Here is a little fictional story — an allegory of sorts. Imagine working hard all year to save $700. By watching the bottom right-hand cell on your spreadsheet each month and depositing a sum in your savings account, this goal was achieved and you were feeling pretty good about that.
Imagine your surprise when, based on the bank management’s assumption that you did not really need all that money, an unanticipated fee was imposed on your account and $700 was simply extracted without explanation — clawed back by the bank for undefined purposes.
Another $300 disappeared from your account, and this, the bank explained, was a standard fee for maintaining its own technology, which had become dysfunctional.
Of course banks, which rely on consistency, trust and integrity as mainstays of their success, don’t do things like that.
But as a metaphor for what happens to school-district funding, it is disturbingly close to reality.
Consider the plight of a school district located probably not as far as it would like to be from the seat of provincial government.
The district’s total operating revenue is about $70 million. The school board, at the beginning of the year, had insisted that Ministry of Education fiscal requirements be met to several decimal places.
Accordingly, district number-crunchers, aware of the impact of unfunded inflationary costs, balanced the budget month by month by reducing administrative costs by as much as $700,000 over two budget cycles, just as the government had suggested.
As a percentage, that doesn’t seem like much, but when applied to classroom instructional needs, it’s a bundle.
Presumably, that amount could then be transferred by the district for instructional needs and the budget would still be balanced. The district does not object to administrative efficiencies, but thought it should be able to use “admin savings” to offset other cost pressures and retain services in classrooms.
Some of those unfunded inflationary costs included increases in MSP premiums and B.C. Hydro rates, neither of which had occurred in a single year, but added costs to the district over time.
Movement upward of employees on their salary seniority grids and increases in employer contributions for payroll benefits (EI, CPP), health and dental benefits and employee pension plans were all additional but unfunded costs.
It all added up, but by reallocating that $700,000 from “administrative costs” over two years, those budgets could still be balanced.
That $700,000 came from reduction of bus services, reduced custodial services, cancellation of technology upgrades and implementation, fewer education-assistant hours, reduced school-supply budgets, reduced library time, school closures and the introduction of a two-week spring break.
There was also a reduction in the number of administrative staff, with the workload passed on to others.
It came as a shock then, after all this, for the school district to discover that the $700,000, rather than being reallocated to classroom services, had simply disappeared from the district’s operating grant.
That money just vanished back into provincial coffers.
In addition, a new, unanticipated and unfunded charge of about $300,000 was imposed to pay for the annual costs of a new provincial network for Internet access. This would be the replacement for the previous provincially imposed network districts did not ask for and had spent large amounts of money trying to get working.
In brief, then, this same district, as careful as it had been to play by the rules, found itself going into the new year with a growing enrolment and more than a million dollars in the hole — simply because it followed the rules.
Adding insult to injury, trustees recently read accounts of breathtaking government overspending in other areas, a transit project that had ballooned from $410 million to $586 million or a Vancouver Convention Centre expansion, originally budgeted at $495 million, finally costing $841 million.
In contrast to these stunning miscalculations by government, calculations by the B.C. School Trustees Association that school districts are being short-changed seem like chicken feed.
According to the BCSTA, school districts throughout the province are facing at least $35 million in shortfalls for next year, on top of the further $29 million the government is demanding in “administrative savings” — about $64 million clawed back out of the school system for 2016-17.
Compared to the mild annoyance experienced by our frugal fictional saver, the outrage of school boards and provincial parent groups is finally beginning to boil over.
Geoff Johnson is a retired superintendent of schools.
