WEYBURN - The Â鶹ÊÓƵeast Cornerstone School Division board approved their budget for the 2022-23 school year, with news that no one ever wants to hear in relation to the education of children.
The school division’s budget was made with a cut to staffing for the next school year, due to a deficit of $6.3 million. The staffing to be cut includes teachers, 21.8 full-time equivalent classroom teachers, plus an early literacy consultant-coach and a curriculum consultant-coach, for a total of 23.8 FTE teaching staff.
Over and above this, a total of 11.46 FTE non-teaching staff will also be cut, including a .20-FTE position in payroll, three caretakers, a carpenter, 2.5 FTE community education liaisons, a .50-FTE educational psychologist, 1.25-FTE information systems person, two FTE library technicians, and an assistant caretaking supervisor.
If one listened to the provincial budget when it was brought down earlier this spring, one would have thought no school division was going to see a deficit, never mind a multi-million dollar one.
The provincial document announced that funding for the province’s 27 school divisions would increase by 1.5 per cent or $29.4 million, to a total of $1.99 billion.
This amount, according to the government, included funding of the two-per-cent salary increase for teachers as per the collective bargaining agreement for their contracts, plus $7 million for 200 new education assistants (EAs).
Cornerstone did note they are hiring seven FTE EAs, but this is because the funds for this are a restrict grant, which means this is the only purpose that money can be used for.
The schools in Cornerstone will certainly welcome new EAs for the classrooms, but division-wide there will be nearly 22 fewer classroom teachers. The school board did note that most (if not all) of these positions will be covered by attrition, such as from teachers taking retirement.
This still leaves the school division with fewer teacher resources, as the retiring teaching positions won’t be replaced, or if they are, some other position will go unfilled.
The school division is forced into this terrible position and they are unable to do anything about it, because the provincial government took over the setting of and collecting of funds from property taxes.
So the province gets the money, but they still require school divisions to make up a budget without a deficit, without giving them any means to do that when there is a funding shortfall. For Cornerstone, even with the staffing cuts, they had to dip into their accumulated surplus, greatly cutting those funds down. This is just one school board out of 27, and is clearly a bad position for any division to be in. The province needs to better fund our schools – these are our future leaders and parents. They deserve better.
