,942 from the budget.
“Forty thousand dollars is not terrible to find because you can take small bits from a lot of places,” said Roller Routley. “Three hundred thousand dollars will have a more serious impact. That is potentially three teachers.”
Derek Hurst, chair of the District Parents Advisory Council, said that it seemed the school district staff had done their best to keep the budget as tight as possible.
“It is a much smaller number than I was anticipating,” said Hurst, noting that there is still a motion to rescind two of the closures that will be voted on by the board on May 9. That could change the budget substantially again, he said, if that came to pass.
The school district is in the process of collecting feedback on their draft budget, especially on the four suggestions for covering the shortfall. Suggestions and comments can be emailed to budgetfeedback@summer.ca up to May 7 at noon.
The first two readings of the budget bylaw take place at the May 9 board meeting and the final bylaw reading will be done on June 13.
The final budget document is required at the Ministry of Education on or before June 30.