A $2.9 million cash deficit for the South East Cornerstone Public School Division was included in the budget that was passed by its board last Wednesday. However, according to the standards of the Public Sector Accounting Board, the deficit was only $1.2 million. This is a difference of $1.7 million, so how is it accounted for?
The Chief Financial Officer for SECPSD, Shelley Toth, explained the standards used by the Public Sector Accounting Board, or PSAB, amortize the capital assets of the division over the useful life.
“For an example of a school bus, it is amortized over 12 years, so those expenses and that statement might have a bus that we paid for four or five years ago, and it’s now being expensed over its useful life,” Toth explained. She added that when things like the funding being provided for the new school in Carlyle, which is $4.2 million, the expenses from that will be amortized over 50 years.
The increase in funding from the 2022-23 school year for SECPSD is 1.1 percent for the next school year. Initially, when the provincial government passed its budget in March, it would have been 0.2 percent. However, additional funding announced earlier this month brought up the total amount of funding for the school division, even though part of it is targeted.
One of the issues that come up with the grants from the provincial government, which makes up 91 percent of the revenue for the division, is keeping up with wage increases. The provincial government negotiates the collective bargaining agreement with the Saskatchewan Teachers’ Federation. The current CBA expires on August 31st. The existing CBA had wage increases of two percent per year. However, what the increases could be for the next year hasn’t been determined yet, so has not been included in the division’s budget.
“We are trusting that the government will fully fund that teacher wage increase,” Toth said. “There was one year where they didn’t.”
The majority of the non-teaching staff are represented by CUPE and SEIU-West. The current CBAs for those unions have wage increases that are closer to four percent, which is something the division has to try to work to include in their budget.
“There actually is no funding provided from the government for those wage increases, so we either have to make reductions to our budget to offset it, or use our accumulated surplus from prior years to pay for those wage increases,” Toth clarified.
There is expected to be an impact on the classrooms across the division as a result of the deficit budget. There is a reduction of 3.9 full-time equivalent classroom teachers, and another eight FTE division-level supports.
“Six of those eight are actually teachers themselves that provide support to the classroom, and then there’s also two that would provide direct support to students through counselling services or speech-language services as well,” Toth explained about the reduction. Those positions, however, will be reduced via attrition with no layoffs being planned.