Quesnel’s Board of Education has passed an amended budget for the current school year worth around 51 million dollars.
Secretary-Treasurer Jennifer Woollends explains the process.
“We set a Preliminary budget in May of the previous year for this school year and then every February the Ministry of Educations requires that we do an amendment budget, so we do the budget based on actuals and what the projections are now until the end of the year.”
Woollends says it was about 600 thousand dollars under budget.
“We saw a reduction in the budget that we passed last year for this year. The main differences were an increase in funding that we received from the Ministry of Education with regards to the number of students that were in the District as well as the number of students with unique student needs, we get special funding for that. And then that was offset by positions that were unable to fill during the year.”
Woollends says the extra money is already spoken for.
“We were already asking for use of accumulated surplus, so we’re still going to be in a deficit position if we spend the budget as we expected, but we would use accumulated surplus for that. We just have to use less accumulated surplus.”
Woollends says they will now start working on next year’s budget.
She says they will start stakeholder meetings in April and then the 2024-25 preliminary budget will go to the Board in May.
