EAST CENTRAL — To cut expenses, the North East School Division (NESD) is choosing not to replace staff members as they retire or otherwise leave.
“We plan to reduce our expenditures quite a bit, because we’ve been using our accumulated surplus, or our reserves, year after year and of course that’s not sustainable,” said Wanda McLeod, superintendent of business administration for the NESD.
“We’ve looked at a few things during the 2019-20 fiscal year. If a position came up to rehire or replace that person, maybe we didn’t rehire or replace that person.”
McLeod gave an example, the NESD chose not to replace a maintenance supervisor position after the previous employee left the role, as well as a maintenance worker.
“Then we looked at staffing in our schools, and that hadn’t been reviewed in a few years. So we looked at the staffing formula and we tweaked that a bit. Together with the change in the staffing formula and the expected enrollment decline in September 2020, we reduced our teachers by about 11 full-time equivalents.”
Don Rempel, the director of education for the NESD, said the school division is expecting no layoffs to occur as a result of these cuts, rather the position will not be filled when the employee leaves it.
“We just haven’t replaced as many of our retiring teachers or temporary teachers with permanent positions for next year,” Rempel said. “Nobody with a permanent contract has lost a position.”
At its June 16 meeting, the NESD passed its 2020-21 budget, which features $60.9 million in revenues – an increase of $1.4 million from last year – and $63.5 million in expenses – a decrease of $2.3 million.
To pay the deficit, the NESD is taking about $1.7 million from their reserves. For the 2019-20 year, removing one-time projects, the budget took about $2.1 million from reserves.
“We had several projects that were not ongoing. For example we had the $1.5 million LED project in our budget,” McLeod said.
“Even with a status quo budget we have a lot of pressures on our increase in costs.”
These include utility and benefit increases.
Since the 2015-16 school year, the NESD’s funding from the province has decreased by about $2.7 million. Of that, about $800,000 is related to enrollment decreases.
“The rest is money we would like returned to the school division, because it really is a struggle to balance our budget since we lost that funding.”
McLeod said it’s still yet to be determined what the fewer staff will mean for the functionality of the school division.
“We’re still working through what September will look like, we’re waiting for some provincial direction before we get too far into deciding what September will look like.”
In the 2019-20 school year, McLeod estimates that about $2 million were saved due to the pandemic.
She attributes this to the school board not needing to call in substitute teachers or bus drivers for the duration of the pandemic, as well as the lack of school bus fuel needed.
The NESD is expecting additional expenses of about $200,000 for pandemic measures for classrooms such as Plexiglas in certain areas, additional cleaning supplies and potentially reusable face masks for staff.
