Forty-nine employees of the New Westminster school district made more than $100,000 in the last fiscal year.
The school district has released its annual statement of financial information. Every school district in B.C. is provincially mandated to publish the document, which lists all employees earning more than $75,000 a year.
New Westminster’s list for the 2019/20 school year (which ended June 30, 2020) showed 307 employees earning more than $75,000, up from 285 in the previous fiscal year. The number of employees at the $100,000-plus level also went up, from 44 to 49.
Just two employees earned more than $150,000: the school district’s superintendent, Karim Hachlaf, at $197,064, and associate superintendent, Maryam Naser, at $160,802. (Typically, the district’s secretary-treasurer would also be in this group, but current secretary-treasurer Bettina Ketcham started in October 2019, part way through the fiscal year. Her 2019/20 earnings came in at $120,445.)
The remainder of the employees earning $100,000 include senior district administrators (including two directors of instruction, the director of capital projects, the director of facilities, the director of IT, the executive director of human resources and the assistant secretary-treasurer) and a number of principals and vice-principals, as well as a handful of teachers.
In total, the district paid out more than $28.9 million in remuneration and $127,617 in expenses for employees who made the list.
The rest of the school district’s employees (those earning $75,000 or less) earned a collective $28.15 million and received $106,885 in expenses.
The document also shows the district paid a total of $178,607 to the seven elected school trustees, plus $3,380 in expenses.
It also lists the school district’s payments to suppliers with amounts exceeding $25,000.
The largest single amount was more than $32.5 million to Graham Design Builders, which is in charge of the New Westminster Secondary School replacement project.
A $2.2 million payment is shown for Heatherbrae Builders Co. Ltd., the company in charge of the new Richard McBride Elementary School construction project.
Other large payments went to employee pensions, with more than $9 million to the commissioner of the teachers’ pensions and more than $2.7 million to the commissioner of municipal pensions.
