The Prince Albert Catholic School Division has passed a balanced budget after incorporating their one-time investment in funding for the 2022-23 school year to assist with rising fuel and insurance costs for the province’s school divisions.
Director of education Lorel Trumier said that the division was grateful for any funding related to inflationary costs
“When we built our budget we would have been remiss not to include that form in our budget. It’s naturally what we do on an annual basis it just had a higher impact with the rate that it was occurring at this particular year,” Trumier explained.
The board of education passed the budget during their meeting on Tuesday evening.
Chief Financial Officer Greg McEwen originally reported that the division would receive one time funding of $262,500 for the 2022-2023 school year.
Roughly $22,573 will go towards for instruction, while $20,000 will cover insurance and $19,927 will cover fuel.
Trumier said the inflationary pressures impacted several parts of the budget.
“What these additional dollars have done is provided us the opportunity to look at what were the areas that really impacted the budget (where) we could relieve that pressure,” she explained. “We needed to make to assure that we had that inflationary cost attached to our budgetary items.”
She explained that the staffing and fuel would be the places where the money would alleviate the pressure the most.
“We came with a plan to the board last night and will be along with any other revisions to our budget that were required so now we are in a position to put that forward again to the Ministry of Education,” she explained.
Budget numbers provided by McEwen show the Catholic Division expects $33,069,304 in revenue. The vast majority of that revenue will come from the Ministry of Education’s annual grant. The provincial grant is $25,963,167.
The total expenditures budgeted for 2022-2023 is now $34,051,804, with a projected deficit of approximately $982,500.
After adjusting their reconciliation to cash position the division had an unrestricted surplus of $3,564.
When they initially passed their budget in July Instead of dipping into reserved to eliminate that deficit, the board looked to reduce spending on long term debt and capital asset purchases. McEwen said that governance spending did not see any major changes in the budget.
This year, the division budgeted $23,343,240 for Instruction which includes teacher salaries, EA salaries and includes resources for students.
They also budgeted an almost $330,000 increase in overall plant expenditures for Plant operation and maintenance. This varies year to year dependent on projects and includes PMR budget which was previously approved by the board.
McEwen explained that the division is mid-sized in relation to other divisions and doesn’t have much for reserves. That meant they had to make do with the funding they received.
michael.oleksyn@paherald.sk.ca
