Budget shortfalls for School District 85 (SD85) means fewer education assistants (EA’s), says Vancouver Island North Teacher’s Association (VINTA) Local President Shawn Gough.
“Unfortunately the school district is still going through the process of getting out of funding protection, which is another one of the liberal government’s things where they said ‘you’re not going to get the sort of buffer funding that you used to get, and you’re going to have to work your way out of that’ — so this year it’s about $300,000 we have to cut from our existing budget from last year in order to get out of the funding protection,” said Gough, who added this year should be the final year of SD85 having to deal with the issue.
“Although the classroom enhancement fund pays for the increase in teachers, we still have that $300,000 chunk of money that still has to come out of the budget from somewhere.”
Gough said this ultimately means “fewer EA’s”, before explaining what an EA’s job actually is. “It’s usually one-on-one or small group student support, under the direction of the teachers.”
Regardless of budget shortfalls this year, Gough said both VINTA and SD85 are definitely on the same page with the restoration of the teacher’s original contracts.
“There are other districts that are having a real hard time getting information from their school boards, but we’ve been talking since December which is well before we were even supposed to,” he said, adding the two groups “started looking at the provisional money that came in back in January. We were starting to talk back then about what was going to happen down the road. We both know the only way we can get anything done is if we sit down and talk to each other and share information. The process has been fabulous here, but it just hasn’t been in some of the other districts.”
Gough said the number one thing students will be benefiting from thanks to the restoration of the teachers’ contracts is “the number of learning assistance resource teachers we have hired over this spring staffing process, which is considerable, in addition to every school now having a teacher/librarian.”
When asked to comment, SD85 Secretary-Treasurer John Martin said Gough’s estimate was not that far off from the actual numbers.
“The reduction in funding protection is actually about $254,000 this year,” said Martin. “But that’s just a small part of where we’re losing money — We’re also losing $800,000 because we will not have a surplus to access next year.”
Martin added SD85 is ultimately “looking at over a $1,000,000 that we have to find going into next year. One of the biggest areas we’ve had to look at is EA’s… we’re looking at 12 full-time EA position reductions for next year.”
Martin stressed SD85 is not planning any layoffs per-se.
“We’ve had some positions we haven’t been able to fill, and we haven’t had to really layoff anyone. We’ve transferred people as a way to make sure we have the correct number of EA’s in each school, so that is going to save us about $500,000. And then we’re going to take another $500,000 from other areas of the budget; different contracts, services, supplies, equipment.”
In total, between the $500,000 from the reduction of EA’s and the $500,000 reduction from the other areas, “we’re going to be able to balance the budget, which is really good news,” confirmed Martin. “On the other hand, we’re going to be spending more money next year because of the new money we’re hoping to get from the classroom enhancement fund. So we’re hoping through that fund we will be able to add about 14 teachers.”
Martin said SD85 has “hired what the board and the union have agreed is necessary to meet the collective agreement, and we’re getting very close to having fully staffed schools.”
He confirmed the restoration of the teacher’s collective agreement will mean having a teacher/librarian in every school, smaller class sizes, and an increase in learning assistance resource teachers.