By Jeanette Hanlon, Secretary-Treasurer SD51 (Boundary)
Each year School District 51 spends approximately $18 million delivering a quality education system to over 1,200 students throughout our Boundary communities.
This spending has a direct impact on your children and their educational experience from preschool, through our Strong Start Centres, to Grade 12 graduations.
Our student achievement results show performances significantly above provincial results on almost every measure. The district wants to sustain and improve these results for our students and make our schools places where students learn and take what they have learned and apply it to real-life experiences.
Our finances need to align with the district’s goals and objectives in order to be effective and provide our students with a successful experience.
Our framework for supporting student success, our budget, is developed through a consultative process. This year we decided to do survey questions with our school community instead of community meetings. Please visit our website at www.sd51.bc.ca if you wish to provide input into the process. We will shortly take into consideration the input from the surveys and the budget considerations from our principals and staff. We value the input received from all of our stakeholders. This enables us to ensure that our goals and objectives represent the needs of all our students and that we are financially supporting those objectives.
The district’s funding is based on student enrolment. The funding formula that allocates funds to the 60 districts around the province has been in place since 2002-03 and is being reviewed by the province. The formula has served us well during our huge enrolment declines in previous years. As demographics around the province are changing, it is only prudent to review the way funds are allocated to districts. We hope that the formula will be predictable, equitable, transparent, accountable, and flexible and takes into consideration unique needs of districts.
The most important item for us is that the revised funding does not take away savings from our four day week. Annualy, our four-day week puts about $200,000 back into our classrooms. The new funding formula will come into effect for the 2019-20 school year.
Next school year we will receive $15,906,530 along with $1,028,243 in special-purpose funds from the Ministry of Education. Our revenues from other sources total around $350,000. We also receive approximately $547,000 to maintain our buildings.
Our operating expenses next year consist of approximately $16,460,000. Based on our funding and expenses we are expecting an operating shortfall of approximately $200,000. This shortfall can be funded through our surplus along with any budget considerations the board wishes to add. Over the long term, funding our shortfall through surplus is not sustainable. The surplus should be used for one-time expenditures.
This will be my last article for School District 51, as after 33 years with this district I am retiring in July. Working for this district has been an amazing experience; I was fortunate to work with many great people and boards of education over the years, all of whom are dedicated to the students of our district.