BC school board gets a hard lesson in economics

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COWHICHAN VALLEY (NEWS1130) – A Vancouver Island school board is getting a hard lesson in economics.

BC’s Education Minister George Abbott has fired all trustees on the Cowichan Valley School Board for not submitting a balanced budget for the upcoming school year.

The fired board chair says she’s surprised the education minister cancelled democracy on Canada Day.
    
“I would have been perfectly happy to have placed myself in the hands of my community at election time for their judgment over whether this was the right thing to do,” says Eden Haythornthwaite.

Abbott points out that the district has lost 2,400 students over the past decade while the per student funding has climbed by 40 per cent.

But Haythornthwaite calls that sleight of hand.

“That is not in fact true,” she explains. “What they have done is they’ve slightly increased some of the per public funding, but they’ve also downloaded a number of costs onto school districts that they do not fund and that includes labour settlement costs and inflation.”

Abbott says the decision to table a budget in the red was not a unanimous one on the district level.

“I think it’s an unfortunate situation,” he says. “There were four of the nine that consistently, along with the superintendent and the secretary treasurer, argued that a balanced budget was both possible, appropriate and constructive.

He adds that he can’t understand why this board couldn’t do what every single other board was able to do.

Hawthornthwaite says that would have been the simple thing to do.

“You can balance a budget no problem, if you’re prepared to make cuts to programs and services without any conscious, and that’s what the other districts are doing,” she stresses. “They’re balancing the budgets by creating a deficit in their programs.”

Last week, the district’s board tabled a budget $3.7 million in the red. Local boards are not allowed to run a deficit according to the province’s School Act

Haythornthwaite says they will likely pursue a challenge of their dismissal.

Abbott has named Mike McKay, the Superintendent of the Surrey School District, as the official trustee for District 79. He praised McKay as a respected 30-year veteran of the education system.

McKay once worked as a school principal in the district and is now tasked with working alongside district staff to produce a balanced budget.

The firing of an entire school board for budget reasons has only happened three other times in the last 40 years – one of them being the Cowichan Valley board back in 1985.

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