School District 5 Trustees passed a balanced budget at the recent Board meeting in Cranbrook. The Board was facing a $993,000 funding shortfall for next year’s budget. SD5 Board Chair, Frank Lento, expressed how difficult it was for Trustees to balance the books, and that it took several months to achieve.

“Each of us had specific areas of the budget that we would have preferred not to touch. However, we were united in the commitment to keep these cuts as far away from classrooms as possible,” said Lento. “Once again we found ourselves in an untenable position. On the one hand, the provincial government hasn’t provided enough funding for us to run our operations at the same level as last year. On the other hand, the provincial government requires us to balance our books. Unfortunately, that means cuts.”

Lento emphasized that the Board wanted to keep cuts as far away from students as possible. Trustees examined spending in each of the seven main areas of SD5’s $51 million budget –in particular facilities, District administration, and operations and maintenance.
“The first place we looked was the District administration, including Trustees”, said Lento. “Although the Governance area of the SD5 budget represents less than 4% of our overall budget, it contributed 30% of where we made our cuts. However, while doing things like reducing meetings and cutting travel does reduce our expenses, it also makes it harder for Trustees to represent the interests and concerns of parents in a large rural District.”

Newly elected Cranbrook Trustee, Jan Gordon-Hooker, pointed out that 38% of the budget shortfall was met by using reserve funds, saying that the ongoing budget pressures will all but deplete SD5’s reserves by next year.

“I’ve had a chance to look things over, and I can see that the District practices prudent financial management, which has traditionally included setting aside some funds to deal with emergencies, such as the structural beam problem in the Mount Baker music room a couple of years ago,” explained Gordon-Hooker. “Not having a reserve not only weakens our ability to deal with unforeseen issues but also takes away one of the options we’ve used in the past to moderate the need for cuts.”

Reductions to staffing costs represent 15% of the budget cuts. According to Cranbrook Trustee Chris Ellis, these reductions were mainly the result of retirements and cost savings achieved by limiting custodial work on days that schools aren’t open and making a small decrease in distance learning clerical hours.

“Our support staff help us maintain safe facilities and support our teachers,” said Ellis. “So we tried to keep any cuts on that side of things to a minimum.”

The remaining 11% of budget cuts were a reduction to the local capital allocation for replacement of equipment such as maintenance vehicles, cleaning equipment and technology.

Although the budget reflects the Board’s commitment to ensure that no educational programs were cut, Trustees remain concerned that the current funding model used by government is not sufficient and the Board intends to submit a “needs budget” alongside the legislated balanced budget.

“We believe that what we’re dealing with is an inherent structural shortfall within the funding system itself,” says Lento, who defines the shortfall as a financial situation where available revenue is persistently and chronically less than what many Districts believe is needed to pay for the delivery of publicly-mandated programs and services.

Lento also believes that the Board has gone as far as it can in trying to make ends meet without adversely affecting the future educational opportunities for students in the District.

“With the current round of cuts we’ve made, and now being forced to spend our reserves, we don’t have any room to move,” said Lento. “We need government to recognize and accept that the current funding formula must be re-examined and work with us constructively to protect public education.”