The budget that cries wolf: SD61’s deficit cycle

Every spring in British Columbia, school districts present budgets that force communities to choose between necessary programming such as: music or speech therapy, career education or school counselling, enrichment for all students or baseline access for disabled ones. No one should have to make these choices. It is like asking people to choose between clean air or clean water.

These ‘choices’ are presented as the unavoidable arithmetic of balanced budgets and provincial funding formulas. It isn’t that simple. What is on the chopping block also signals what a district values, what they treat as negotiable, whose needs matter.

For many BCEdAccess families, our children’s basic rights to education are being placed alongside enrichment activities and treated as negotiable.

Music is important. Framing music programming versus access to education for children with diagnosed disabilities collapses fundamentally different kinds of obligations into the same choice. Access to academic learning is not an enrichment program. And in doing so, it forecloses the choices it never puts on the table. The community is asked to weigh music against inclusion. 

Ironically, school districts aren’t asking community members to make budget cuts to executive compensation, administrative growth, or the conservative forecasting practices that reliably generate surplus after the cuts have already been made. These are the items that should be included in the budget cut options; not inclusive access to education for children with disabilities.

Quick facts

• SD61 is projecting a $1.57 million shortfall for 2026–2027.
• The district is proposing a $250,871 cut to middle school music.
• Total proposed reductions affecting disabled and vulnerable students are $438,488. These cuts will mean less vital services: speech-language pathology, psychology, deaf and hard of hearing support, transportation, early childhood educators, and counselling.
• The budget uses categories including “collective agreement obligation,” “no collective agreement obligation,” and “service obligation.” Items under “no collective agreement obligation” include music, athletics, and inclusive learning costs.
• The presentation lists “inclusive learning exceeding Ministry funding” at $12.2 million. This figure is presented without a detailed public breakdown of how it is calculated.
• The same visual format, red dollar figures, is used across both discretionary and service-related categories.
• SD61’s financial reporting shows a pattern of projected deficits followed by year-end surpluses.
• Budget decisions are made based on projections before final funding allocations are fully confirmed.
• Provincial base funding rates for students and designations are largely unchanged year over year.
• The province has announced additional K–12 funding, including targeted funds.
• Funding for the new teacher agreement is expected to be provided separately as a special grant, with timing not confirmed at the point of budgeting.
• The new teacher agreement includes salary increases and staffing ratio improvements, which increase costs.
• The district identifies cost pressures including inflation, benefits, enrolment changes, and unfunded programs.
• Superintendent compensation increased from $285,400 in 2022–2023 to $366,652 in 2024–2025. That is an increase of $81,252 to pay a superintendent.
• Some reductions to services are implemented through not filling vacant positions, reducing service capacity without eliminating demand.

The budget

Greater Victoria School District No. 61 is proposing $1.57 million in budget adjustments for 2026–2027. The public conversation has centred on a $250,871 cut to middle school music — a real loss, and one that has drawn visible and organised opposition. It deserves that attention.

But between the lines, the budget presentation tells another story. When the proposed reductions are grouped by who they affect, the largest cuts will be faced by disabled and vulnerable students: $438,488 across speech-language pathology, psychology, deaf and hard of hearing support, transportation, kindergarten ECEs, youth and family counsellors, and continuing education counselling. These necessary supports are already under-funded and unable to adequately serve children who need them. 

And underneath both the visible cuts and the less visible ones is a deeper question: whether the deficit used to justify them is real? 

SD61’s own multi-year financial plan shows a consistent pattern. The district projects a structural deficit, implements cuts, and finishes the year with a multi-million-dollar operating surplus (slide 29). They have money left over. In 2024–2025, the accumulated surplus grew to $11.2 million. The budget presents urgency; the year-end results tell a different story.

What the district says is causing the deficit

The presentation lists these causes for the structural deficit: 

• Prior year one-time reductions added back (when something was removed in the previous round of cuts and now that cost has been added back to the budget)
• Declining enrolment
• Declining interest rates on investments
• Non-enrolling staffing levels greater than Collective Agreement
• Programs not funded by Ministry
• Unfunded inflationary costs, e.g. software renewals and service contracts
• Unfunded costs, e.g. employee benefit increases, step increments, replacement costs for absences
• Unavoidable costs, e.g. trustee election
• Technology replacement

Some of these are verifiable from the district’s own materials:

• Enrolment has declined modestly — from a peak of 20,074 in 2024–2025 to a projected 19,890 for 2026–2027, a drop of less than 1%.
• Investment income fell from $1.8 million to $1.3 million in the prior year’s budget, consistent with the interest rate claim.

These are real, if modest, pressures.

Others are doing enormous work without specificity:

• “Programs not funded by Ministry” could refer to music, to the $12.2 million inclusive learning gap, to early childhood educator positions, or to any number of services — the district does not say.
• “Unfunded inflationary costs” and “unfunded costs” appear as separate bullet points that sound functionally identical. 

The list creates an impression of pressure without showing which costs are large, which are growing, or which are within the district’s control. Transparency is lacking.

One item stands out for a different reason:

• “Unavoidable costs, e.g. trustee election” appears on the list as though it is an exceptional expense.

It is not. Every school district in BC pays for trustee elections on the regular municipal cycle. The only reason it registers as notable here is that SD61 has been governed by a sole trustee appointed by the provincial government since January 2025, after the previous elected board was dismissed. The election scheduled for October 2026 is not an unusual cost. It is the ordinary cost of democratic governance, returning after a period in which the district has operated without it — a period during which the budget decisions in this presentation are being finalized by a single appointee accountable to the province, not to the electorate.

Items that could be considered for the chopping block

Some items that they have not presented in their curated list of potential cutbacks are:

• Executive compensation: the Superintendent’s compensation rose from $285,400 in 2022–2023 to $366,652 in 2024–2025 — an increase of more than $81,000 over two years, including a retroactive 12.37% increase and a subsequent 3% increase. This level of growth sits in clear contrast to reductions in student-facing services. (SD61 Executive Compensation Disclosure 2024–2025)
• New administrative roles are not identified as cost pressures. The Greater Victoria Teachers’ Association has reported two new director of instruction positions created in 2025 at a cost of approximately $400,000, remaining in place while services are reduced. (Victoria News, March 23, 2026).
• District-level staffing decisions are absent. The causes list references “non-enrolling staffing levels greater than Collective Agreement,” pointing to counsellors and learning support teachers, but does not reference central office staffing, administrative structures, or leadership growth.
• Administrative structure is treated as fixed. Advancement in BC education typically moves educators out of classrooms into district roles, and those roles tend to accumulate over time. Each position carries ongoing cost implications that do not appear in the deficit framing.
• Alternative models are not explored. In other systems, leadership functions are distributed or time-limited, with educators rotating through coordination roles while remaining connected to classrooms. The work still gets done, but without the same permanent administrative layer.

The effect is a partial picture. The presentation frames the problem as being the cost to support students directly via staff and services, ignoring the administrative and structural costs that could be targeted.

The school district points to costs needed to support students, mainly staff and services needed, as the problem, but ignores the administrative and structural costs that could be targeted.

This is the lens through which the rest of the presentation needs to be read. The list does more than describe pressure — it shapes what is treated as changeable, and what is not under consideration.

“I’ve often thought that even administration at the school level could be distributed between teachers — experienced teachers could do a year of administrative duties then return to the classroom — maybe a 10% stipend or something for the extra time it would take in the summer preparing. In Finland they reduced the number of administrative and management positions — I believe that one principal in Finland takes care of four schools…. Funding goes directly to the schools making the district positions unnecessary — there is a lot of duplicated work there that could be done at the school level by finance committees, tech committees, etc. That would more than pay for the shortfall to these programs….”

– BCEdAccess member

The four slides that decide what counts

SD61’s budget presentation runs thirty-four slides. Four of them — slides 21 through 24 — do the work of deciding which costs are fixed and which costs can be cut. Everything that follows in the presentation, including the specific cuts to music, career education, speech-language pathology, and early childhood educators, flows from the categories these four slides establish. The categories are not neutral. Taken together, they function as an argument about what a school district owes its students, dressed up as accounting.

COLLECTIVE AGREEMENT OBLIGATION

Slide 21 is the simplest. It lists the costs the district is contractually bound to pay under the teacher collective agreement: enrolling teachers, non-enrolling teachers within staffing ratios (counsellors, librarians), professional development, and benefits. No dollar amounts. No red ink. No elaboration. The message is: these exist, they are non-negotiable, we move on.

This is the only slide in the sequence that receives that treatment — a clean, uncommented list of things the district will pay without question. It sets the baseline against which everything else is measured.

NO COLLECTIVE AGREEMENT OBLIGATION EXAMPLES

On slide 22, the heading alone is doing significant work. “No Collective Agreement Obligation” means, in budget terms, “things we could technically cut without breaching a contract.” The word “examples” means this is a curated selection — the district has chosen which items can be cut. What is left out is as revealing as what is included.

The items listed are music ($1.2M across middle school, elementary strings, repairs, and miscellaneous), athletics ($140K), and above-ratio counsellors ($1.6M). Every figure is in red — not the proposed cut amount, but the current total spent. The visual grammar of a red number, under a “no obligation” header communicates one thing: these things are on the chopping block. Executive compensation, district principal positions, and administrative staffing levels do not appear. This clearly tells us that music rooms and counselling services are negotiable but not who sits in the boardrooms.

On slide 23, the same heading, the same red ink. The items are early learning and child care, Pathways and Partnerships exceeding SkilledTradesBC funding, and inclusive learning exceeding Ministry funding for Levels 1–3 at $12.2M.

This is the slide that does the most structural work. Inclusive learning — mandated by provincial policy, grounded in human rights law — appears in the same visual category as instrument repairs. The obligation to provide access to education for disabled students exists independently of the collective agreement; the fact that it is not specified in that agreement does not make it optional. It places it in a different category of obligation, one the presentation does not represent.

The $12.2M figure itself raises unanswered questions:

• There is no breakdown of how the number is constructed — no total inclusive education spent, no total provincial funding attributed to inclusion, no calculation connecting the two.
• Some roles (e.g. SLPs, psychologists) appear across multiple slides, making it unclear how they are counted within the total.
• The province funds inclusive education through multiple channels, including designation supplements and a portion of the basic per-student allocation intended to support diverse learners. The presentation does not show how those sources are reflected in the district’s calculation.
• Across districts, families are consistently shown large aggregate figures for inclusive education spending without a standardised or transparent methodology. The question is not whether districts absorb costs beyond provincial funding — they almost certainly do. The question is how those costs are defined, and what the numbers are being used to communicate.

By placing inclusive education on this slide, the district positions it within the same decision space as music, athletics, and career programming. The issue is not that the number appears — it is that the presentation offers no category for costs that are mandated but not fully funded. That missing category is the structural gap the entire budget rests on. Without it, the conversation is pulled toward trade-offs between a $1.2 million music programme and a $12.2 million funding shortfall for disabled children’s access to education, presented in the same red ink, under the same header, as though they are the same kind of problem requiring the same kind of choice.

SERVICE OBLIGATION

On slide 24, a third category appears. After “collective agreement obligation” and “no collective agreement obligation,” the district introduces “service obligation” — a convenient term for the purposes of this presentation.

The slide lists departments (with no further explanation of what this means), followed by inclusive learning services (SLPs, psychologists, OT/PT, and orientation and mobility at $3.3M), mental health services (youth and family counsellors at $1.7M), student transportation for inclusive learning ($1.4M), and technology ($1.9M). Every figure is, again, in red.

If these are obligations, the red numbers raise an immediate question: why are they flagged at all? The visual language is identical to the “no obligation” slides. Red numbers on a budget presentation signal costs under review, costs that might change, costs the audience is being invited to scrutinise. The district is using the same visual register for its obligation to provide speech-language pathologists to disabled children as it uses for its decision about whether to continue funding middle school concert bands.

The effect is to make services that support disabled and vulnerable students look negotiable. SLPs, psychologists, occupational therapists, youth and family counsellors are the professionals who make it possible for disabled children to access education. These services are already stretched thin, and they are presented in a format that visually equates them with discretionary program lines.

The word “obligation” in the heading does not protect these items from the implication carried by the red ink. If anything, the juxtaposition sharpens it: the presentation communicates that SD61 considers these services obligatory and that their cost is notable, notable in the same way that music and athletics costs are notable. The audience is left to draw its own conclusions about what “notable” means in a presentation whose explicit purpose is to identify where $1.6 million in cuts will come from.

What the four slides accomplish together

Read in sequence, slides 21 through 24 construct a hierarchy of value.

At the top are things the district will pay without comment or question: teacher salaries and benefits within collective agreement ratios. Below that are things the district considers itself obligated to provide but still marks as costly: SLPs, psychologists, counsellors, and transportation for disabled students. At the bottom are things the district has no contractual obligation to fund: music, athletics, career education, early childhood educators, and, critically, inclusive learning that exceeds provincial funding.

This is a budget structure, but it is also an argument about whose needs are protected and whose are negotiable. Collective agreement obligations are protected by contract. “Service obligations” are acknowledged but still flagged. Everything on the “no obligation” slides is presented as available for reduction, and the $12.2M inclusive learning gap has been placed, by the district’s own framing, in that category.

What is missing is a clear explanation of what that $12.2M represents. It is not a program the district chose to add. It is the district’s estimate of the difference between what the province provides and what it actually costs to support students. That distinction matters. One describes a discretionary decision. The other describes a funding shortfall.

By presenting inclusive learning under “no collective agreement obligation,” alongside music and instrument repair, the district folds that funding gap into a list of discretionary spending. The slides do not say “the province underfunds inclusion.” They say “here is what we spend without being contractually required to.” The effect is to make the cost visible while leaving the source of the shortfall unclear.

Where the cuts actually land

After four slides establishing the categories, the presentation moves to “Budget Balancing Considerations” — the specific reductions the district proposes. The additions are minor (an EA mentor extension, student Chromebooks, a privacy contractor, printer replacements). The reductions are where the district’s priorities become legible.

• The one-time reductions are infrastructure deferrals and one temporary administrative vacancy: network infrastructure delayed ($155K), staff devices delayed ($365K), and an acting district principal position held vacant due to a secondment (temporary assignment) until April 2027 ($147K). When that secondment ends, the position comes back. This is not a structural cut to administration. It is a scheduling convenience presented as fiscal restraint.
• The ongoing reductions are where the cumulative picture emerges — and where cuts to inclusive education services are scattered across multiple line items in a way that makes the total harder to see.
• Counselling — Continuing Education ($28K): A 0.20 FTE counsellor for adult learners, described as low-enrolment. It is still a reduction in access for a vulnerable population.
• Pathways and Partnerships ($453K across four lines): Career centres at secondary schools drop from two or three teaching blocks to one ($260K). The department is restructured ($140K), the aviation programme remains unfilled ($45K), and a conference budget is eliminated ($8K). For students navigating the transition out of school, this is a material reduction in support.
• Middle school music ($251K): Concert band and strings for grades 6–8 continue; everything else compresses.
• Itinerant support ($70K): 0.20 FTE speech-language pathologist, 0.10 FTE psychologist, 0.20 FTE deaf and hard of hearing specialist — all vacancies the district will simply not fill. No layoffs, no service. The children who need those professionals will still be in classrooms; they will go unsupported.
• Inclusive learning student transportation ($166K): “Only eligible riders will receive bussing.” At $8,921 per rider, likely 18 to 19 disabled students will lose the transportation that gets them to school. SD61 already tightened eligibility last year and halted new applications mid-year. This is a direct transfer of cost onto families, regardless of whether they can absorb it.
• Early childhood educators ($160K): Three ECE positions in kindergarten, with the note that they will be “prioritized for consideration in allocation of contingency funds in Inclusive Learning.” That is a promise to think about funding them. It is not a commitment to fund them.
• Youth and family counsellors ($45K): All schools will retain “access to” YFCs, and fourteen prioritised schools will keep dedicated counsellors. But contracted hours “may be slightly reduced.” For a child in crisis who walks into the counselling office and finds no one there, theoretical access means nothing.

What the cuts add up to

The budget cuts conversation has focused on a $251K music cut. That is the number in the headlines, the number at the rally, the number parents are writing to the trustee about.

But the budget presentation contains nineteen line items — thirteen reductions and four additions — and when you stop reading them individually and group them by who actually loses, the picture changes:

• Disabled and vulnerable students: ($438,488). This is the single largest category of cuts to any student population. It spans six ongoing reduction lines: speech-language pathology, psychology, deaf and hard of hearing support, inclusive learning transportation, early childhood educators in kindergarten, youth and family counsellors, and continuing education counselling. The only flow back to this population is a one-year EA mentor extension worth $29,533.
• Students (general): ($553,498). Music and career education reduction and Chromebooks added.
• Staff: ($512,102). Device purchase delays and one temporary administrative vacancy.
• All: ($64,030). Network infrastructure deferred, and privacy management and print solution added.

Note: Disabled and vulnerable students appear in one category, but they are students too — the cuts to music, career education, and general services land on them as well, which means the losses stack.

see the full table of proposed budget changes

Who does this serve?	Item	Proposed change
All	Managed print strategy	$52,960
	Network infrastructure	-$155,476
	Privacy management program	$38,486
	All Total	-$64,030
Disabled/vulnerable students	Counselling — Continuing Education	-$27,966
	EA Mentor	$29,533
	Early childhood educators in Kindergarten	-$159,660
	Inclusive learning student transportation	-$165,921
	Itinerant support (SLP, psychologist, deaf and hard of hearing)	-$69,915
	Youth and family counsellors (YFC)	-$44,558
	Disabled/vulnerable students Total	-$438,487
Staff	IT for Learning Department — leadership	-$147,102
	Staff devices	-$365,000
	Staff Total	-$512,102
Students	Middle school music	-$250,871
	Pathways and Partnerships — Aviation	-$44,850
	Pathways and Partnerships — Career Centres	-$259,946
	Pathways and Partnerships — conference	-$8,000
	Pathways and Partnerships — department restructure	-$139,831
	Student devices (Chromebooks)	$150,000
	Students Total	-$553,498
Grand Total		-$1,568,117

This presentation asserts that inclusive education is an obligation — a service the district must provide, a cost it has to absorb because the province does not fund it directly. The categories were carefully constructed: collective agreement obligations that cannot be touched, service obligations that must be honoured, and a residual pool of “no obligation” items that are available for sacrifice. The rhetorical architecture insists that disabled students are protected.

Then the district cut $438,488 from disabled students – the population those obligations exist to serve.

That is $188,000 more than it cut from middle school music. It is spread across six line items rather than one. It is described in language designed to sound like nothing is really changing — vacancies that will simply go unfilled, hours that may be “slightly reduced,” positions that will be “prioritized for consideration.” And it lands on children who need speech therapy, psychological assessment, specialised support for hearing loss, transportation to get to school, early childhood educators in their kindergarten classrooms, and counsellors in their buildings when they are in crisis.

The music cut has a Facebook group Save SD61 Music Programs, a pre-rally march, a rally, a petition, a letter from the Victoria Conservatory, and even a message of support from our beloved Fred Penner! That visibility is earned and necessary — communities should fight for music.

But the inclusive education cuts have no rally. They are dispersed, technical, and wrapped in reassurance. They are attached to children whose families are often already too stretched — by the daily labour of navigating a system that was not built for their children — to show up at a budget meeting and explain, again, that a 0.20 FTE speech-language pathologist is the difference between their child accessing language and their child going without.

The budget does not cut music instead of inclusive education. It cuts both. But it frames them differently. The music cut is named, debated, and met with organised opposition. The inclusive education cuts are dispersed across six line items, described in the language of administrative adjustment — vacancies not filled, hours slightly reduced, positions prioritised for consideration — and addressed to a community of families who are already spending their advocacy capacity on getting their children through each school day. These are purposeful tactics meant to hide the consequential budget cuts to children who need it the most, and families who count on these minimal supports. 

The quiet mechanism: cut, restore, repeat

There is another pattern here, one that does not appear on any slide but is visible in the district’s own reporting. In 2022–2023, the district reduced strings funding by $209,000 (Times Colonist, April 2022). That reduction was later addressed through external sources (Saanich News, March 2026). The phrasing is administrative, but the mechanism is not. “External sources” in a school district context means PAC fundraising, community donations, foundation grants, or partnerships with organisations like the Victoria Conservatory. It means that a publicly funded program was cut from the operating budget and then restored through private effort.

What that produces is not a restoration so much as a transfer. The district reduces its operating commitment, the program continues, and the difference is made up through donated labour and community fundraising. The service remains visible, but responsibility for sustaining it has shifted.

This dynamic has been visible to the community for some time. In January 2026, the GVTA’s Carolyn Howe noted that music is typically what gets cut when districts face deficits (CHEK News, January 2026). By March, concerns about the strings program had surfaced again, with parents pointing to reduced staffing and growing class sizes (SD61 Board Meeting, March 2025). The pattern is not surprising because it is familiar.

We cannot prove from the available documents that this cycle is being intentionally engineered. But we can describe what it does. Programs that can be privately restored are more likely to survive. Programs that cannot are more likely to be reduced permanently. Over time, access begins to track not policy, but capacity.

That distinction matters. Private restoration works where families have time, money, networks, and institutional relationships that can be activated quickly. It does not work the same way for schools serving lower-income communities, and it does not work at all for services that cannot be replaced by fundraising. Speech-language pathology cannot be restored by a bake sale. Psychological assessment cannot be crowdsourced. Transportation for disabled students does not reappear because a PAC runs a silent auction.

Once external restoration becomes part of the system, access is no longer evenly distributed. It follows who can afford to maintain it.

Why music is a target

There is also a policy layer underneath this that explains why music, in particular, appears in the discretionary category. Arts Education is required in British Columbia from Kindergarten through Grade 9, but the requirement is defined broadly — it includes dance, drama, music, and visual arts (BC Curriculum, Arts Education). A district can meet that requirement without offering instrumental music.

That matters more than it looks. When music is placed on a “no obligation” slide, that classification is technically correct within the current framework, but it is also a policy choice. The province has defined arts education so broadly that anything under the umbrella of ‘arts’ can be swapped in. In practice, they are not.

Music teaches fractions and ratios through time signatures before a child has the vocabulary for either. It teaches pattern recognition, spatial reasoning, and the relationship between abstract notation and physical action — the same cognitive architecture that underlies mathematics, coding, and scientific reasoning. A child learning to read sheet music is learning to decode a symbolic system and translate it into coordinated motor output on the fly.

Music carries regulatory, relational, and therapeutic functions that other arts disciplines do not replicate in the same way. The sensory predictability of rhythm, the breathwork of wind instruments, the experience of being held inside a collective sound — these are forms of co-regulation.

But music also teaches something harder to quantify and more difficult to replace: how to be bad at something in front of other people and keep going. Learning an instrument is one of the few experiences school offers where failure is expected, visible, and part of the process — where the squeak and the off note are not errors to be corrected by a red mark but stages in a progression that everyone in the room recognises because they have been there. 

For many students, music is the part of school that makes the rest of school bearable — the room where they discover they are good at something, the ensemble that gives a reason to show up on a hard day, the first place they experience themselves as part of something larger than their own desk. When families say music keeps their child in school, they are not being sentimental. They are describing a retention mechanism that the district benefits from but does not fully fund.

“Kids with disabilities spend more time in their lives trying to fit in. They need easy opportunities to find their passion, and the rewards should be that they tried something new. Who knows, ten years later they might go back to it and it could become a hobby or a career.”

–BCEdAccess member

And as the labour market shifts beneath us — as AI reshapes or eliminates career pathways that a generation of students were told to pursue — the skills that music builds are precisely the ones that become more valuable. Creativity, collaboration, improvisation, the ability to listen and respond in real time, the willingness to sit with difficulty and iterate in the presence of others: these are the capacities that remain when the predictable career trajectories have been automated. 

Cutting music to save $251k in a year when the district will likely finish with surplus is not just a loss for the children in those classrooms right now. It is a bet against the futures of students whose working lives will look nothing like the ones their curriculum was designed to prepare them for.

The question, then, is not only why a district is cutting music. It is why the system is designed to make that type of cut permissible while still claiming compliance — and why, at a moment when the economic argument for creative and collaborative education has never been stronger, we are still treating music as the first thing to go.

What this budget reveals

The fable of the boy who cried wolf is usually read as a story about credibility — cry wolf too many times and nobody believes you when it arrives. But there is another reading, more relevant here: what happens when the wolf never arrives and the sacrifices were real?

SD61’s accumulated surplus grew from $9.06 million to $11.23 million in a year when the district projected a $6 million deficit and implemented $4.1 million in cuts. The deficit was presented publicly, covered in media, framed as necessary. The surplus was quiet, recorded in financial statements most families will never see. The cuts to counselling, school supplies, and programs were real, and in many cases permanent.

Step back from the line items and the pattern becomes clearer. The presentation builds a deficit narrative on cautious projections that the district’s own financial plan suggests may again resolve into surplus. It lists pressures while leaving out administrative growth and executive compensation. It places inclusive education — a statutory obligation the district says exceeds funding by $12.2 million — alongside discretionary items like music and athletics. It introduces a “service obligation” category, then flags those same services in the same visual language used for cuts. And it cuts $438,488 from disabled and vulnerable students alongside the $250,871 music reduction.

The structure does the work. What is grouped together, what is shown in red, and what is treated as negotiable shapes how the problem is understood — and what solutions feel available.

This is not unique to SD61. Across BC, similar conditions produce similar outcomes: funding that does not meet need, protected budget areas that continue to expand, and processes that reward conservative forecasting, while cutting services. By the time communities are shown the choices, the frame is already set.

Meanwhile, the Ministry of Education’s own preliminary grant announcement confirms that districts are building budgets using incomplete revenue information. Labour settlement funding for the newly ratified teacher agreement is expected to be provided as a separate grant, but has not yet been confirmed or allocated. (Ministry Operating Grant Summary, March 2026). Budget 2026 also outlines additional K–12 funding over three years, but without clarity on timing or distribution at the district level (BC Gov News, Budget 2026). The result is that decisions are being made using partial figures. Districts are required to implement cuts based on funding that is known to be incomplete.

Over time, this begins to function as a cycle. The budget cries wolf. A series of calculated cuts follows, rarely touching executive salaries or administrative growth. Projected deficits resolve into surplus, and by the time the surplus appears, the position is unfilled, the bus route is cancelled, the programme compressed. The money flows quietly back into reserves. The losses remain where they landed — which is almost always on the same children.

What families should ask

The SD61 online budget feedback form closes April 6, 2026. The special board meeting for budget bylaw readings is April 8, 2026 (SD61 Financial Page).

If you are writing to the district

• Why is inclusive education placed in the “no collective agreement obligation” category alongside music and athletics, when the obligation to provide it is statutory and rights-based?
• Can you provide a full, traceable breakdown of the $12.2 million inclusive learning gap?
  • What costs are included, and how are they calculated?
  • Is the methodology consistent across districts?
• Why do executive compensation increases and new administrative positions not appear on the list of deficit causes?
• Of the past five projected structural deficits:
  • How many resolved into year-end surplus?
  • By how much in each case?

If you are writing to the province

• Why does the Ministry fund inclusive education at a level that leaves districts absorbing large shortfalls, while still requiring them to pass balanced budgets?
• When will labour settlement funding for the new teacher agreement be confirmed and allocated?
• Does the province consider it acceptable that: a district governed by a sole appointed trustee, without an elected board or local accountability, is making permanent cuts to inclusive education services months before a scheduled election?

Ahead of the October 2026 trustee election

Ask every candidate:

• Do you consider a $438,488 cut to disabled and vulnerable students compatible with the district’s stated obligations?
• Will you continue a budgeting approach that:
  • projects worst-case deficits
  • delivers cuts to student-facing services
  • and then finishes the year with surplus?
• Or will you commit to a different approach:
  • one that reflects the actual cost of public education
  • and clearly identifies where funding falls short and who is responsible?