WEYBURN — The Preventive Maintenance and Renewal (PMR) program for the South East Cornerstone Public School Division has become a study in economic husbandry as well as construction and repairs to school facilities.
Andy Dobson, manager of facilities and transportation for the school division provided an outline of the proposed project plans for the upcoming academic year when he visited with the board members in the division's head office in Weyburn on May 24 during the open business meeting.
"We had a negative for the first time," Dobson said in his opening remarks. The financial support was down 3.8 per cent, or about $110,000 compared with the previous school year of 2022-23.
Therefore, amendments to the first year of a three-year plan should be fairly accurate he said, while the following two years are more of an educated guessing game.
The projects being foreseen within a $2.653 million budget will go ahead with no expected increase in PMR funding with a designated accumulated surplus that will be just over $91,000 next year. Dobson said the usual surplus or "holdover" is around $250,000 that is used in the event of emergency situations that aren't necessarily covered by insurance policies and are not covered by any additional provincial funds. He said he hoped the team could build that surplus account back to around $171,000 by the end of the 2025-26 school year.
"So the priorities change," Dobson said, referring to use of surplus funds.
Pointing to inflation as part of the problem, Dobson noted that roofing supplies have risen about 10 per cent over the past year while mechanical materials, furnaces and fixtures have gone up by between 30 to 60 per cent.
He cited McNaughton School in Moosomin as an example of a need to switch priorities when a major refurbishment of the library and home economics rooms and support systems that required an upgrade to a sprinkler system to meet code were originally estimated at a cost of $600,000, but came in as a $1.2 million project that had to be postponed. "We had to re-establish priorities there and see what else we could manage," Dobson said.
An ambitious program of replacing old-styled lighting systems with newer LED lights is also on hold at most locations except Estevan Comprehensive School where the very old lighting system will be replaced, gradually, by the newer LED system, led by the division's two electricians and their staffs. ECS will also receive another stage of needed roofing replacement, at a cost of $550,000.
Division-wide facility repairs and HVAC system replacements or repairs will take care of the rest of the budgeted amount with the exception of the upgrade on the boiler system in the Yellow Grass school that will come with a cost of about $275,000.
A temporary $40,000 repair of the Lyndale School in Oungre is now in need of a replacement roof at a cost of around $265,000.
In the 2025-26 PMR budget, it is hoped that money can be set aside for such things as roof replacements in Lampman, Stoughton and Radville, among other items.
