GHSD “cautiously optimistic” on budget

By Sean Feagan, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter

A month after the 2021 provincial budget was announced, Golden Hills School Division (GHSD) is “cautiously optimistic” about next year’s education funding.

Highlights of how it appears the province is funding education for the 2021-22 school year were discussed during GHSD’s board meeting on March 23. However, GHSD is still awaiting actual budget figures from the province, which are scheduled to be delivered by March 31, explained Laurie Huntley, board chair.

But several budget areas appear to be funded similarly to last year, including operations and maintenance, teacher pensions and administration. 

“We’re hopeful on it – things appear to be status quo for the most part,” said Huntley.

But without having the final numbers, it is difficult to compare funding to previous years, she said. The school division needs to have its budget to the province by the end of May. 

“So, there will be busy people crunching numbers here,” said Huntley.

The province will be using a “holding harmless” approach to funding – this means funding will be held constant for school divisions that, under the new education funding model implemented last year, would have funding reduced, explained Bevan Daverne, GHSD superintendent.

Under this model, funding was based on enrolment projections made in May 2020. Then, budgets were to be adjusted at the start of the school year based on the number of students who enrolled.

But at the start of this school year, many districts in the province had fewer students, with many families choosing online learning or homeschooling because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“They saw their student populations go down by anywhere from five to 15 per cent – quite a significant shift,” said Daverne.

If the government were to follow the new funding framework, this would result in reductions in funding to these school divisions. Instead, the province held funding levels, thereby “holding harmless” these divisions. This was important because many of these divisions had increased costs from funding things such as learning at home and expanded cleaning.

GHSD was different from many other school divisions by allowing students to come back to person-to-person learning at any time during the year. The division also experienced an increase in enrolment for its two online learning programs, available to students across the province.  

“Overall, we had a lot of growth this year because of online schools,” noted Daverne.

In addition, the division is expecting an increase in demand for summer school, said Daverne. Because of COVID-19 disruptions, many high school students will need courses to proceed to the next grade, to graduate or to enter post-secondary education.

“We’re expecting summer school could potentially double (in enrolment) to what we’re used to,” said Daverne. “That’s all across the province.”

GHSD is hoping the province will provide additional funding to support this increased demand.