The Foothills School Division (FSD) is looking at a potential huge budget shortfall for the next school year.
FSD Superintendent Chris Fuzessy said they're still hoping for more, but it's not looking good.
"We have not yet received our final funding profile from the government. We had an initial one, and we've looked through that, and overall, if you factor increase in costs and a decrease in funding, we're looking at between two and four million dollars less in funding year-to-year from this year to the next school year."
While it doesn't look good now, they're hoping for some good news soon.
"We expect to get that final funding profile within a few days of May 6th, but it certainly isn't a budget where we're seeing increases in funding across the board."
The funding breakdown is rather complicated because it comes from a reduction in grants, in enrollment, and some ways of calculating funding have changed.
"The student complexity grant, for example, has been touted as a 20 per cent increase, which works out to $80,000 in our case, which is not significant. We saw a reduction as well overall in our enrollment, and there seems to be less kids being born overall... and that's a trend we see outside of the urban centres across Canada. They also changed the funding formula. Six years ago, they moved to what they call 'the weighted moving average,' so, instead of a set amount per student on September 30th per year, it switched to 50 per cent for this year's enrollment, 30 per cent for next year's, and 20 per cent for last year's. So, they switched it up again, and I can understand why because there is a lot of growth in Calgary and Edmonton in particular, so now it's 70 per cent for next year's enrollment and 30 per cent for this year. So, with the decline in enrollment of about 200 students overall, which is our projection, we lose on that as well because 70 per cent of 200 less students is less money overall, about a million dollars less overall."
There's also a difference between how the Town of Okotoks is now classified.
"Last year, the Town of Okotoks grew by about 200 citizens more than the 40,000 mark, and that's a benchmark that's used by Alberta Education to say that you're not rural so much as you are suburban or urban. And that was a 1.7 million dollar decrease in funding in one fell swoop. Which is hard to accept because Okotoks is one part of the larger county. We've also seen two years of declining enrollment, and so even though Okotoks may have 200 plus more citizens than 40,000, we're not seeing that translate into more students in schools."
Fuzessy is looking forward to having some questions answered soon because time is against them.
"It's a little bit frustrating to be this late in the game and not having started any kind of staffing process for schools."
FSD need to have their budget ready for Alberta Education by June 1.