Quesnel’s Board of Education has approved it’s 2017-2018 Preliminary Operating Budget.
It comes in at 39.3 million dollars but as Interim Secretary Treasurer Bryan Mix explains, it once again took some work to balance it…
“The original shortfall was around close to 900 thousand dollars and the biggest part of that was the payback of the funding protection for about 400 thousand dollars of that and then there is another 250 thousand dollars in less revenue because of changing and declining enrollment.”
Mix says almost 300 thousand dollars was saved through a reduction of 2.3 teaching positions and 2 education assistant positions.
He says two positions will be eliminated through attrition but Mix says they will actually be hiring 13 teachers with funding from the Classroom Enhancement Fund which is outside the operating budget.
This was the money that came out of the Provincial Government losing it’s course case on class sizes to the BC Teacher’s Federation.
Mix says 2.3 of those teachers will come out of the existing pool and 10.3 will be new hires.
Another savings this year include 187 thousand dollars through the closure of Continuing Education that is now being done at the college.