The Vancouver School Board awarded PricewaterhouseCoopers a $100,000 contract to review the district's finances and come up with budget proposals for 2012/13. The decision was made at a board meeting Monday night, although the NPA's Ken Denike voted against it and his NPA colleagues Sophia Woo and Fraser Ballantyne abstained.
Last week, board chair Patti Bacchus told the Courier the VSB wants to hire a contractor "to help identify areas of potential savings in the case that [VSB] funding doesn't improve."
Preliminary figures had suggested a $14 million shortfall for the 2012/13 budget, although that number has likely dropped by $4 million or $5 million due a provincial government funding announcement last Friday, according to the VSB's secretary treasurer Rick Krowchuk. The number could fall again depending on further government funding announcements, but cuts are still likely. A shortfall update is expected in January. PricewaterhouseCoopers has been hired for similar jobs by the Montreal, Calgary and Ottawa-Carleton school districts. Ontario's Ministry of Education hired the company to perform operational reviews of the 72 boards in that province.
Krowchuk said after years of education cuts in Vancouver, it's useful to have outside eyes to examine whether "efficiencies" have been missed. PricewaterhouseCoopers may propose revenue-generating ideas as well.
The company has an understanding of what other public sector organizations are doing and what might be transferable to this school district, according to Krowchuk. "They're more familiar than us, who work exclusively in education, to know what could work-what has worked in other situations and could potentially work here. In other words identify best practices," he told the Courier Monday afternoon.
Krowchuk said the Ottawa-Carleton school district review was highly detailed and addressed potential savings in administration, as well as examined educational areas where expenditures exceeded budgets. Proposals ranged from departments sharing support staff to cutting daily mail services between schools to twice a week. Krowchuk acknowledged some unions expressed concern about the review at committee meetings. He suspects some of that relates to their "negative experience" with the province's comptroller general review of the district's finances, which produced controversial findings.
The school board makes the final decisions regarding budget recommendations that come out of the review.
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