School District 43 may have to pay back up to $149,000 for grants it received for students who were missing paperwork or didn't show up for programs they were enrolled in.
An enrolment audit carried out by the province looked at a random sampling of students and found that some were registered without proper documentation while others hadn't turned up for classes.
The audit, conducted by the Ministry of Education, matched district records and a head-count taken Sept. 30 to verify per-pupil grant allotments. Where information didn't match attendance, the district will be expected to pay back the grant.
But SD43's secretary treasurer, Rick Humphreys, is planning to appeal some of the findings because of special circumstances. In some instances, students took longer to show up than expected for programs targeting aboriginal students and in others, documents weren't available by the Sept. 30 deadline for someimmigrant students.
"It was a document issue, the paperwork wasn't ready," said Humphreys, who expects the district will still have to pay back about $70,000 because there were cases where students were recorded as enrolled but were actually attending school elsewhere. Still, he said, the number of missing students is very small in a district with 30,000 students.
