Three Stooges governance, year-end surpluses, and the case for an inclusion guarantee.
School districts in British Columbia are required to pass balanced annual budgets. That rule is usually presented as fiscal responsibility. But when it interacts with underfunding, unpredictable student needs, and weak accountability for exclusion, it can create a dangerous incentive: districts are safer, institutionally, when they budget conservatively, delay staffing, hold vacancies, cut supports, and later report surplus.
That is not sound public management. It is risk transfer.
The risk does not disappear when a district avoids a deficit. It moves onto students, families, workers, and schools. Disabled students lose access to instruction. Parents reduce work hours or leave employment. Staff absorb unsafe conditions. Complaints escalate. Legal risk grows. Trust collapses.
Also see: The BC NDP is balancing the budget on mothers’ backs.
If accessibility and inclusion are legal obligations, they should not depend on whether a school district guessed heating costs correctly twelve months earlier.
BC needs a stronger financial architecture for accessibility in public education. This paper proposes three linked reforms:
- Multi-year budget stabilisation for rights-based student supports, so districts are not forced into defensive one-year budgeting.
- Protected accessibility and inclusion reserves that must be used when students are losing access, not merely accumulated.
- A provincial accessibility and inclusion guarantee fund that acts as a central risk pool when disability-related costs exceed local forecasts.
The goal is not to give districts a blank cheque. It is to stop balancing budgets on the backs of vulnerable children and their largely female advocates.
The current design rewards caution more than access
BCEdAccess introduced this issue in The budget that cries wolf: SD61’s deficit cycle, which describes how annual deficit warnings and conservative budgeting can adversely affect inclusion.
British Columbia’s School Act requires boards of education to prepare annual budgets, and estimated expenditures generally cannot exceed estimated revenues plus appropriated operating reserves. Boards must adopt an annual budget by June 30 for the next fiscal year.
This creates a familiar annual ritual. Districts forecast enrolment, staffing, wage pressures, special education needs, inflation, benefit costs, replacement costs, and provincial funding. They then build budgets around a legal requirement to avoid deficits.
On paper, this looks prudent. In practice, it can reward institutional caution even when students are going without support.
A district that spends early to meet urgent accessibility needs may be criticised for financial risk. A district that under-hires, delays support, leaves positions vacant, or cuts “non-enrolling” staff can claim it is being responsible. If that district later reports a surplus, the accounting problem may look solved. But the access problem has already landed somewhere else.
That is the core asymmetry: deficits are visible, measurable, and politically punishable. Exclusion is dispersed, delayed, and often hidden in attendance records, parent withdrawals, informal pickups, partial days, burnout, and “complexity.”
A system that punishes deficits more clearly than exclusion will keep producing exclusion.
Surplus is not neutral when supports were cut
Operating surplus is not inherently bad. The province’s own accumulated operating surplus policy recognises that surplus can help boards plan for future years, manage financial risk, and support consistent service to students. The policy also allows boards to internally restrict portions of surplus for future priorities, while requiring local policies and public engagement around surplus management.
The issue is not whether districts should ever carry surplus. The issue is what surplus means when it appears alongside annual cuts to critical supports.
A year-end surplus has a different public meaning if a district maintained staffing, met accessibility needs, avoided exclusion, and then carried forward funds for a clear, transparent purpose. It has a much more troubling meaning if families spent the year being told there was no money while students lost access to school.
In that situation, surplus is not just a financial result. It is evidence of a planning system that protected the budget from uncertainty by exposing children to it.
Districts often describe cuts as unavoidable. They point to inflation, unfunded wage increases, service pressures, and provincial underfunding. Many of those pressures are real. But when conservative forecasts repeatedly turn into surplus, the public is entitled to ask what was sacrificed to produce that result.
Were education assistant hours reduced? Were specialist positions held vacant? Were counsellors, learning support teachers, occupational therapists, speech-language pathologists, psychologists, or behaviour support staff stretched beyond usefulness? Were students placed on reduced timetables because the support was not there? Were families told to wait while money remained unspent?
A budget can be technically balanced and still structurally dishonest if it fails to account for who carried the risk.
Accessibility is not an optional programme area
Public education is a service. Under BC’s Human Rights Code, people must not be denied or discriminated against in services customarily available to the public on protected grounds, including physical or mental disability, unless there is a bona fide and reasonable justification. The BC Human Rights Tribunal describes schools as an example of public services covered by the Code.
That matters for budgeting.
Accessibility and disability-related accommodation are often treated inside school district budgets as if they are one pressure among many. But they are not ordinary discretionary enhancements. For some students, support is the condition that makes attendance possible. Communication access, behavioural support, safe staffing, transportation accommodation, assistive technology, sensory adaptation, mental health support, and instructional modification are not extras when they determine whether a child can meaningfully attend school.
A district cannot make its legal obligations disappear by underestimating them.
The current funding model puts districts in a structurally conflicted position. They are expected to meet rights-based obligations, but they must do so inside annual budgets built from imperfect forecasts and limited provincial allocations. The Ministry’s operating grants are updated through the year based on enrolment counts and other data, but the basic structure remains formula-driven and district-based.
For 2025/26, the province reports estimated operating grants of $7.290 billion, including an additional $87 million for students with disabilities or diverse abilities, an 8.9% increase. That increase may sound substantial in isolation, but the practical question is not whether one line increased. The practical question is whether districts can provide timely access when needs are uneven, urgent, and not perfectly forecastable.
If the answer is no, then the system needs a stabilisation mechanism.
Three Stooges governance is not accountability
When disabled children are excluded, the system can look like Three Stooges governance: the Ministry points at districts, districts point at schools, schools point back at funding, staffing, policy, or “complexity,” and everyone insists the problem belongs somewhere else.
But families are not watching a comedy routine. They are watching a public system pass responsibility around while their children lose access to school.
The Ministry can say districts make local staffing decisions. Districts can say they cannot spend money they do not have. Schools can say they are managing within the staffing they were assigned. Each explanation may contain a piece of truth, but none of them restores the service.
That is the failure of fragmented governance. Responsibility is divided finely enough that everyone can explain their constraint, but not clearly enough that anyone is required to fix the harm. For families, the distinction between provincial funding, district allocation, and school-level implementation is often irrelevant. The child either has access to school, or they do not.
Parents should not have to care which hand dropped the ball. Public education is one system, and services for disabled children should be guaranteed.
A guaranteed accessibility model would change the question. Instead of asking which level of the system is most to blame, it would ask: what support is required, who has authority to provide it, what funding mechanism applies, and what deadline will restore access?
The design problem: local budgets carry provincial risk
Disability-related education costs are not evenly distributed. One school may have several students requiring intensive support in the same year. A small district may face a sudden need that is proportionally large. A student may return from hospitalisation, experience trauma, require communication technology, need temporary one-to-one support, or need a carefully staged return after exclusion. A staffing shortage may increase replacement costs. A transportation accommodation may be essential but expensive. None of this arrives neatly before the budget deadline.
That is exactly why pooled systems exist.
When costs are uneven, unpredictable, rights-based, and socially important, it makes little sense to force each local district to absorb volatility alone. A province-wide system is better positioned to pool risk across 60 districts than any one district is to absorb sudden pressures locally.
The current approach leaves districts trying to manage provincial obligations with local risk tolerance. Some respond by spending cautiously. Some rely on vacancy savings. Some wait for crises to become undeniable. Some shift the practical burden to families by reducing timetables, calling parents for pickups, or leaving children technically enrolled but not meaningfully attending.
This is not only unfair. It is inefficient.
Failure to accommodate early creates downstream costs: parent work loss, staff injury, burnout, emergency meetings, investigations, complaints, human rights proceedings, legal costs, substitute costs, placement breakdowns, and long-term disengagement from school. The system may avoid a budget deficit in June while creating a larger social deficit over time.
Reform one: multi-year budget stabilisation for access supports
The first reform is a limited multi-year budget stabilisation model for accessibility and inclusion.
This would not mean districts could run open-ended deficits. It would mean that specified rights-based supports could be managed over a three- to five-year planning window, with provincial oversight and public reporting. The purpose would be to reduce the incentive to under-respond in year one because the cost is uncertain.
A multi-year stabilisation model could apply to:
- disability-related staffing needed to maintain attendance or participation;
- communication supports and assistive technology;
- transportation accommodations;
- specialist assessments and intervention;
- short-term intensive support during transitions or return-to-school planning;
- accessibility-related health and safety supports;
- temporary staffing pressures caused by urgent accommodation needs.
The key is that this flexibility must be tied to access outcomes. It should not become a general permission slip for poor forecasting or structural deficits. Districts using the mechanism should have to show what student access problem they are solving, what support is being provided, what timeline applies, and how the cost will be managed across the planning period.
This would shift the question from “Can we afford to act this year?” to “What is the responsible plan for meeting the obligation over time?”
That is a healthier question.
Reform two: protected accessibility and inclusion reserves
The second reform is a protected accessibility and inclusion reserve.
Districts already have the ability to carry forward operating surplus, and provincial policy recognises that operating surplus can support long-term planning and risk management. But if surplus is accumulated while disabled students are losing access, the problem is not merely whether the reserve exists. The problem is whether there is a duty to use it.
A protected accessibility and inclusion reserve would be restricted in both directions.
Districts should not be able to raid it for unrelated purposes. But they also should not be able to sit on it while students are on partial days, informal exclusions, unsupported placements, or long waits for basic access tools.
A strong reserve model would require public reporting on:
- opening balance;
- annual contributions;
- amounts spent;
- types of needs addressed;
- number of students or schools supported, with privacy protection;
- requests denied or deferred;
- reasons for any significant unspent balance;
- relationship between reserve use and attendance, reduced timetables, or exclusion data.
The public should be able to see whether accessibility money is being used to restore access or merely preserved to make the balance sheet feel safer.
A simple rule could anchor the policy:
Where a student is losing access to school because disability-related support is not in place, restricted accessibility funds must be considered before the district cuts, delays, or denies support.
That does not require reckless spending. It requires a transparent explanation when money exists but access is still denied.
Reform three: a provincial accessibility and inclusion guarantee
The strongest reform is a provincial accessibility and inclusion guarantee fund.
This would function as a central risk pool for legitimate disability-related overages. Districts would still budget responsibly. They would still be expected to use ordinary operating funds, targeted grants, and local reserves appropriately. But when urgent access-related costs exceed reasonable forecasts, the province would provide a backstop.
The principle should be straightforward:
No student should lose access to school because their district is afraid the cost will exceed its annual forecast.
This guarantee could cover costs that are:
- tied to disability-related access, accommodation, safety, communication, attendance, or participation;
- urgent or time-sensitive;
- beyond what the district reasonably budgeted for;
- necessary to prevent exclusion, restore attendance, or maintain meaningful instruction;
- documented through a clear support plan;
- reported publicly in aggregate.
The province already has authority under the School Act to provide special grants to boards in addition to other grants payable under the Act. The question is not whether special funding mechanisms are conceptually possible. The question is whether BC is willing to build one specifically around accessibility and inclusion, with enough transparency to prevent both local rationing and provincial offloading.
A guarantee fund would also give the Ministry better visibility into system pressure. If districts repeatedly draw on the fund for the same types of needs, that is not a reason to blame individual students. It is evidence that the base funding model is misaligned with actual need.
Automatic triggers would make the guarantee real
A guarantee mechanism should not depend entirely on districts voluntarily admitting they cannot meet student needs. There should be automatic triggers for review, support, and potential funding.
Triggers could include:
- a designated student exceeding a defined absence threshold;
- a student being placed on a reduced timetable for more than a short, fixed period;
- repeated early pickups or partial-day attendance connected to disability-related need;
- high district rates of “unspecified” absence for students with inclusive education designations;
- unfilled support positions while students are excluded or under-attending;
- delayed access to communication tools, assistive technology, or specialist support;
- repeated safety incidents where no accommodation plan has been implemented;
- a pattern of families being asked to keep children home because staffing is unavailable.
These triggers would connect money to access, not just enrolment. That is essential.
A student can be enrolled and still excluded. A child’s name can remain on a class list while their actual access has been foreclosed. Budgeting systems that only count placement miss the reality families are living.
Spend it or explain it
A politically realistic reform could begin with a “spend it or explain it” rule for inclusion-related funds.
If a district cuts supports, delays staffing, or reports unmet accessibility needs while also carrying forward surplus, it should be required to explain the relationship between those facts.
The explanation should not be buried in a 200-page budget package. It should be plain, public, and specific enough for parents, staff, trustees, journalists, and the Ministry to understand.
A district should have to answer:
- What inclusion-related supports were reduced, delayed, or left vacant?
- How many students were on reduced timetables or partial days?
- How many students with designations had concerning attendance patterns?
- How much inclusive education funding was received?
- How much was actually spent on access-related supports?
- How much surplus was carried forward?
- Was any surplus internally restricted for accessibility or inclusion?
- If money remained available, why was it not used to prevent loss of access?
This would not solve underfunding by itself. But it would make the current pattern harder to hide.
It would also change the public conversation. Districts could still say they need more provincial funding. The province could still say districts must manage responsibly. But neither level of government could point at the other while children quietly disappear from school.
Answering the predictable objections
Before the chorus of naysayers begins, here are a few rebuttals.
“Districts cannot be trusted with more flexibility”
That is exactly why flexibility should be tied to reporting, triggers, and access outcomes. The current model already gives districts discretion; it just channels that discretion through annual budget fear. A better model would make districts show how financial decisions affect attendance, support, exclusion, and accommodation.
“This would reward poor planning”
Not if the mechanism distinguishes between ordinary mismanagement and legitimate volatility. Districts should have to show that costs were tied to real access needs, were not reasonably avoidable, and were addressed through a concrete plan. But refusing support because a need was not perfectly forecast is not good planning. It is rationing by spreadsheet.
“The province cannot fund every local pressure”
The province already funds the system and sets the rules. It is also better positioned than individual districts to pool uneven costs. A guarantee fund would not eliminate local responsibility. It would prevent local volatility from becoming student exclusion.
“Surplus is needed for long-term stability”
Sometimes, yes. But stability for whom? A surplus policy that protects future plans while students lose current access is incomplete. Long-term planning cannot be used as a justification for present exclusion. Protected reserves should support students, not merely reassure auditors.
“Accessibility needs are complex”
They are. That is why the system needs better design, not more delay. Complexity is not an argument against action. It is an argument for mechanisms that can respond quickly, track patterns, and prevent families from carrying the burden alone.
What should change now
BC should create a provincial accessibility finance framework with five basic commitments.
- The province should require districts to report inclusion spending, vacancies, surplus, reduced timetables, and attendance patterns together. These issues are usually discussed separately, which allows systems to claim scarcity in one room and report surplus in another.
- Districts should be required to establish protected accessibility and inclusion reserves, with rules requiring active consideration of those funds when students are losing access.
- The Ministry should create a provincial accessibility and inclusion guarantee fund for legitimate disability-related overages that exceed reasonable district forecasts.
- BC should pilot multi-year budget stabilisation for access-related supports, with public reporting and Ministry oversight.
- The province should establish automatic review triggers when attendance, reduced timetables, support vacancies, or unspecified absence suggest that disabled students are being pushed out of school.
If the duty is provincial, the risk cannot be local. If the obligation is legal, the funding cannot be optional. If access is the goal, the budget process must measure whether students actually got through the door and stayed there.
Conclusion
The public is often told that school districts have no choice. Budgets must be balanced. Costs are rising. Needs are complex. Funding is limited. Everyone is doing their best.
But process design shapes outcomes.
When districts are required to balance annually, punished for deficits, weakly monitored for exclusion, and allowed to carry surplus after cutting supports, the system has chosen what it protects first. It protects the appearance of fiscal control.
Disabled students and their families are then asked to absorb the instability the budget avoided.
BC does not need a funding model that rewards districts for crying wolf and then reporting surplus. It needs an accessibility finance model that treats inclusion as infrastructure: planned, protected, monitored, and guaranteed.
A child’s access to school should not depend on whether a district was brave enough to spend the money in time.