The BC Teachers Federation will be watching closely when Education Minister Rob Fleming unveils a report today examining how school districts are funded.

Glen Hansman says the concern around the funding model review is it could possibly decategorize funding for special needs students needs via what he called a prevalence model.

“So rather than there are 35 students with autism at this particular school and money flows to school districts from the province on that basis. Instead we would look at there is ‘X’ number of people with autism in the general population for every thousand people and money would be allocated that way.”

Hansman says the current model of funding special needs students is also linked in with the recently won back class size and composition language.

“There is also inter-relation between the current way students with special needs are funded and designated and the language that we just got back from the Supreme Court of Canada. Since teachers spent so long trying to get all that language back we want to make sure that what ever change is made that it does not negatively impact those basic guarantees in our collective agreement.”

The Education ministry will post the review online at noon followed an hour later by a press conference with Education Minister Rob Fleming.