School District 5 trustees gave third reading to a balanced budget of almost $51 million Tuesday, eliminating a $993,000 deficit that existed at the beginning of the board's deliberations.

In an interview after the meeting, Board Chairman Frank Lento admitted the budget deliberations weren't easy.

“The first thing we looked at was the Board office and we started there and made significant cuts in terms of staffing.” Lento said the process is still under way and he can't say yet how many job cuts there will be but it will likely be “four or five.”

The Board then turned to its reserve funds and they were “scraped to the bones,” Lento said.

In a prepared statement issued by the Board, he emphasized trustees wanted to keep cuts as far away from students as possible. Trustees examined spending in each of the seven main areas of the school district's budget, particularly in facilities, district administration, operations and maintenance.

“Each of us had specific areas of the budget that we would have preferred not to touch. However, we were united in the commitment to keep these cuts as far away from classrooms as possible,” said Lento. “Once again we found ourselves in an untenable position. On the one hand, the provincial government hasn't provided enough funding for us to run our operations at the same level as last year. On the other hand, the provincial government requires us to balance our books. Unfortunately, that means cuts.”

Lento said the governance area of the district's budget is less than four per cent but contributed 30 per cent of the cuts the Board made. “However, while doing things like reducing meetings and cutting travel does reduce our expenses, it also makes it harder for Trustees to represent the interests and concerns of parents in a large rural District.”

Newly elected Cranbrook Trustee, Jan Gordon-Hooker, pointed out that 38 per cent of the budget shortfall was met by using reserve funds, adding the ongoing budget pressures will all but deplete District 5's reserves by next year.

“I've had a chance to look things over, and I can see that the District practices prudent financial management, which has traditionally included setting aside some funds to deal with emergencies, such as the structural beam problem in the Mount Baker music room a couple of years ago,” said Gordon-Hooker. “Not having a reserve not only weakens our ability to deal with unforeseen issues but also takes away one of the options we've used in the past to moderate the need for cuts.”

Reductions to staffing costs represent 15% of the budget cuts. According to Cranbrook Trustee Chris Ellis, these reductions were mainly the result of retirements and cost savings achieved by limiting custodial work on days that schools aren't open and making a small decrease in distance learning clerical hours.

“Our support staff help us maintain safe facilities and support our teachers,” said Ellis. “So we tried to keep any cuts on that side of things to a minimum.”

The remaining 11% of budget cuts were a reduction to the local capital allocation for replacement of equipment such as maintenance vehicles, cleaning equipment and technology.

Trustees say the budget reflects the Board's commitment to ensure no educational programs were cut, Trustees remain concerned the current funding model used by government is not sufficient and the Board intends to submit a “needs budget” alongside the legislated balanced budget.

“We believe that what we're dealing with is an inherent structural shortfall within the funding system itself,” says Lento, who defined the shortfall as a financial situation where available revenue is persistently less than what many Districts believe is they need to pay for the delivery of programs and services.

Lento also believes that the Board has gone as far as it can in trying to make ends meet without adversely affecting the future educational opportunities for students in the District.

“With the current round of cuts we've made, and now being forced to spend our reserves, we don't have any room to move,” said Lento. “We need government to recognize and accept that the current funding formula must be re-examined and work with us constructively to protect public education.”

But Sparwood Trustee Bev Bellina said Wednesday she wasn't entirely in agreement with her fellow trustees on the budget.

“In my personal opinion, I believe we could have taken the comments and suggestions we solicited from the School District 5 employees and utilized more of them.”

Bellina said she would like to see a reduction in teachers-on-call payments and feels the Board's cuts were unbalanced, too much in some areas and not enough in others.