Vancouver School Board trustees will meet with B.C.'s education minister to go over results of a special advisor's report on board finances and management.
The 88-page report prepared by Comptroller General Cheryl Wenezenki-Yolland criticized the board's competency to manage budgets, realize savings and plan strategically over the long-term.
VSB chairwoman Patti Bacchus described the document as a "political deflection" of the province's lack of funding for education across the province.
"This [meeting] is to discuss the report and where we go from here," Bacchus told 24 hours of an hour-long closed-door meeting set for Tuesday morning. "We have a lot of questions. What was the purpose of this [report]?"
Wenezenki-Yolland's report identifies $11.8 million in additional revue and cost savings opportunities. Bacchus maintains the school board faces a more than $16 million budget shortfall for the upcoming school year.
"What we can do [with] all the recommendations that are in this... [is] explain to [Minister Margaret MacDiarmid], if she doesn't understand, how far along we are. There's nothing in this report we didn't know."
MacDiarmid said in a statement released Friday she was "troubled that the board's governance practices have led to poor choices that have diverted millions of dollars from the classroom."
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- Reporter
- Dharm Makwana currently serves as a web editor at The Province, British Columbia's best read daily newspaper. For more than four years he wrote on issues affecting the Lower Mainland for the province's third largest daily newspaper Vancouver 24 hours. Before arriving in Vancouver in January 2007, Dharm won the John Lott Scholarship for outstanding journalism at Centennial College. Since then Dharm has developed an interest in municipal and provincial politics, crime and policing and social issues including immigration, prostitution and trafficking. He is currently working on a series of stories involving Vancouver's sex workers.
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