The Board of Trustees of Rocky View Schools yesterday (June 20) approved its 2019-2020 budget which, for the third year in a row, gives key priority to resources for direct classroom instruction, classroom support for learners with complex needs, mental health supports and literacy and numeracy skills development.

Those four things were the goals and strategies of the board's Four Year Plan to foster innovators in their learning journey while addressing the operational needs of the jurisdiction.

The budget projects revenues of $278 million for the next school year.  78 percent will be directed towards instruction, 13 percent to plant operations and maintenance, 6 percent to transportation and 3 percent to governance and adminstration.

RVS Board Chair Todd Brand says preparing the budget without knowing how much the provincial government will put towards education was a difficult assignment   

"We're pleased with the budget," Brand says.  "Probably a status quo budget would be the best way to describe it.  We are anticipating and expecting that the amount of money will be similar to what we had last year.  Outside of that we are anticipating, based on the government's announcement that we will have enrollment growth that will be funded so we have gone ahead and projected that into the budget.  There are still a lot of unknowns when it comes to the exact numbers. That presented challenges in putting the budget into place but we feel that we have taken a prudent and conservative approach believing that we're going to have the funding that we need to operate the budget as we've outlined it."

RVS is anticipating adding approximately 24 new teachers to classrooms to serve the expected 655 new students.  RVS is calling for enrollment growth to slow somewhat from the nearly 1,000 students a year in recent years.   It still is an increase of 2.6 percent 

RVS obviously sees things somewhat differently than the Calgary Board of Education who presented their budget yesterday.  It calls for increased class sizes, layoffs and service cuts.  

"We can empathize with them in the sense that there's still all these unknowns, but we feel, from the information that we've been given that the budget we put forward is very pragmatic and conservative," Brand thinks.  "I'm guessing that there's just a different set of assumtions that were made.  From the assumptions that we've made based off of the information that we have, we didn't feel that we needed to go in that direction."

Karyn Gollem, Director of Finance says Education Centre Departments were directed to build their budgets with zero percent increases.  That resulted in costs for adminstrtion and governance to remain at 2.9 percent, well below the government's cap of 3.6 percent.

While all school boards across Alberta are feeling uncertain because the government hasn't told them how much they'll receive, RVS has a known challenge in its transportation budget.  Having depleted transportation reserves to zero and cutting over $1 million in services in 2018-2019, the department will need to further adjust services in the coming school year in response to continued cost pressure.

Here are some of the highlights of the 2019-2020 budget:

• Projected enrolments are anticipated to climb to 25,300 – an increase of 2.6 per cent or 655 students over prior years budgeted enrolments.

• Alberta Education per pupil grants are assumed to remain virtually the same as the previous year, with funding for enrolment growth maintained.

• Overall revenue is projected to be $279.4 million, 1.2 percent higher than prior year’s budget.

• Average teaching salary is $101,242, slightly higher than what is currently trending for the 2018/19 school year at $101,125

• At the K-8/9 grade levels, the equivalent of 16 new classes will be added (approximately 17.2 teacher FTE), which will maintain the divisional K-8/9 class size average.

• At the Gr.9-12 level, high schools anticipating adding approximately 6.3 teacher FTE during the year.

• Inclusive education funding to schools was increased by $360,000, an increase equal to the 2.6 per cent enrolment growth.

• Education Centre (EC) based departments budgets reflect a zero per cent increase, with the exception of mandatory OHS training.

• Approximately $750,000 will be taken from reserves in 2019-20 to help achieve a balanced budget. All expenditures from reserves are one-time in nature.

The budget is posted on the RVS website under: Publications.  

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