New Westminster school district puts Queensborough property on the market

The cash-strapped New Westminster school district is putting a for-sale sign on an empty property it owns in Queensborough in a bid to bring in revenue.
Board chair Michael Ewen confirmed that the property is up for sale, though he couldn’t say what the asking price is. Instead, he said the property would go out for requests for proposals. In other words, the buyer would say what they would pay for the property and the sale would either proceed or not from there, according to Ewen.
Asked what the funds would be used for if the Queensborough property sells, Ewen said. “That’s an interesting question.”
“At this point, it would go to part of our building,” he said. “It would go to building the new board office eventually … That’s the plan right now, but one just never knows.”
The school district is dealing with a $4.4-million shortfall and had to cut eight per cent of its workforce last year to balance the budget.
As for this year, the district has to fund a pay raise for Canadian Union of Public Employees.
As well, the school district must make staff reductions to deal with a 25 per cent enrolment drop in its alternate programs.
“Our alternate programs, RECAP, POWER and SIGMA, came in about 25 per cent less students,” Ewen said. “Who knows why less students showed up? One speculation is that school districts are trying to keep kids longer – past the Sept. 30 count, which means that other school districts would keep the money. We wouldn’t get the money if they came over to our programs.”
Ewen said the district’s alternate programs, which service students who struggle in the traditional school environment, have always “fluctuated.”
“Kids get jobs, kids decide they don’t want go back to school, but whatever the reason is, for us, it means we are having to reduce staff. We are going to have to cut somewhere in the order of $580,000 because of this,” he said.
It’s the normal “price of doing business,” and it’s something that happens, Ewen added.
“In years’ past, when that’s happened, we’ve been able to hold on until the re-count or we’ve been able to suck it up, and, obviously, we can’t suck anything up this year,” Ewen said. “So there most likely will be some reductions coming there. We are working with the NWTU (New Westminster Teachers’ Union) and CUPE (Canadian Union of Public Employees) around that at this point.”
The district is going to attempt to redeploy as much staff as possible to save jobs, he said
“At this point, we are hoping it will only be through transfers and that there won’t be any layoffs,” Ewen added.