Ratepayers in Western School Division are being asked to pay more in taxes this year to support education in Morden.
The tax hike comes with the division not only facing increased costs that include starting up a new school but also after having to largely hold the line on taxes in recent years under the cap enforced by the previous provincial government.
“It is a big tax increase … what we are doing though is understanding that we have had some big tax decreases over the last several years, and that is unsustainable in our environment,” chairperson Brian Fransen said at a public meeting last Wednesday that introduced the draft budget. “So what we’re doing is we’re looking back a couple years, and approximately 2020, that’s kind of what we’re looking at in terms of a burden.”
“We’ve had a number of years where we’ve been restricted for our income. We didn’t have the taxing authority,” said secretary treasurer Carl Pedersen. “Anything that we’re allowed to increase the special requirement from was reduced by an offsetting grant from the province.
“With our assessment growing well over two per cent every year and our student body growing over two per cent, it’s been a difficult number of budgets for the last number of years,” he continued. “So as a result, we’ve been kind of peeling back all those discretionary items that we could … that’s just not sustainable.
“There’s lots of places where costs have really increased, and we’re in a pinch,” he added. “And when you don’t have the funding to match that, we have only one source to go now.”
The board is introducing a budget of about $31 million for the 2024-25 school year, and the impact on taxpayers will vary.
On a house assessed at $400,000, the local school levy will increase by $369 to $2,496.60, although it will be reduced to an increase of $184.50 after the provincial rebate.
On a million dollar quarter section of farmland in the RM of Stanley, the levy will increase by $533 to $3,606.20. For a $350,000 business, the increase will be $444.54 to $5,137.63.
Provincial funding represents about 65 per cent of the division’s total revenue, with local taxation making up about 34 per cent. This compares to recent provincial averages of 57.7 and 36.1 per cent respectively.
Provincial funding overall increased by about five per cent (over $830,000), however a large portion of that increase is targeted funding and not for general operating support.
The budget spends about 85 per cent on salaries and benefits, while the breakdown otherwise includes 6.9 per cent for administration, 6.56 per cent on transportation and operations, 5.74 per cent to instructional support, 1.89 per cent for tax and interest and 0.44 per cent on adult and community education.
The division is forecasting a surplus of about $115,000 for 2024-2025, and it would put the reserve balance as of June 30, 2024 at $545,384. That would represent just under three per cent of expenditures, and the province restricts reserve to a maximum of four per cent.
Some of the key factors and priorities in the 2024-25 budget include the following:
• increased enrolment requires 5.8 full time equivalent teaching positions.
• increased allocation for guidance and resource positions that adds another 5.6 full time equivalent positions.
• increased speech and language and occupational therapy time.
• funding to continue to support behaviour consultants and staff training.
• increased vice principal time at Morden Collegiate.
• additional support staff for Ecole Discovery Trails.
• investments in technology and related infrastructure.
• increase student services administrator to a full time position.
• support to upgrade and replace band equipment at Morden Collegiate.
“The majority of it is, certainly, of the new expenditures this year, a lot of it is in staffing. It doesn’t take much staff to add up to a lot of dollars,” said Pedersen. “We have to deal with projected increments for staff … staffing being 80 per cent of our total budget, and that’s where we’re taking the biggest increase.
“The other thing too is with opening a new school and not having the support for that area, until we get through a full year, we have to kind of up front all that too,” he added, noting that represents almost three quarters of a million dollars in new spending.
“We were looking at all the things that we needed to do this year. We’re opening École Discovery Trails. There’s a lot of new funding that is needed for that that is unsupported … and we need to find that money somewhere,” said Fransen.
“We also looked at a lot of supports that are needed in our schools and we wanted to make sure that those supports are available,” he added. “We’ve seen and heard a cry for support for mental health in our community and in our schools, and this year, we were able to provide some resources and supports … that’s something we are really proud of … this is something that we’ve heard from all of our sources.”
Fransen added this was a draft budget that will still get some fine tuning, but there will likely be no significant changes.
“People still have time to give feedback. We have until March 15 to finalize our special requirement.”
