financial reports

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financial reports
By Cathy-Dee

Not sure if my insights will help or not. In our school division (actually our province) all school districts have funding via the government. The funding then goes to each division and from there to the schools. In my
division the funding is school based so we are well aware of how the monies are spent. As far as I know all school districts would have to prepare a financial report that would be submitted to their school board each year. And I would think that these would be public record as well.
Perhaps you just need to call the central office for the district you are wondering about and ask how

you could obtain their financial report for the past year.

As far as decisions go, I think there would be quite a bit of variety. As I mentioned above in my district most of the decisions are school-based, but not all of them. Staff wages are negotiated by contract - these monies are put into our school budget - but they are not really there - they are handled by the division. However we only have so many positions within the school that are covered by the monies allotted to us. So if we feel we need an extra 1/2 time position, etc., we would have to buy that position out of our general budget. So as a staff we make a lot of decisions. The principal is the one who makes the final decisions. In the larger schools there may actually be a budget committee who makes the decisions for the school.

In other areas, the boards would make a lot of the decisions or central office. You would need to find out how your district works. The principal of any school would be able to tell you.

As far as new employees and training. Again I think it would differ from place to place. In the past we had no orientation for new staff. Because we do have a high turn over of staff (our area is remote, some don't like living so far from cities), we realized we did have to do more for our new teachers. The government alloted some special money for projects to improve student learning. So our project is working with our new teachers and helping them especially in their first year of teaching. We have an orientation day, they will check out classrooms, meet tenured staff and get a look at our area. They will also have 2 lead teachers to meet with on a regular basis to help them out. We prepared binders of materials to give them with year plans, unit plans, etc., as well.
Then each school also does their own orientation.

As far as training. We have quite a bit of funding for professional development. The first and second year teachers are not sent out as often because they have just come from 4 years of training. Most of their training will be in the classroom. However some are sent out if they are expected to teach a certain program that the school is using, etc.,

So after all this typing, I'm not sure if I answered any of your questions or just made things more confusing. I still think your best action would be to check with your central office and ask about financial records. Also check out their web site if they have one. Quite a few will publish their records right on their web page.