Trustees and boards of education across British Columbia have long advocated for increased funding to education.
While the provincial education and health budgets have been protected to some degree in relation to other ministries, there is no question that rising costs (such as inflation, benefits and energy) coupled with declining enrolment have seriously impacted the dollars available to school districts to support student learning.
In recent years, the call has gone out for changes to the current provincial funding formula.
The Ministry of Education answered that call late last year when it invited boards of education to provide input through the BC School Trustees Association regarding the funding formula and suggestions for improvements.
The mandate of the committee was to summarize the submissions from boards and identify common themes.
Three key areas of common ground were found: equity, predictability and stability, and flexibility and transparency.
The full report from BCSTA’s “A Commentary on the Operating Grant Allocation Process” can be found at www.boundaryschools.com.
Early last December, the ministry responded to the report by accepting many of the recommendations and introduced changes to the funding formula effective 2012/13.
The changes, which will all be funded through the current operating grant, include:
-Additional funding to help with growing vulnerable student populations.
-A new allocation based on student location, which will be phased in to replace the current transportation supplement.
One of the worries our school district has had since we went to the four-day week was that if, and when, the transportation funding changed, we would lose because we were receiving dollars based on operating buses five days a week and that is where we were seeing savings.
This change is based on student density, not on days of operation or expenditure.
The $1.5 million amount in funding will be provided to support rural and remote elementary schools with fewer than 75 students that are 40 km from the next school.
We have two schools that benefit from this change, Beaverdell and Big White.
To provide additional support to small districts, $3.7 million in funding will be added to assist districts with 2,500 or fewer students. Our current enrolment is 1,376 students, so we benefit from this change also.
Another key element of the report from BCSTA was the recognition that the funding protection model currently in place was not sustainable or predictable.
School District No. 51 has been in funding protection since 2006/07 when it was first introduced. Beginning in the 2012/2013 school year, districts will be protected to at least 98.5 per cent of the previous year’s funding level.
The 1.5 per cent difference will be used to fund the changes to the funding formula. Forty-three out of the 60 districts in the province are currently in funding protection.
Additionally, the government has committed to a predictable three-year funding envelope so that districts can plan and budget over a three-year period to support learning initiatives and make plans to address the needs of students.
So what does all this mean to us? If our enrolment continues to decline, we will lose each year for the next three years 1.5 per cent of our previous years funding and we expect that funding protection will be with us at least until 2014/15.
The bottom line is each year, for the next three, we will receive less money. In the immediate future the district will need to identify ways of operating even more efficiently.
We will continue to advocate strongly for new dollars to be invested into the education system.
Declining enrolment is a big part of what is draining us, so it is important that our local communities be economically strong enough to enable young families and their children to live here and grow with us.
– Teresa Rezansoff is chair for the Board of Education for SD51