Public schools funding announcement gets lukewarm response from local divisions
The general message coming from local school division leaders in response to the province’s recent announcement of its funding support for the next school year is that it simply doesn’t go far enough.
The Manitoba government announced last week that it is increasing public school funding by $79.8 million to nearly $2 billion.
And while the funding overall represents a 3.5 per cent increase, it is somewhat limited for the school divisions in this region.
Garden Valley School Division is receiving a 2.2 per cent or $800,000 increase to about $36.4 million, while Western School Division is getting about two per cent or $400,000 more to $19.2 million.
Elsewhere in the region, Prairie Rose and Prairie Spirit are both receiving about $300,000 or 1.9 per cent more to $17.8 and $17.1 million respectively, while Border Land is getting about $400,000 or 1.8 per cent more to $21.1 million.
“We were hoping for something more substantial. I think most school divisions are in the same boat,” said Stephen Jaddock, superintendent of Western School Division.
“It’s tricky because when you are looking at our budget … it’s actually just about a one per cent increase,” said Garden Valley School Division board chair Leah Klassen, who noted the increase actually only comes out to about 1.8 per cent, and a portion of that is dedicated to the staff cost harmonization support, so the actual operational support otherwise is a fair bit less.”
Border Land School Division superintendent Krista Curry echoed that and noted that it can be somewhat misleading for the province to say its support for education is above inflation overall
“It doesn’t translate to that for every division, and we would be one of those divisions that it is certainly well below inflationary rate.”
Jaddock agreed that will part of the increase including the harmonization costs, the actual operational funding only represents about a one per cent increase for Western.
“That’s going to be short in terms of what we’re looking for to maintain status quo,” he said, adding it not keeping up with increased operational costs, especially for a growing division.
“It’s going to be a challenge to work on the budget and come up with something … the trustees don’t want to be in the position where they’re reducing frontline workers. We want to make sure that all of our staff is able to provide the support to students.
“Our numbers are continuing to rise … so we want to make sure that we can have the supports available.”
Jaddock said they want to carefully consider the impact on taxpayers but don’t want to be making any substantial cuts, yet some things on the wish list will have to be put aside.
“If we we’re going to maintain the front line staff then a lot of those wish list things come off the operation side … projects that we were hoping to work on,” he said. “We’re going to have to go through everything with a fine tooth comb.”
A similar message came from Curry.
“It’s going to be a tough budget year because we want to try to keep things affordable for our taxpayers but at the same time we don’t want to have to cut a whole bunch of things either,” she said.
“We don’t want to impact the quality of education that kids are getting … we want to try to maintain that without having to cutback a bunch.
“I would say we have been in that position for the past several years,” said Curry. “Our goal at the end of the budget cycle is to be able to sustain what we have. The ability to dream has kind of gone by the wayside because there’s just not enough funding.”
“There are some very tough conversations happening now,” noted Klassen.
She agreed it can be a difficult balancing act to meet the needs of the division while not having too much of an impact on Garden Valley taxpayers.
“We have all of the needs in mind,” she said. “There’s many different aspects to this, so how do we balance it? We’re looking at what kind of efficiencies can we create in the system.
“Garden Valley has always operated on a very lean budget,” she suggested. “So we don’t have a lot of extras.”
