B.C. Public Education is falling short?

Do you have a political voice? I'm in the process of finding mine.

As a parent with children in public school. I'm having a serious struggle with the impact our current governments budget hacking is having on my children's education.

I believe our school board has done it's best with the cards it has been dealt over the last several years. School District 85 is anticipating a budget short fall of a min. of a 1 million dollars, it could be more. Here are the current numbers:

- budget 09/10 - approx. 19 million.
- salaries/pension - approx. 17.1 million ( which can not be touched)
- operating budget - 1.9 million

So as you see there's not much room to move. Our current schools are running at bare minimum. We have no music programing at all. Our high schools offer only the basic programs. No band, no home-ex, very basic P.E. & minimal fine arts of any kind.

The PAC at our school works very hard. Much of our financial resource are spent on topping up our kids education. We fund raised for years & applied for several private sector grants to pay for that new accessible playground featured above. We pay for field trips, to bring in art presentations and workshops for our students. The " Healthy Schools Program" being offered at our school is basically run by the myself with the support of our teachers. The funding has come from community based grants.

Our totally dedicated teachers spend countless unpaid hours coaching teams and traveling with students to events so they can participate. Most of them are also topping up their classrooms supplies. Our principle Larry practically lives at the school ( not joking). If I had to guess I'd say he's only getting payed for 50 o/o of the hours he's putting in.

I'm angry that our governments priority is not our children. This HAS to change !!!