A dispute over funding at the Langley School District is expected to hit the Education Minister's doorstep on Friday, when area teachers plan to take their calls for financial reform to Margaret MacDiarmid's Vancouver office.
The Langley School District, comprising nearly 50 schools and with an annual budget of about $150-million, has amassed a deficit that now stands at about $14-million - even though districts are not allowed to run deficits under the B.C. School Act.
The financial woes have prompted the Langley Teachers' Association to ask Ms. MacDiarmid to appoint a special adviser, as she did earlier this month for the Vancouver School District. The group intends to repeat that request Friday.
But in a telephone interview Thursday, Ms. MacDiarmid said Langley's situation is "extraordinary" and that a special adviser is not required.
In Langley, "there were a series of very serious accounting errors made by staff and they thought they were going to be having an operating surplus and suddenly found themselves in a very significant deficit," Ms. MacDiarmid said.
Since Langley's budget problems were first identified early last year, the district arranged a review by an outside accounting firm and asked the provincial Auditor-General to review its financial management, she said.
Provincial staff have also been working closely with Langley school board staff to come up with a plan to eliminate the deficit. Those plans have yet to be approved, but a preliminary proposal calls for saving $6.6-million in the 2010-2011 year "while maintaining a high level of programs and services" through measures that include school closures.
Those proposals worry the Langley Teachers' Union, which blames the Langley school board for the bulk of the district's money woes.
"We currently have the highest per-pupil debt in the province," Langley Teachers' Association vice-president Gail Chaddock-Costello said Thursday. "This is the worst financial system that any district in B.C. has ever had to face."
The teachers union last week wrote to Ms. MacDiarmid to say it would welcome a special adviser.
The Vancouver School Board, meanwhile, was deemed "unable or unwilling to manage its resources to protect the interests of students" and was paired with a special adviser, although it hadn't asked for one.
That appointed rankled some in the education community. In an April 21 letter to Ms. MacDiarmid, the chair of the Greater Victoria Board of Education asked her to withdraw the adviser, saying the appointment interferes with the board's ability to resolve its financial situation.
In Langley, some parents and teachers are calling for a forensic audit to determine how a modest projected surplus of early 2009 turned into today's multimillion-dollar deficit. A Deloitte & Touche review last year found a series of accounting errors, including schools getting authorization to spend money "without approval or funding."
The staff members responsible for the accounting errors no longer work for the district, spokesman Craig Spence said Thursday. The review found no evidence that funds had been misappropriated.
Wendy Stueck