North Vancouver school trustees recently passed an amended budget for the current school year that provides more money for educational assistants and for hiring substitute teachers to address teachers’ contract class size and composition limits.
Many of the changes in the approximately $151-million operating budget came about due to changes in amounts given to the school district by the provincial ministry of education after the budget was passed at the end of June 2017.
Increased enrolment in the North Vancouver school district resulted in an additional $1.7 million in grant funding from the province, while a decrease in the number of students designated special needs meant a reduction of about $400,000 in those grants.
One of the biggest changes was the addition of about $2.3 million to hire approximately 50 educational assistants, which was only confirmed after the budget had been passed, said Georgia Allison, secretary-treasurer for the school district.
The district also added an additional $1 million to hire substitute teachers when union contract language requires that teachers whose classrooms are over size and composition limits be given extra help or preparation time. That figure wasn’t known until October.
Several amounts that weren’t fully spent last year have been put back into this year’s budget, including approximately $526,000 of $750,000 handed out by the province near the end of the last school year to reduce expenditures for parents. School district administration costs are also down.
The result of the changes is that the school district will use less of its surplus to balance the budget this year than originally anticipated, said Allison.
While MSP payments for employees are down this year by about $412,000 as a result of the 50 per cent cut in MSP premiums, Allison warned that will change when the new provincial payroll health tax takes effect, which will see expenses in that area climb by about $750,000 annually. School district staff said they will be keeping an eye on those figures when the ministry of education announces next year’s grant funding for school districts.
