The Kamloops District School Board is reporting a budget surplus in the last fiscal year.

The board was presented with its financial statements at its meeting this week. Chair Kathleen Karpuk says the auditors had no concerns with how it was running the district financially. It gave the board a clean audit opinion. “Revenue up slightly over last year. Part of that is because we had an additional 182 FTE students and part of that was an increase in the per student amount that we got.” Karpuk says it had about $7.25 million increase in revenue and its total operating budget for 2018-19 was just over $152 million.

 

Chair Kathleen Karpuk says most of that extra money goes toward benefits and wages. “That’s where most of that goes when you have an additional 182 students, then you hire additional teachers and that’s where a lot of that went. Another thing we discussed is that we did have a small surplus of $1.5 million.” Karpuk says when you think about how many different people, programs and line items there are, to spend everything within 1% is pretty amazing.