The $7,000 coffee budget, and other school district cuts
And goodbye, Rick Kelly, the voice of 2000s pop in Prince George
Ok, that’s out of the way. Today’s newsletter.
So as mentioned yesterday, the Prince George School District is facing a more than $2 million budget deficit and is looking for feedback on what cuts to be made. You can read about it in depth on Yahoo News, of all places, as well as the Citizen and My Prince George Now.
Even more directly, you can watch a little YouTube presentation the school district put together on it here (or below) and you can read the slides from the presentation here and TODAY IS THE LAST DAY to provide your feedback using this form.
With all the resoures above, I’m not sure there’s a whole lot more I can add but I took some notes so I’m going to share them anyways:
This is a structural deficit, meaning it’s not something that a one-time grant or donation could fix. These are ongoing expenses that are costing more money than the district takes in, so cuts are needed (because school districts are required to balance their budgets, by law). The money the district gets is largely based on how many students it has, and that is not expected to increase (or decrease) dramatically anytime soon.
The majority of the costs (88 per cent) are related to people’s salaries and benefits, so it’s really not possible to handle this without people losing jobs/pay.
The recommended cuts are being guided by these four principals:
Now, here are the proposed cuts.
Reduction in school administration positions - this would be done by possibly sharing principals and other positions between multiple schools, maybe cutting vice-principals, that sort of thing.
Reduction to school budget allocations by $30 per student - self-explantory.
Reduce supplement rurla school allocation - basically, rural schools, like Hixon, McBride, etc get some extra money to support the cost of .. being rural. They would reduce this extra funding as these schools are losing students.
Distance education program elimination - I was confused by this since they said it was cost-neutral, but in the presentation it was explained that although there’s no budget for it on paper, there is a belief that eliminating the program will actually free up costs in terms of staff time, etc.
Eliminate Indigenous Education director position - This position was previously held by Pam Spooner, who was recruited for the newly-created role in 2022. She became acting superintendent last year when the previous superintendent was let go, and now she’s assistant superintendent so the position is vacant and up to be eliminated from the budget altogether.
District learning commons - cuts, cuts, cuts. From what I understand, this is essentially an internal library of things like books, guides, DVDs etc that educators can use to access material for classroom learning.
Cultural performances budget - as this was presented in the YouTube cast, this is money used to send teachers to Vancouver to view performances that are available for them to then put on here. It was suggested they could watch these online rather than traveling.
Teacher Pro-D Fund - this is a job that helps coordiante what teachers do on Pro-D days. It would be eliminated.
Transportation - They didn’t explain this one. I don’t know. But I do know I continue to have questions about the deal that was cut to pay two separate bus companies after the first one failed to actually fulfill its contract, so I’m gonna hazard a guess this could be better managed. Or it could be a cluster with even more students left on the side of the road! Definitely an area I’m interested in hearing more about.
Oh, you thought I skipped those other ones? They are all pretty straightforwardly admin cuts but I just want to take a moment to admire the $7,000 coffee supplies budget for the central administration office. It’s actually the smallest line item on here but also the one that feels the most interesting to talk about, to me, a person who doesn’t know better. If we do some quick math of 260 weekdays a year, that amounts to $26 a day. Let’s eliminate, I guess, four weeks, or 20 days, to holidays and it’s up to $30. I’m betting at least 30 people work in that office, so that’s like $1 per person. Even if you cut things in half because I honestly don’t know how many people work in admin over Christmas and summer, it’s still only $2-$3 a person or something like $60 a day. Like, $7,000 is not enough to even hire someone part-time but I guess it’s also not nothing so the fact that it’s on the chopping block tells us something, I suppose.
The next steps in this process are an actual draft budget come together and then the elected school board will make some decisions on May 28.
Goodbye, Rick Kelly, the voice of 2000s pop in Prince George
CKPG: Taking a walk down memory lane with Rick Kelly before he retires
For the first two decades it was on air, 101.3 FM was, I’m told, a country station. I don’t remember this but I do remember when it was converted, somewhere around the year 2000, to 101.3 Hits FM, a station that promised to play all the hottest new music of the day.
To give you young ones some context, this was well before Spotify. iTunes and iPods were soon to be a thing but at this point in time, if you wanted to hear new music, the radio was still, by far, the best delivery mechanism. This also happened to be the peak of the pop era — *NSync, Backstreet Boys, Christina Aguilera, Britney Spears, Enrique Iglesias, plus certain rappers like Eminem and Nelly, were sending music sales (yes, sales, of actual physical albums) to new heights. And 101.3 Hits FM promised to be a connection between people in the city and that music.
I was in high school at the time, and if I’m remembering things correctly Rick Kelly hosted a music countodwn at 6 p.m. followed by a call-in request show. Or maybe they were combined, somehow. I’m not sure. But he was definitely the host and there was definitely a call-in request show because I remember people from my class calling in to make requests and it being a bit of a big deal if they had gotten through. Especially if they got something less poppy and more rappy on, like California Love by Tupac, not that this isn’t exactly pop music. I also seem to recall Good Vibrations by Mark Whalberg being a frequent player for some reason.
Wikipedia tells me that 101.3’s time as a Top 40 hits-oriented station only lasted four years before shifting to adult contemporary but I didn’t know that. I guess by that time I had moved on to university and by now I had an iPod and a better internet connection and now I have a Spotify algorithm that helps me determine what I’m going to listen to. But there was a real joy in that sense of there being various artists vying for the top of the local charts and people you actually knew calling in and getting their request in on the radio and Rick Kelly was the guy who I will forever associate with that. He talks about all of this in his interview with Caden Fanshaw here, and it’s fantastic to hear he remembers it with the same fondness I do. His final show is 2 to 6 p.m. today on 101.3 FM.
Today in bears
Today in birds
News roundup
It’s FanCon weekend. Happy anniversary to this banger of a tweet.
“You’re giving them a voice”: Red Dress Stand In to be held Sunday.
Prince George local receives large grant to produce podcast on women and autism.
Duchess Park student Peyton Briere picked for national football prospects game.
Today’s song is what Rick Kelly says his last song will be:
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Send feedback by emailing northerncapitalnews@gmail.com. Find me online at akurjata.ca.
The cuts to the DLC really don't make sense when paired with the guiding principal "Creating greater equity across SD57 schools." Having resources housed at the DLC means that they can be accessed by teachers at any school. Without this, smaller schools with smaller budgets would have much less access to resources. These resources include novel sets, technology kits, sets of books about local Indigenous groups and languages, etc. The technology/maker kits are especially great because many of those resources are very expensive and wouldn't otherwise be available. For example, the kits with Dash Robots ($3000), Makey Makeys (~$1000), Hydraulics kit (~$1000) and other expensive resources like Snap Circuits, magnatiles, keva blocks, and K'nex. There are also tools for woodworking, Without the DLC, schools would be responsible for purchasing these things themselves if teachers wanted to use them. Many of these kits are for specific grades and it makes way more sense to have them borrowable by teachers from any school. The DLC also facilitates the borrowing and transfer of materials between schools and it looks like the cuts would eliminate this as well.
The DLC supplies teachers with materials that the District owns so schools don’t have too. They are also very involved with school libraries. They facilitate group orders for books and other materials, and then catalog the items for all the schools in the district. That is a big saving for all the teacher librarians. It also maintains the integrity of the district data base since all of the identical items are catalogued exactly the same. If you contact Joseph Jeffrey at the DLC he could probably give you more information. He is in charge over there.