Teachers hoping for more money at the bargaining table received some bad news Tuesday with the release of the provincial budget.
And the economic plan was even worse for the province's post-secondary schools, who will have their consolidated budgets slashed by 2.1 per cent over the next three years.
In one of its most austere budgets in several decades, the Liberal government announced the basic grant for public education will remain at $4.7 billion for the next three years and that spending in public schools for kindergarten-to-Grade 12 students will increase by only 0.6 per cent next year. That's about half the 1.1 per cent budget increase the previous two years, well below the 4.8 per cent increases in the three-year period from 2005-06 to 2008-09.
The only new spending on K-12 education will be $30 million for the learning investment fund, which will grow to $165 million over the next three years. That money will be used to address concerns highlighted in the B.C. Supreme Court ruling last spring on Bill 28, which found the government acted unconstitutionally when it stripped the rights of teachers to bargain on class composition and how that relates to the number of special needs students. The fund will be distributed directly to classrooms identified as
having the highest needs.
B.C. Teachers Federation president Susan Lambert said the education budget does not keep up with the rate of inflation and increasing downloaded costs. School boards, she said, will feel the pinch.
"This means $100 million in cuts to public schools next year alone," said Lambert. "This is a massive theft of educational opportunities for the next generation of B.C. kids."
Lambert said the province is now entering its second decade of education cutbacks.
"That means a whole generation of students have grown up going to school in larger classes without adequate support and a lack of specialist teachers to meet diverse needs," Lambert said.
"Now we're looking at another three years of ongoing cuts and increasing demands on
teachers to fill the gaps and meet student's needs."
The BCTF on Monday asked the Labour Relations Board to consider bringing in an independent arbitrator to try to kick start negotiations between teachers and the province and end the current job action, now in its sixth month.
The province's annual facilities grant to fund maintenance of schools remains unchanged from the 2011 budget at $110 million in 2012-13.
Prince George District Teachers Association president Matt Pearce was in Victoria Tuesday meeting with the BCTF and could not be reached for comment.
Colleges and universities face a one per cent reduction in their provincial grants by 2014-15. But UNBC's vice-president external relations, Rob Van Adrichem, expects the consolidated advanced education budget cuts to total 2.1 per cent over the next three years, starting in the 2013-14 fiscal year. Provincial funding accounted for 70 per cent of UNBC's $67 million budget in 2011-12, while student tuitions raised close to 30 per cent.
"We've been in a situation over the last number of years where we've had flat government funding that did not keep up to inflation and this forecast reduction comes at a challenging time for us," said Van Adrichem.
"When you look at the situation in the north, with expectations for significant growth in the region and a prediction of a million new jobs, with 78 per cent of those jobs needing a post-secondary credential and most of the jobs in the North, it comes at a time when the region wants UNBC to be doing more. We want to be doing more for the North, not less."
Officials from the College of New Caledonia could not be reached for comment.
In his speech Tuesday, Finance Minister Kevin Falcon urged all 60 public school districts to try to find ways to cut administrative costs by sharing services. Schools in the province spend close to $840 million annually on administration,
operations, maintenance and transportation.
The province is expecting to run a total deficit of $938 million in 2012-13 as it attempts to budget its books, with modest surpluses of $154 million anticipated for 2013-14 and a $250 million surplus projected for 2014-15.
