Trustees for the Border Land School Division (BLSD) will be working with a status quo budget for the coming school year.
A budget of $40,587,000 has been approved for 2024/25, with an increase of about $2 million, or 5.4 per cent from the current school year.
A total of $396,400 was designated for annual capital expenditures in the coming year, with $127,000 for capital reserve projects.
“Salaries and benefits account for 80 per cent of our budget, so those always most significantly impact our budget,” explained BLSD secretary-treasurer Rachel Geirnaert. “Other areas where we’ve seen an increase are fuel and bus repair costs, as well as custodial and maintenance supplies.”
The division completed a variety of projects last year, including new flooring at Elmwood School, cabinetry at Gretna School and Ross L. Gray, new PA systems at Parkside and Shevchenko schools, LED lighting at W.C. Miller Collegiate, new lockers at Shevchenko, floor scrubbers at Roseau Valley School, and brick repairs and other exterior work at Elmwood and West Park Schools.
Their increase to provincial funding for existing operations was $149,000. The division’s total nutrition funding amounted to $297,000, which is to be spent on new nutrition programming.
“The funding from the province was not enough to cover our increased costs, so we rely on taxpayers to assist us in operating the school division,” Geirnaert said. “BLSD had a surplus at the end of June. The board made the decision to allocate that surplus back to taxpayers by applying it directly to the special requirement, and by purchasing our next three buses from this surplus.”
BLSD has seen a steep increase in the cost of buses, she adds.
“Our buses put on a lot of kilometres over the year, so what ends up happening is we usually rotate our four buses one year, and three buses the next year. Because our routes are so long, we need to have reliable buses in place. If a bus breaks down in the middle of winter, it could be an hour before another bus gets there. So, we have a fairly new fleet because of that. With the surplus, we were able to buy one wheelchair bus, and two non-wheelchair buses.”
The cost of the three new buses was approved last week at over $521,000.
“We made the decision to order them now,” Geirnaert said. “It used to be that we would get them in July or August for the upcoming school year, but with the delays we’re still experiencing from COVID, we are still waiting on the buses that should have been here this past July. So, we need to allow for some lag time.”
As far as education and property taxes for the coming year go, there will be a special levy increase of 3.98 per cent, with a mill rate increase of 0.33 or 2.78 per cent.
As a result, a home valued at $200,000 will see an increase in education taxes of $29.70 before the province’s education property tax credit.
“So this will be a break-even budget,” Geirnaert said. “We had a deficit budget last year because we found ourselves in the surplus position, so we thought last year we could use a deficit budget. This year we decided to break even, however we again had a surplus at the end of June of 2023, so the board chose to put $345,000 of that directly towards our special requirement or supplied surplus.
“It reduces the amount of special levy we need to collect, because we’re going to be doing some of our spending out of surplus.”
As far as dreams and wishes for the coming year, Geirnaert says, “We can’t even go to our dreams right now, which is why we opted for a status quo budget this year.”
