There were 14,613 students enrolled in the Kamloops-Thompson school district in 2018-19 and 14,832 students enrolled in the district this year. Those numbers are expected to climb one again in 2020-21.

It is beginning to go through the budget process which comes with some guess work. Board Chair Kathleen Karpuk says it has had to predict how many students will be enrolled in the district next year which is not always the easiest thing. “Assuming that the grade 12’s are going to graduate and leave us, kindergartners and everyone will move up a grade, and we then use birth numbers from interior health to predict how many new kindergartners we think we’re going to get. So, that gives us a ballpark of how many students we think we’re going to have for the next year.”

Karpuk says the tricky part is that it can’t predict in-migration or out-migration. “So families moving into the district or out and that’s economic. So, we actually had [238] extra students over predictions show up in September that we hadn’t predicted.”

“That has big impact on our budget. Wound up adding 1.68 million dollars to our budget. So that means that when end of September hits, we have those student numbers, then we have to rejig everything.”

April 9th will be the chance for the public to first see the budget and the deadline for public submissions will be April 23rd.

Karpuk says they finally get budget dollars in December and then finalize everything and pass the completed budget.