The Sea to Sky School District has found it will cost close to $400,000 more than expected to implement restored language for teachers agreements this year.
The restored language, effective this school year, brings back teacher staffing levels to pre-2002 levels. It results from a Supreme Court ruling made a year ago that found the province had wrongly stripped teachers of their right to bargain for class size and composition.
More teachers were hired in order to bring staffing levels in lockstep with the restored language.
Earlier this year, the school district estimated it needed $2.7 million to cover the equivalent of 12 new full-time enrolling teachers and 19.5 new full-time non-enrolling teachers.
Enrolling teachers are educators who preside over classrooms, teaching subjects such as math, English and science.
Non-enrolling teachers are educators who work as librarians, counsellors, special education resource teachers and so forth.
The school district also estimated each new teacher would cost about $88,378.
Everything was expected to add up to about $2.7 million.
“It was our best guess at that time,” secretary-treasurer Shehzad Somji said during the latest school district meeting.
However, now that school has begun, Somji said it’s become apparent this was an underestimation of the costs.
Each new teacher ended up costing $92,645, on average.
Furthermore, student counts determined that 14.7 enrolling teachers were necessary, as opposed to 12.
The estimate for non-enrolling teachers, however, was almost spot-on. The equivalent of 19.6 full-timers in this category were hired, just 0.1 up from 19.5.
In total, the actual costs rang up to about $3.1 million, roughly $394,000 more than what was originally asked.
“Now that we have the actual numbers and the actual cohort, and all that, and we’ve put them into classrooms, this is where we’re at,” Somji said.
He said the school district has sent a request to the province for funding.
The school district is expecting to hear a reply in the coming weeks.
