The Ministry of Education announced Wednesday that School District No. 42 will be receiving the additional funding requested earlier this year, ending months of uncertainty.
According to the approval sent to the district, nearly $8 million has been allocated for new teachers, with another $1.15 million for overhead.
School district’s board chair Mike Murray is excited to be able to move forward with planning for the upcoming school year with the funds in place.
“The ministry’s approval represents welcome news,” Murray said in an email. “The school district will now be able to proceed with hiring the last group of teachers we need to comply with the requirements in our collective agreement.”
Murray had said before the announcement that the district had already been planning for the upcoming year with the understanding that the funding would be approved.
“We’re confident we’ll be getting” the money requested, he said at the time.
The announcement also comes as a relief to the Maple Ridge Teachers Association, which had earlier expressed frustration with the Liberal government not following through with its earlier promises.
“We’re happy the government has finally followed through,” association president George Serra said. “Now we can go back to the schools and tell them they can add those extra classes and bring in those extra kids, and we can move forward.”
Serra says he’s confident students who had previously been waitlisted for their catchment schools will now be approved for placement.
But Serra says the timing of the announcement is suspect.
“These decisions are being made for political gain, and not in the interests of the kids,” Serra said, explaining he feels the government had been trying to make itself look good ahead of Thursday’s throne speech and the upcoming confidence vote.
“The Liberals need to think more about the kids and less about their political standing.”
After the Supreme Court ruled in favour of the B.C. Teachers Association in their case against the provincial government, the Liberals promised to meet basic funding requirements for all school districts throughout the province.
Any additional funding required, the government said, would be awarded on a case-by-case basis, asking school districts to submit detailed proposals.
School District No. 42 submitted such a proposal, and was initially promised an approval by the end of May, a deadline that then got pushed to June 15. That date also came and went without an announcement.
Serra said before the funding was approved that he found it hard to believe the Liberals would delay approving the funding because it was unsure of its future standing as the party in power:
“Do you really think [NDP leader John] Horgan and [Greens leader Andrew] Weaver would be upset at the Liberals for promising cash to schools? I’d think they’d be delighted, based on what they’ve promised. They might even add more on!”
The school district, on Wednesday, passed the final budget for the upcoming year. It includes the newly-approved funding. The budget will still include a $1.45 million deficit, which the district says has been approved by the ministry.
The local funding was part of a larger announcement from the ministry, which approved over $355 million across all 60 B.C. school districts. The funding will be made available in the fall.