Susan Fonseca always looks forward to this time of year. As a secondary teacher and president of the Langley Teachers Association, September means the beginning of school with new chances to improve education and enhance the lives of the children in her community.

But this year Fonseca and her fellow educators have more to look forward to than new classes and students eager to learn. They're anticipating the release of the provincial auditor general's report on the Langley School Board's financial mismanagement that led to a debt of $13.5 million.

It's a burden made worse by the $7-million shortfall in the 2010/11 budget announced by the board this past spring.

"Langley has basically the double whammy of the effects of the provincial underfunding and also the impact of the accumulated debt that it has from previous years of financial mismanagement," Fonseca told The Tyee.

Wendy Johnson, vice-chair of the Langley School Board, has already seen a draft of the report, which the board plans to release to the public later this month.

"The auditor general's report vindicates the community in my view. And I see that as a vehicle for change," she told The Tyee.

How the debt began

The troubles first came to light in March 2009 when the board identified financial errors in the amended budget that saw a $264,000 budget surplus change into a multi-million dollar deficit that continued to grow.

Private auditors Deloitte & Touche LLP were commissioned by the board to conduct a review of the processes that led to a flawed budget. By the time their report was released in Sept. 2009, the total deficit according to the board had reached $8.2 million. The following February, the board announced it had another deficit of $5.3 million, which raised the debt to $13.5 million in all.

The LTA wrote the auditor general twice that fall requesting he provide "oversight and direct services" to the district, and by January the board announced that not only would the auditor general be acting as the board's auditor for at least the next three years, but writing a report on the actions that led to the debt, as well.

The LTA disputes the board's deficit numbers, claiming the district is actually $19.8 million in debt (see sidebar). Frustrated by the lack of clarity, the LTA submitted a Freedom of Information request in Oct. 2009 for the members and the minutes of the board's auditing committee since 2005/06. Three months later they were told no such committee existed, despite the fact that the accounting firm of Grant Thorton, the board's auditors at the time, had recommended every year since 2005/06 that the board improve its internal finance controls.

Board chair Joan Bech says this was an oversight the board moved to remedy this year.

"An audit committee was established in late spring and has been meeting regularly," Bech told The Tyee by email. "It includes two trustees and the chair of the board. The deliberations of the committee have been assisted by advice from the superintendent, the secretary-treasurer, the assistant secretary-treasurer and the office of the auditor general."

She did not comment on why the board had not created an audit committee before this year. It's one of many things Fonseca hopes the auditor general's report will discuss.

"We want the auditor general's report to really identify what the errors and the systemic problems are in their accounting system here in Langley. To see how they could have overspent so many millions of dollars without anyone at the board office knowing," says Fonseca.

The budget shortfall

The board has developed a Deficit Elimination Plan in which $3.375 million in cuts will be made every year for four years starting in the 2011/12 school year. The plan includes increasing the rental rates of school facilities, eliminating positions in the district board office and cutting down on services to schools such as maintenance and IT support.

But the plan doesn't address the $7 million budget shortfall for this school year, which the LTA blames on ministry of education underfunding. The ministry argues the district has a seen a loss of 1,600 students in the area since 2000/01, and therefore needs to cut costs.

"As many school districts are realizing, it just doesn't make sense to keep spending money heating and maintaining increasingly empty schools when those funds might better be directed toward improving learning for our students," Education Minister Margaret MacDiarmid told The Tyee in an emailed statement.

BC Teachers Federation president Susan Lambert says the government often cites low enrolment, even though it predicts enrolment will pick up in the coming years.

"Enrollment did not decrease between this year and last year, and in the future, according to ministry figures, next year we have growth in student enrollment," Lambert told The Tyee.

The ministry's 2009/2010 Summary of Key Information document backs up Lambert's claim, showing the number of students enrolled in the province's public education system will increase by approximately 1,000 this school year.

"The underfunding almost triples the decline in enrolments," Lambert says.

In order to compensate for the shortfall, the board, which has closed six schools and reconfigured 13 others since 2004, served 61 teachers and 156 CUPE workers with layoff notices in June. This came on top of 40 teachers already retiring.

Some of the positions cut include a speech language pathologist, an educational psychologist, special education assistants, teacher librarians, ESL teachers and clerical staff at both schools and the board office.

"There's going to be less services for students this year," Fonseca told The Tyee. "All the support teachers that regular classroom teachers rely upon for the extra help with kids, it's just drastically reduced."

Johnson is no stranger to the strain of school board cuts. She was principal of H.D. Stafford Secondary in Langley when the board decided three years ago to turn it into a middle school. She opted for early retirement and ran for the board in 2008, winning with the highest number of votes of all the candidates.

Now Johnson is seeing what it's like from the other side, though she believes the cuts being made put some children at risk of falling through the cracks of the education system.

"Particularly the grey area kids, who struggle in one area or another, who aren't identified as a special needs student but teachers know who they are and do their best to provide additional support for those kids in the classroom," Johnson told The Tyee.

"But there's going to be larger class sizes, less support in classes for those kids who are at risk, certainly."

'Ministry's dirty work'

Other school boards in the province are facing similar budget shortfalls, including the Vancouver School Board, which went head-to-head with the ministry earlier this year when it presented a needs-based budget as opposed to the balanced budget the ministry requires by legislation. It's an action Fonseca hoped the Langley board would follow.

"Our board hears continually [from teachers] that the situation is deteriorating in our schools in terms of the time that's available to support each individual student," Fonseca says. "We would like our board to pass that message on to the minister, and not just do the ministry's dirty work of cutting services to students in classrooms."

Johnson personally believes the ministry is underfunding education across the province, but says that's not the position of the board, and Langley's financial problems can't be blamed on the government alone.

"It's a fine line that we walk as the board of trustees. And we looked at what Vancouver [School Board] did, actually, and we had talked about submitting a needs budget, but the difference between us and Vancouver is that part of this debt was of our own doing," she told The Tyee.