Education minister doesn’t understand what a deficit is
Kelowna Capital News
By Alistair Waters
May 5, 2010

Somebody needs to tell B.C.’s education minister it’s not right to blame someone else for something you do that’s wrong.

The Central Okanagan School District finalized its 2010-11 budget last week and to balance it, the board had to chop 17 teaching positions and 22 support staff positions.

The moves had to be made to offset a $4.7-million financial “shortfall.” Some would call it a deficit.

But if you ask Education Minister Margaret McDiarmid, she’ll tell you the local school district—as well as every other one in B.C. except Langley—does not have a deficit.

Her proof—they all balance their budgets each year.

What she doesn’t say is provincial law requires school districts to balance their budgets, by whatever means necessary.

If that means laying off teachers or support workers, cutting course offerings, closing schools or using any other approach that negatively impacts their students’ education’s, so be it.

The minister can repeat her mantra that Victoria is now providing more money per pupil than ever before as much as she wants—and she does—but that doesn’t change the fact the funding from Victoria doesn’t meet the need here or anywhere else.

For MacDiarmid to appear to point the finger of blame at the boards of education and not at her own government is simply a cop out.

A medical doctor by trade, MacDiarmid seems woefully unaware of what ails public education in this province—adequate funding….

So it seems the education minister thinks a deficit is not a deficit unless it is presented as such.

And because school districts are not allowed to do that, in her mind, they don’t have them.

But try telling that to the men and women who run school districts and who sit on boards of education. They have to wrestle with the numbers.

This year is not the first time the local school district has had to make cuts at budget time. It did it last year as well.

But, according to board chairman Rolli Cacchioni, this time was the toughest.

And that makes MacDiarmid’s no-school-district-has-a-deficit comment all the more galling.