Months after they announced plans to close a Mennonite school as part of their plan to grapple with a $4.3-million budget deficit, the Waterloo Region District School Board is coming under fire for spending $1 million to renovate its boardroom.
But weighing the two against each other isn’t comparing apples to apples, says the board’s chair.
The school board actually runs two separate budgets – an operating budget, based on per-student funding from the province, and a capital budget.
The capital budget is used for repairs and renovations to schools and other board properties, but each individual project must be approved by the province.
The boardroom renovation was a capital project, while the deficit that led trustees to begin shutting down Three Bridges School on St. Jacobs was in the board’s operating budget.
Board chair Ted Martin tells CTV News he understands why people might be surprised by the figures – and that the WRDSB was aware of the perception the boardroom renovation oculd create.
“We asked the question: “Should we be going ahead with this project? It’s going to look bad,’” he says.
“We had already started the process. We had already had the architects in, we had spent some money on it.”
Martin says there were “lots of deficiencies” in the old boardroom that needed to be addressed, including mould issues and a broken sound system.
Greg Weiler, president of the Elementary Teachers’ Federation of Ontario’s Waterloo Region chapter, calls the timing of the renovation “unfortunate,” but doesn’t take any issue with the need for the renovation itself.
“We understand the school board had these decisions made prior to what’s happened most recently with the financial issues,” he says.
The renovation also includes three flatscreen televisions and allows for the boardroom – the biggest room in the WRDSB’s administrative building – to be easily reconfigured for training sessions or other purposes.
