The school district held a meeting on Tuesday night telling people that it was looking for input on the budget - a budget that was first projected to be a $500,000 surplus and then ended up being a 'surprise' $2.8 million deficit.
Many people went to the meeting hoping to find out how the heck the school district ended up a) having a deficit and b) having it be a surprise. After all, one would rightly assume that the people in charge of the local school district would be able to answer a pretty simple math question. Someone by now would surely have figured out if it was an addition error, a formula gone wrong, a matter of forgetting the electrical bill, the food bill, or, heaven forbid, leaving out a school or two on the list.
Unfortunately this has happened before. It faced a $1.4 million deficit in its 2000/01 budget. And, at that time the district hired a consultant to help it. And, at that time, it also held a public input meeting. Of course, the district blamed the deficit on funding formula inequities and largely blamed the province for inadequate funding. At that time crossing guards were cut, and 31 school district positions were cut.
The difference between then and now is simply this: the public is not being told how such a monumental budget error happened. And without that missing piece in the equation, it cannot provide any reliable input to be used for future planning.
While trustees, we're sure, have been told by some legal eagle that they'd better keep their opinions to themselves as it could involve personnel issues - we're, frankly, flabbergasted.
The district should simply not have held a public input budget meeting if it couldn't provide people with basic information as to how the deficit came to be. To ask residents to come up with cost-saving ideas when the people elected to trustee positions don't seem to have the foggiest notion of what's going on in their financial offices, is chutzpah, to say the least.
We don't know how this 'surprise' deficit came to be, but we do know that someone knows and they should, and can, explain it to the public without violating any employee's rights.
