It was a no surprises budget that was brought forward to Fraser-Cascade school board on Tuesday (Jan. 15).
“It isn’t anything unexpected in the budget,” Natalie Lowe, secretary-treasurer for the school district, said during the board meeting. “It’s very much the same as the budget that I presented as the preliminary. We weren’t that far off.”
The amended budget shows changes to the 2018-2019 school year budget that were made after the province provided funding to the district in mid-December of last year.
The biggest changes to the budget came from staff salaries and provincial operating grants.
Salaries for education assistants were significantly more than the district expected; the amended 2019 budget shows a 24 per cent increase from what was projected, bringing the total cost to just over $2 million.
This is also more than what the district paid in 2018.
Lowe said this could be attributed to the high number of students in the district with special needs designations.
“Our population in … the district is fairly significantly high needs,” she said. “In a lot of cases, our population that comes subsequent to Sept. 30 requires additional assistance, and that means we end up putting more money into our budget for special ed assistants.”
The numbers of special needs students has not decreased in the last 12 years, Lowe said, and often it seems the district is playing catch up with getting them on track for education.
“Students come in not as prepared as we expect them to be,” she said. “We have all these ed assistants to support them, try to bring them up to their grade level quickly.”
There were some other slight adjustments to the budget when it came to salaries: teacher salaries were nearly $227,400 less than projected, making teacher salaries pretty much on par with what the district paid in 2017-2018.
Principals and vice-principals were paid marginally more than what was expected, as were substitutes, and employee benefits went up around $150,000.
However, these changes pretty much evened out, leaving education assistant salaries as the main driver behind the $400,000 increase in operating expenses.
On the revenue side, the district actually got around $600,000 more than expected.
This can be largely attributed to the district getting more students than expected, which bumped the Ministry of Education’s operating grant from just over $19.5 million to just under $20.2 million.
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“Our numbers did go up by around 70 students, some from our new school up Harrison Lake way,” Lowe said.
The new QalaTku’7em Community School, located at the most northern end of Harrison Lake, started this year as a collaboration between the Sea to Sky School District and the Fraser-Cascade School District to give 13 students the ability to attend school close to their home community of QalaTku’7em. Previously, the students were bused for two hours each day on logging roads to attend schools to the north of their community.
Overall, the 2018-2019 school year saw a two per cent increase in students, with the number of students accessing special needs services go up by nine per cent.
This increase means the school district gets more money from the provincial government than expected. While the district receives a base grant of $7,423 for each student, that grant can go up to $38,800 for students with a special needs designation.
The district had a total of 138 students with special needs designations, according to Ministry of Education numbers, which meant the district received more than $2.2 million.
Additional grants are provided for Indigenous students, ESL students and adult education students.
The school district is on track with its spending for the year, having spent just over 60 per cent of its budget by January.
The school board gave first and second reading to the amended budget. It will come back for third reading in February before being submitted to the province.
