The South East Cornerstone Public School Division trustees scanned their proposed budget on June 20 when they gathered for their regular public business session and came to the conclusion that they have some challenges waiting in the wings.
At the outset of the meeting, board chairman Harold Laich said he had attended a recent provincially organized business session that discussed the much talked-about public, private partnerships (P3) that are being touted by the provincial government as one way to move forward on expansion and replacement plans for aging infrastructure.
"I found the seminar repetitive but still helpful. They're talking about P3s mostly for projects with values in excess of $100 million, which would mean in our case, bundling school building projects," said Laich.
"What I saw as a downside though would be less input from the communities and we'd get cookie cutter schools. P3s can lead to abuses just look at what has happened in Quebec. I just hope that doesn't happen in Saskatchewan," he said.
Trustee Audrey Trombley added that she wasn't sold on the concept of P3s at first, but looking at the division's current infrastructure deficits, she noted "there is lots of money out there with no promises of returns in traditional markets and there are a lot of contract variations with P3s such as for construction only, construction and maintenance, construction, maintenance and management so it's interesting."
Laich said it will be interesting to monitor what happens in Regina with a P3 contract pending there for a civic waste water treatment facility, if it gets approval from their council.
Janet Foord, an Estevan trustee, who is also president of the Saskatchewan School Boards Association, added that the ability to bundle school projects would only be allowed within each school division, so perhaps P3s would not be an option for rural divisions.
Later on in the meeting, during a discussion regarding a pending dilemma in providing school spaces in Weyburn, the topic of provincial funding arose again.
A long-range plan in that city originally called for the closure of the aging Haig Elementary School following an expansion of the Weyburn Comprehensive School that includes offices and space for the Southeast Regional College. That project has a July, 2015 completion target.
The WCS rebuild would include space for students in Grades 7 through 12. That, in turn, would lead to a remodeling of the current Weyburn Junior High School to accommodate elementary school students and that, in turn, would allow for the closure of the Haig School.
But with the Ministry of Education recently declaring that a new school, instead of renovating the old junior high school, would be preferred, since it would only cost 16 per cent more, yet would add 25 years to the life of the building, has put the overall program on hold since the renovation at the junior high was not approved.
The board learned that with this refusal, the closure of Haig that would have happened in 2016, is now having to be put off until 2019, at best. The closure of Queen Elizabeth School and Souris School, which were next on the list, would also be put back.
While the current phase of the WCS rebuild, for $11 million is pending (up from the original $9.5 million) the bills keep adding up, said Foord.
With more than 100 change orders on the books for the WCS project so far, most of them being at the direction of the Education Ministry, Shelley Toth, Cornerstone's vice-president of finance, said, "We don't know how much to borrow for our share."
Trombley said a letter had been sent to MLA Dustin Duncan regarding the issue, but no response had been received.
"Administration will need guidance from the board," said Marc Casavant, director of education for the division.
"We're disrupting classrooms at the whim of the ministry," said Foord.
"We're now looking at Weyburn Junior High School as a big building that may be left vacant," said Casavant.
"Haig School was the key to this whole thing back in 2003-04," said Weyburn trustee Bryan Wilson. "It wasn't a viable school then. We'll keep kids in this school, which was the original problem."
Chairman Harold Laich said safety problems at Haig that were apparent in 2003 were addressed at the time, but only as a temporary measure.
"They got a short-term solution six years ago," said Wilson.
Foord added, "Then we talk about school divisions working on lean efficiencies and improving the way we do things and we get change orders coming from the ministry indecisions. They're taking money away from kids taking the money because they can't make a decision."
While it was pointed out that money for capital projects, plus interest is eventually picked up by the provincial government, Foord pointed out that $600,000 in change orders for the new school in Oxbow that opened two years ago, wasn't reimbursed until January of this year and in the meantime, the school division is not reimbursed for extending its line-of-credit at the bank.
It was also noted that six local governments within the division had yet to submit property taxes to the provincial government to cover school costs, and Toth and her associates had ended up trying to track them down.
Trombley said that should be something the Ministry of Government Relations does, not local school authorities.
Toth noted that due to the outstanding issues and pending decisions, Cornerstone's bank debt had now risen to $11.6 million compared with $5.7 million for the same time period last year.
