The Horizon School Division is seeing an increase in the funding it receives from the provincial government, but that doesn’t make up for cuts made in the last two years.
In the 2018-19 provincial budget, the division received $79.8 million, an increase of $443,000. Last year, the Horizon School Division and the Englefeld Protestant Separate School Division, which are amalgamating in the 2018-19 school year, received a combined $79.3 million.
“While we are certainly appreciative of the $30 million increase to overall education funding in the province,” wrote Marilyn Flaman, Horizon’s superintendent of finance services, in an email, “we recognize that the amount allocated to Horizon will unfortunately be insufficient to cover the known increase in salaries, benefits and overall inflationary pressures on our operating expenditures.”
She added this year’s school division budget will be hard to balance, but they will focus their limited resources in meeting the province’s 2020 goals for education, which include improving students’ reading, writing and math skills, as well as improving the graduation rate. The division will be looking for ways to save money, either by being more efficient or co-operating with other school divisions on items like bulk purchases.
“Following a reduction in funding of $54 million for the education sector in the 2017-18 budget, the increase of $30 million to operating grant funding for the province in 2018-19, while deeply appreciated, does not get us back to where we were prior to the previous year’s budget cuts,” Flaman wrote.
Preventative maintenance has also increased by $268,000 to $2.1 million.
“We are very appreciative of this increased funding as the resulting investments that we have been able to make in our school facilities have resulted in noticeable improvements, which is critical as these facilities continue to age and show the wear and tear of intense use,” Flaman wrote.
The school division now also no longer has a cap imposed by the province on how much it can spend on governance expenses, trustee professional development and school community council allowances. As well, there’s no more requirement to spend a certain amount of money on minor renovations.
“The removal of conditionality on these items restores the autonomy of boards to allocate funding as they deem appropriate to respond to local needs,” Flaman wrote.
