2025-2026 Annual Budget Summary

At the Regular Public Board Meeting on Monday, April 28, 2025, the Kamloops-Thompson Board of Education passed the 2025-2026 Annual Budget Bylaw.

“On behalf of the Board of Education, I want to sincerely thank everyone who shared their budget feedback and priorities and participated in multiple months of consultation as part of the 2025-2026 Budget development process,” shared Board Chair Heather Grieve. “We have had to make some incredibly difficult decisions throughout this process in order to achieve a balanced and stable budget moving forward. Like many districts across the province, we are facing significant financial challenges due to provincial cost increases, inflationary pressures, flattening enrollment, and current funding levels. As a Board, we will continue to advocate for increased revenue to address provincial cost increases annually to ensure students and staff across our district are supported.”

2025-2026 Budget Overview

The 2025-2026 draft budget is $251,000,000 and made up of three parts: the Operating Fund, Special Purpose Fund, and the Capital Fund.

The Operating Fund is 84% of the total budget and includes costs for day-to-day operations and includes salaries, benefits, utilities, and supplies. 89% of the Operating Fund is spent on salaries and benefits and only 11% on supplies.

The Special Purpose Fund is 12% of the total budget and is targeted for specific activities or purposes that are not covered by Operating or Capital Funds, such as Early Learning and minor capital projects that prolong the life of a building.

The Capital Fund is 4% of the total budget. Capital funding pays for the design and construction of new schools, additions, and school enhancements and upgrades.

2025-2026 Provincial Cost Increases

Similar to districts across the province, we are facing cost increases, inflationary pressures, flattening enrolment, and increased supports needed for students with complex needs, and funding is not keeping pace with these increased costs.

Cost increases are anticipated to be $5.79M in 2025-2026 due to several factors including higher salaries, employee benefits, inflation, school bus and support equipment replacement, portable moving costs, new school opening costs, and services and supplies increases. Many of these cost pressures are not funded and must be absorbed into existing budgets.

Because of current provincial funding levels, flattening enrolment, decreases in revenues, and provincial cost increases, we have had to make some difficult recommendations in order to balance the 2025-2026 draft budget while trying to meet priorities set out for us by the government and our school and district communities.

Budget Development and Consultation

The 2025-2026 Budget was developed after a robust consultation process over four months with representatives from employee partner groups, students, staff, parents, Indigenous rights holders, and community members.

Following the preliminary budget presentation on April 9, 2025, District and school communities were invited to provide further feedback until April 21, 2025. We received 94 email responses, four letters, and feedback from employee partner groups that highlighted three main themes.

1. Student Support and School Staff: Student support in the classroom and schools was the top priority for parents, staff, and community members. We aimed to minimize the impact on classroom teachers, continue to plan classes to meet students’ needs, and hire teachers based on enrollment. We have added, not reduced, allocations for Certified Education Assistants in classrooms. We have ensured that students have access to both Counselors and Learning Assistance Resource Teachers and have tried to minimize the impact on these roles. We have ensured that students have access to libraries and to their classroom teachers and librarians during library time while also continuing to support school libraries from the District-level.

2. Curriculum Program Support and District Staff: Parents and staff emphasized the need to maintain curricular programming as well as extracurricular programming and events that support students. We have ensured district level staff can support curriculum such as literacy and numeracy, career education, languages, fine arts, and inclusive education for 2025-2026. Community feedback requested a reduction in district office positions and salaries—we have reduced district level staff in this budget and are 0.2% below the provincial average for district administration.

3. Transparency and Trust in the 2025-2026 Budget: Parents, staff, and community asked for more transparency about the accounting error and the 2025-2026 Budget. Reductions in the 2025-2026 Budget are not the result of the accounting error which was addressed this year with strategies we implemented such as reducing district level supplies and services, some staff reductions, and reassignment of district level teachers to support replacing teachers when they were away. We have aimed to present the budget details with transparency, while respecting the privacy of individuals who may be affected by budget reductions.

Recommendations to Address Cost Increases

The Board and District had to make extremely difficult recommendations in order to balance the budget while trying to meet priorities, including reducingSupplies and Services budgets by approximately $350,000, Principal, Vice Principal, and Exempt Staffing reductions of approximately $590,000, Teaching Staff adjustments of $3,266,000, and Support Staff adjustments of $2,000,000. To learn more about these recommendations and reductions, please watch the 2025-2026 Budget presentation here.

The Board would like to thank all staff, partners, community members, and employee partner groups who took the time to participate in the 2025-2026 budget development process. These are incredibly difficult decisions and we know this process has been challenging for staff, parents, and our community. As a District and Board, we will remain focused on classroom and students’ needs, and to continue to do everything we can to meet school community needs.