In her campaign, Ms. Bacchus tapped into public concerns about cash-strapped schools, vowing to press the provincial government for more money. She kept that promise.
She said steep budget cuts would hurt students and schools and that provincial funding had not kept up to rising costs.
Repeatedly, she called on the minister to reconsider education funding and slammed the province for its policies.
Things became heated. The two NPA trustees on the board even issued a statement calling on Ms. Bacchus to tone down her personal attacks on the minister.
In April, Ms. MacDiarmid appointed a special adviser, B.C. comptroller-general Cheryl Wenezenki-Yolland, to review the board’s finances, saying the board was “either unable or unwilling to manage its resources to protect the interests of students.”
Vancouver’s sizable budget shortfall was a factor in that appointment, says veteran NPA trustee Ken Denike.
So was politics.
“What singled them out for an adviser was the ferocity of the attack on the provincial government, and I think on the minister,” Mr. Denike said recently. “What singled them out was the combination of the agendas being put forward that were not school-board agendas – they were from the BCTF [the British Columbia Teachers Federation] and the NDP.”
Ms. Bacchus says the Vancouver board was singled out because it spoke out.
“If you put your head out of a foxhole, this is what happens,” she said Thursday.
Ms. MacDiarmid says the board’s difficulties suggested that it needed extra help and that the board should focus on balancing its budget, providing quality education and tackling the governance problems flagged in the comptroller-general’s report.
“This a report that highlights waste and resources that have not been used wisely, and that needs to change,” she said this week.
THE CLIMAX
The comptroller-general’s report was released in early June. Ms. Wenezenki-Yolland concluded the board had enough money, but wasn’t managing it well. She also concluded that the board was focused on lobbying the government at the expense of managing its finances and that decision-making was often bogged down by committees and interest groups.
In response, the board said the report didn’t do anything to improve the board’s finances, that many of its recommendations were under way and that others, such as raising rents for non-profit childcare groups, were questionable.
So, in a rare move, Ms. MacDiarmid ordered the board to send a preliminary budget to her by June 18, before a board vote, and to take all of the recommendations of the comptroller-general’s report into account.
The board sent its preliminary budget to the minister this week, but said the document was much the same as the one trustees had been working on in April, before Ms. Wenezenki-Yolland came on stage.
School closures are being considered, a band and strings program appears to have been spared, and daycare rents are headed up.
In a letter to Ms. MacDiarmid, the board said the draft budget, if approved, would meet the requirement to file a balanced budget and also comply with the minister’s directive.
The budget is based, however, on a bigger deficit, $17.2-million, than the $11.8-million identified in the comptroller-general’s report. The gap stems primarily from different ways of accounting for funds left over from a previous year.
Ms. MacDiarmid says the board has a habit of crying wolf.
“The comptroller-general has gone back many years, both with this board and previous Vancouver school boards, and has discovered that they continually, every year, have very pessimistic outlooks in their forecasting, and they’re always wrong. Every single year,” Ms. MacDiarmid said on Thursday.
The last time Vancouver closed a school was in 2003. Plans to close the Queen Elizabeth and Garibaldi annexes were cancelled in 2008, after a public backlash and changes in government policies relating to sale of school properties.
The board is again considering closing schools, although it has not yet announced how many or which ones.
