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A teacher’s annual ATA fee set at $1,113
Brian Jordan
ATA Treasurer
Delegates attending the 93rd Annual Representative Assembly balanced the budget, approved new programs and set a fee that will guide Association activity for the 2010/11 fiscal year.
Delegates were presented with a proposed budget that predicted a deficit—based on the current fee of $1,059—of $1,282,000. A major contributor to this deficit was a required contribution of $679,000 to begin paying down an unfunded liability that had arisen in the Office Staff Pension Plan. This plan is an Association-sponsored pension plan for staff who are not certificated teachers.
Five new programs with a total price tag of $67,000 were included in the proposed budget. Two of those programs will focus on research on the growth and development of teacher leaders. Both projects will be undertaken with other education partners. A third program will see the Association investigating key emerging technologies to evaluate the opportunities and challenges for teaching, learning and teacher workload. The fourth program involves joint sponsorship of a symposium to highlight the Association’s research on the leadership role of school administrators, school improvement and educational development. The last new program is a collaborative project to develop materials and leadership training that will assist teachers in integrating francophone cultural components within the Alberta curriculum.
The cost of the five new programs is more than offset by the elimination of five programs that will be either completed during the current fiscal year or discontinued. These programs had a total cost of $94,000.
Delegates turned down proposals from local associations that would have provided for an annual Political Engagement Seminar (it is currently held every second year) and that would have provided each teacher in the province with an e-mail address.
A proposal in the budget to increase the annual fee for an associate member from $100 to $150 was modified by delegates. The Assembly approved a proposal by delegates to set the associate member fee each year at 15 per cent of the fee for an active member employed full-time.
At the conclusion of a relatively short but productive debate, delegates approved an annual fee of $1,113 for each full-time active member to balance the budget.
