The New Westminster school district has announced former Quesnel school district secretary-treasurer Bettina Ketcham will take over that position in New West.
Ketcham will be replacing Kim Morris, who is departing for the secretary-treasurer role in the Greater Victoria school district after 15 months in New West, effective Saturday, Oct. 11. Ketcham, then, will fully take over the role locally the week of Thanksgiving, on Tuesday, Oct. 15.
Ketcham is a chartered professional accountant with a decade of management experience at KPMG in Kamloops and Quesnel and at PricewaterhouseCoopers in Vancouver. She was secretary-treasurer of the Quesnel school district for four years.
“Bettina has a wealth of experience,” Supt. Karim Hachlaf said in a recent school board meeting. “Combined with the expertise, we collectively felt as a board and senior management team Bettina brought forward a great fit for the work we’re doing.”
In a news release, school board Chair Mark Gifford said the district looks “forward to building on a foundation of transparency with our community” in its work with Ketcham.
Among her achievements in Quesnel, Ketcham helped guide that school district in its strategic planning and in announcing a new $52-million middle school in July 2019.
Last week was Morris’s final school board meeting in New West, and she was sent off with messages of gratitude from trustees, who spoke of her ability to distill complex budgets into easily understood documents.
Trustees also spoke to her patience in working with the board in its learning curve around the school district’s finances.
The school district has been on the hunt for a new secretary-treasurer since at least July 2019, when Gifford announced her departure in a tweet.
