In another move to get the New Westminster school district's finances in order, the new superintendent has asked the Ministry of Education to allow the district to take funds it uses for the hefty $700,000 annual lease at Columbia Square and put the money back into classrooms.
The district tore down the school board offices at the New Westminster Secondary School in 2005 as part of a botched bid to build a replacement high school and moved the board offices downtown. Every year since, the district has doled out rent for the property. The funds come from its operating budget - the same budget that is used to buy books and pay teachers. And the same budget that has been chronically short for the last few years - to such an extent that the district now owes the Ministry of Education almost $5 million.
"We start off every year writing a cheque for $700,000 for something that neither goes into supplies nor services," said superintendent John Gaiptman, who joined the district earlier this year, coming from the Victoria school district which he ran for more than a decade.
In a bid to bring the district's finances into the black, Gaiptman recently asked the Ministry of Education for a break on that rent.
He's made the case to the provincial government that the board office is a nonpermanent space required while the new school board office is being built.
"We have made the case of temporary lodging that while the new school board is being built that government should be seeing it as temporary lodging and allow us to take it out of capital rather than out of operating," Gaiptman said. "If that's the case, then the $700,000 that comes out of supplies and services will no longer come out of supplies and services but would instead come out of capital, which doesn't affect our operating budget that we use on education."
The extra funds would make a significant difference to the district's ongoing persistent budget shortfalls - saving about $1.5 million over the next two years until the district moves into the new board offices in 2015.
When asked if the district could recoup previous years' rent and apply it to the district's debt to the province, Gaiptman said he asked, but acknowledged that it's difficult to go backwards.
"I think we made a very strong presentation. I don't want to appear greedy here; I want to do what is fair," he said. "I don't want to push too hard that I sound like I'm being unfair and not understanding that everybody's got budgets to live with, and yet we have to make a very strong case for the students of New Westminster that this money should be going into their education and not into a lease."
The interim superintendent - the district has yet to officially hire him and is still actively looking for a permanent superintendent, though Gaiptman wants the job - expects to hear from the ministry soon.
