As Classroom Pressures Grow, VSB’s Increase in Management Staff Sparks Criticism

The Vancouver School Board has nearly doubled the number of senior administrators it employs since 2014, while student enrolment has dropped slightly over the same period, a Tyee analysis reveals.

A union that represents elementary school teachers says that money would be better spent on frontline staff and school programs in the classroom.

“The money spent on senior management could be going to the students,” said Marjorie Dumont, president of the Vancouver Elementary and Adult Educators’ Society.

During the April 29 Vancouver School Board meeting where trustees voted on the district’s 2026-27 budget, board chair Victoria Jung said the budgeting process is the “worst part of our job every year.”

“And this is the worst it’s been for us, in this position,” Jung said, referring to the $826-million budget.

At $9,015, the provincial government’s per-student funding level for public school districts is the same as it was in the 2025-26 school year.

What has changed is a drop in Vancouver student enrolment, which means a reduction in the overall funding. As well, there is a significant reduction next year in international students, who pay high fees for their education in the public school system.

Teacher and support worker contracts provide salary increases. And inflation affects every cost from transportation to utilities, software licensing, insurance, contracted services and school supplies.

The district’s operating budget does include an increase in the number of student support workers. But it also cut the district librarian role and reduced the number of teachers trained to work with visually impaired students.

“There’s so much cost pressure,” Jung said during the budget meeting. “These sustained pressures are eating away at the jobs we do as a district and the families that we serve, and the students.”

Provincial law requires school districts to deliver a balanced budget for the coming school year to the Education Ministry by June 30.

School trustees across B.C. say this is currently impossible without making cuts. They point to high inflation and the frozen per-student funding.

Last year, the Vancouver board balanced its $808-million budget in part by ending a commitment to be a living wage employer.

As a result, contracted service workers like school bus drivers saw their hourly wages drop.

At the same time, anonymous posters began popping up around the city, listing the purported six-figure salaries and five-figure wage increases of 11 of the school district’s highest-earning staff members.

At the time, board chair Jung denied the numbers were accurate. She also characterized the sharing of information publicly available on the school board’s website as bullying.

But the number of senior administrators in the Vancouver district, as well as their six-figure pay, has been a bone of contention for the Vancouver Elementary and Adult Educators’ Society for years.

Especially when services and positions that are cut to balance the budget, such as the number of teachers for the visually impaired, affect students in the classroom.

It’s a message the union consistently brings to the district during budget time, union president Dumont says.

“We want teachers, we want counsellors” and other staff who work directly with students, she said. “They keep cutting programs... and it’s going to directly impact students.”

The provincial government advocated for smaller senior administration teams during Patti Bacchus's time as a Vancouver School Board trustee from 2008 to 2016, Bacchus told The Tyee.

“We were running thin,” she said, in terms of senior administrators. “However, as a trustee, I always felt it was important to prioritize spending on frontline services that actually affect kids in classrooms.”

To prioritize spending on classrooms, the board at the time instructed then-superintendent Steve Cardwell not to replace some senior-level administrators after they retired, Bacchus says.

“We started shifting, downgrading some of those positions to field services directors that had much more of a role actually in schools, supporting principals,” she said, instead of working solely out of the school board office.

Number of senior administrators nearly doubled over 10 years

The district’s most recent senior administration pay information is outlined in its 2024-25 statement of financial information.

That statement reveals employees’ remuneration, including salaries, wages, bonuses, taxable benefits, gratuities, income deferrals and any payments into trusts. All district employees whose remuneration was $75,000 or higher are included in the statement.

It does not account for employees’ pension, vacation payouts, work expenses, vehicle allowances or severance packages.

The Vancouver School Board enrolled 53,077 students in the 2024-25 school year. We identified 44 senior administrator positions in the district that year. They are:

• one superintendent;
• five associate superintendents;
• one secretary-treasurer;
• eight directors of instruction;
• one communications director;
• an executive director of employee services;
• 20 district principals; and
• seven other director positions covering everything from learning technology to labour relations to facilities.

It is a near doubling of the 24 senior administrators we counted at the school board in the 2014-15 school year, when Vancouver had 54,340 students.

Senior administrators’ remuneration also showed significant growth over that 10-year period.

In 2014-15, then-Vancouver superintendent Steve Cardwell retired in the middle of the school year. As this meant significantly lower remuneration for him that year, we used his 2013-14 remuneration instead.

For positions with multiple staff members, such as directors of instruction and district principals, The Tyee used the median remuneration for the role that year.

Other positions, such as communications director, were elevated to senior roles with senior remuneration levels after 2014-15.

That’s an example of what is known as “title creep.” Jason Ellis, associate professor of education at the University of British Columbia, says title creep could be one reason why the district’s senior staffing numbers have grown.

“Who is to say in 2014-15 whether they had enough senior administrators, and now they’ve staffed up to the correct amount?” he asked.

But while Bacchus admits the district’s senior administrative numbers were “lean” at the time, she says it wasn’t a hindrance to running the district.

“It does take a certain level of management to run a school district. But it can be done relatively leanly, if government isn’t making too many admin demands,” she said.

Remuneration also increased between 2014-15 and 2024-25. For positions like directors of instruction and district principals, remuneration increased by $40,000 to $50,000 over 2014-15 pay.

But for secretary-treasurer and associate superintendents, their pay increased by almost $100,000 during that period. And the superintendent role received nearly $200,000 more than they were making in 2014-15.

School boards have say over senior administrative pay: former trustee

Senior-level school district compensation is set by the Public Sector Employers’ Council and the BC Public School Employers’ Association, or BCPSEA, a Vancouver district communications staffer told The Tyee via email.

“Districts do not have independent authority to adjust these salaries. Superintendent compensation, however, is determined by the Board and is aligned with BCPSEA guidance for superintendents,” the staffer’s email reads.

“Salary grids for exempt staff are based on provincewide market surveys and job evaluations conducted for BCPSEA by external consultants. They review the complexity of each role, operational responsibilities and broader public sector compensation practices outside of education.”

Salary grids for senior administration were frozen between 2009 and 2016.

“Since then, BCPSEA set salary grid adjustments reflecting the relevant comparator labour market,” the emailed statement reads.

But Bacchus says school boards do have some say over senior administrator pay.

“Sometimes we didn’t rush to implement every single raise that was allowed for administrators,” she said, while acknowledging that never granting raises would lead to issues with hiring and retaining senior staff.

Still, Bacchus says, it is difficult to deny pay increases to staffers working long days and nights alongside trustees.

“You might be eating dinner together three to four nights a week, in some cases,” she said, adding that decisions like raises are made by trustees during in-camera meetings.

“Often the raises are looked at in percentages,” Bacchus said. “So if the teachers negotiate a certain amount of percentage increase, that will be applied to the admin, as well. But three per cent of $400,000 is a lot different than three per cent of $70,000. So the gap seems to be getting wider and wider.”

It’s not an easy job, Bacchus added. But the trustees' obligation is to spend every public dollar on students’ education.

B.C.’s 60 public school districts are regularly audited by the province, UBC’s Ellis told The Tyee.

So if district senior administrator pay were out of whack, that would come up during an audit, he said.

The school district’s financial statements are scheduled to be audited by a third-party company, under the oversight of B.C.’s Office of the Auditor General, from 2027 to 2029.

A spokesperson for the Ministry of Education and Child Care told The Tyee that it recently completed a financial compliance audit of the district, but that didn’t include executive pay.

However, every school district is also required to submit annual audited financial statements to the ministry, the spokesperson added.

Senior administrator pay does not represent the largest operating budget expense for any school district, says Ellis.

Instead it’s other staff salaries, mainly the kindergarten to Grade 12 teachers. Their pay is established by provincial contract negotiations.

“That’s not a slight on teachers,” Ellis said. “They’re the main budget item.”

Cutting anything else in the budget would just be “cutting around the edges,” he added.

But elementary teachers’ union president Dumont says her union’s membership often asks the union why there are so many district administrators. And why their pay is so high.

“It doesn’t make sense how much they’re paid, and the number of senior staff that are being hired,” she said. “You can be competitive, but I think we’re paying way higher than other districts of similar size.”

Comparing Vancouver salaries with those in Surrey and Coquitlam

To analyze whether Vancouver’s senior school district administrators’ 2024-25 pay is too much, too little or just right, we compared remuneration rates with those in the Surrey and Coquitlam districts.

There are some caveats to keep in mind when comparing the three districts.

First, their enrolments differ widely. In the 2024-25 school year, the Vancouver School Board had 53,077 students.

In comparison, Coquitlam enrolled 35,256 students, and Surrey had 83,545 students.

The districts’ senior administrator roles don’t all mirror each other, either. For example, unlike the other districts, Coquitlam doesn’t have any directors of instruction, Vancouver doesn’t have an assistant secretary-treasurer and only Surrey has a deputy superintendent.

As with Vancouver's remuneration information, some Coquitlam and Surrey positions saw so much turnover in 2024-25 that we had to use 2023-24 remuneration data. An asterisk indicates where that occurs in our charts.

Surrey is facing its own criticisms over executive pay levels this year. In many cases, its senior administrators took home more money than its Vancouver and Coquitlam counterparts.

But there were some cases in which Vancouver administrators’ remuneration exceeded Surrey’s, such as district principals and the secretary-treasurer.

As well, the total number of senior administrators in Surrey, a district with 30,000 more students than Vancouver over a space 2.5 times the size of the Vancouver district, is just four employees more than in Vancouver.

“Given the size of our district, those in leadership positions carry responsibilities that are significantly broader in scope and complexity,” Surrey communications staff told The Tyee via email.

“For example, some assistant superintendents in Surrey oversee a zone of schools larger than many entire districts, such as West Vancouver and New Westminster.”

For Bacchus, superintendent pay deserves a second look in both Surrey and Vancouver.

“When you look at what each student brings to the district in funding, that one position is taking up a whole chunk of the budget that could actually make a lot of difference for a lot of kids, with the right staffing in place,” she said.

Updated senior administration remuneration data for the 2025-26 school year will be published on district websites later this year.

*Story updated on May 7 at 12:30p.m. to correct information about student enrolment trends.