The South East Cornerstone Public School Division didn’t have a lot of time to grapple with tough decisions they had to make once details of a restricted provincial budge, filtered down to them, but they got their numbers filed in time.
Shelley Toth, the division’s chief financial officer, provided the board members with the prospective 2016-17 budget during their June 28 board meeting held in Weyburn. The deadline for submitting the regional budgets to the Education Ministry was June 30.
Cornerstone projects operating expenditures to be $107.4 million for the next fiscal year and a total staff of 1,065.61 fulltime equivalent positions.
No programs are being cut, in fact, the Cyberstone Virtual School services are being expanded to from Grades 10 to 12 to now include Grades 8 and 9.
But to get there, the division is having to dip into their unrestricted surplus account to find an additional $3.2 million to accommodate the budgeted cash deficit.
“We had the rainy day account, and it’s raining now,” said board chairwoman Audrey Trombley, speaking with the Mercury shortly after the budget was passed unanimously.
The division was facing a smaller deficit earlier, but with them now having to cover half the costs of the teachers’ salaries increase of 1.9 per cent as well as other demands, the book balancing act took on a new tone this year. Cornerstone employs about 560 teachers either on a fulltime or part-time arrangement.
In some instances, savings were found by not filling vacated administration positions.
Toth said 2.8 administration positions are currently going unfilled at the head office level through attrition, which means no one is being laid off.
Trombley and Toth also said that education assistants (EA) are hired and assigned according to individual school needs, and the upcoming year indicates there will be 11.8 fewer EAs required in the public school division. Total student enrolment is expected to be relatively stable compared with current registration numbers.
The classroom teacher numbers are being reduced .35 of one full-time equivalent position.
“Other decisions had to be made at other levels. For instance, we would ordinarily be purchasing 10 new school buses to replace older ones, but this next year, only five will be bought,” said Toth.
“Cuts by way of attrition are happening for a second straight year,” said Trombley. “Naturally, we are disappointed with the reduction in our total revenue base, and since we are financed, pretty well, exclusively by the provincial government, we can’t do much about it. We understand the pressures the government is feeling, and we hope that education remains a key component for them, whether education becomes part of the forecasted transformational change or not,” said Trombley. “When it comes to the transformational change issue, we’re not sure what to expect or what is being proposed everywhere, but I am one who believes that getting bigger doesn’t necessarily make you more efficient, we see that in a number of cases, so we’ll just have to wait and see what the government is proposing.”
Toth stated that moving grades 7 and 8 students over to the Weyburn Comprehensive School and closing the junior high school in that city, is also automatically eliminating 3.8 maintenance/caretaking positions.
Toth explained that total revenue from government sources in the next fiscal year are not expected to match the operating expenditures, thus the need to dip into the unrestricted surplus account that was around $16 million.
Toth told the trustees total operating revenue for the upcoming year is $2.1 million lower than the prior year’s budget and since the operating funding comes from provincially determined property taxation and grants from the Education Ministry, the resulting budget constraints had to be implemented.
Property taxation collected by the school divisions, but sent directly to the provincial government, amount to $58.2 million in the Cornerstone division. Ministry of Education grants amount to $36.1 million while school generated funds are around $2.8 million and tuition and fees, sales, rentals, interest and other grants account for another $2.7 million in total.
Salaries and benefits take up about $77.2 million of the annual budget, while goods and services cost around $22 million, amortization (loan payments for schools and other school facilities) require $7.4 million to keep them updated and another $687,000 is used to service the debt.
There are no major capital projects pending for the public school division within the next year with a partial roof replacement for Midale’s Central School being the largest planned project at $800,000.
The purchase of computer hardware and audio/video equipment will cost about $1.8 million, said Toth.
