Ministry of Education announces plan to help B.C. school districts cut costs
The B.C. Ministry of Education wants all school districts in the province to share the same system for payroll and business administration.
Minister Margaret MacDiarmid today (May 27) announced the plan, which aims to reduce costs and improve administrative efficiency in the 60 districts.
The ministry has recently faced criticism that it does not give enough funding to districts. Many dealt with shortfalls as they firmed up their annual budgets this year.
Taken together, B.C. districts spend an estimated $70 million each year on payroll, human resources, and financial management, MacDiarmid said in a statement.
“Through shared services, other sectors have found savings of at least 10 to 15 percent,” the minister said. “A saving of just $1 million is equivalent to the cost of employing 22 teaching assistants in the classroom.”
At present, school districts manage their business administration needs using different practices, systems, software, and personnel.
The plan to standardize how that work is done and centralize payroll processing will first be tested in the districts of Vancouver, North Vancouver, Surrey, and Kamloops-Thompson.
Those districts will undergo a review to explore what implementation across the rest of B.C. could look like and what the potential savings could be.
Susan Skinner, chair of the North Vancouver school board, welcomed the ministry’s plan.
“I think it’s really good to be working in partnership,” she told the Straight today by phone. “Clearly the announcement shows that it’s not just another mandate by the province and the ministry that is being forced on school districts.”
Skinner emphasized the need for the ministry to help districts find ways to save money given that appeals for more funding have apparently failed.
She also suggested that savings could be found by reforming the requirements for districts to submit reports to the ministry.
“I think it would be a dollar savings because there definitely wouldn’t be as strong a rationale to support the employment of so many district administrators,” Skinner said.
“I think there’s a lot of districts throughout the province that are quite top heavy,” she added.
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Comments
Possibly saving $1 million at some vague point in the future is not going to put a dent in the $300 million structural deficit facing local boards for the 2010-11 school year, due to provincial underfunding of new costs and obligations (the shortfall is $17 million alone just for Vancouver).
And while the minister should be applauded for overturning any rock that may produce potential savings that can be redirected to the classroom without demanding more from weary taxpayers, similar provincial initiatives have not always worked out as well as advertised in the past: school business companies and a common provincial electronic data platform for local boards (BCeSIS) are among the bigger BC Liberal boondoggles. Amalgamation of provincial health boards has also created monstrously top-heavy and costly bureaucracies, so it can't be assumed that consolidation produces automatic savings.
But other things, like shared purchasing deals, have worked well and saved money. These things tend to work better when they evolve naturally and with broad support and less well when they're ideologically driven or imposed unilaterally or when they're just attention-seeking gimmicks designed to distract us from politically embarassing problems.
Hhm, I wonder which one we're looking at in this case?
-Investing $185-million in building jail cells
-Created a 10-person police team dedicated specifically to seizing firearms.
So there you have it. That's the liberal plan:
1. Close the schools. Make the population as stupid as possible.
2. Build more prisons, preferably privately run.
3. Disarm the public.
4. Make sure Carol James runs again.
5. ?
6. Profit.