MOOSOMIN — Representatives of the Â鶹´«Ã½AVeast Cornerstone Public School Division provided a presentation to the Moosomin Chamber of Commerce meeting Tuesday and said they plan community consultations on capital spending
The division is quite vast - approximately the same size as Vancouver Island - stretching across most of southern Saskatchewan. With some 8,200 students and 1,000 staff members through 35 schools in 27 communities, there are a lot of working parts to ensure the machine runs smoothly.
“This is what I prefer to talk about - the learning and things that are happening in our schools and some of the great stuff that our staff do with our students,” said Keith Keating, Director of Education and CEO with SECPSD.
He added that the student population across the division includes around five per cent First Nations students, about six per cent English as an Additional Language students and approximately 300 intensive needs students. Early childhood initiatives are also part of the school division.
“Some of you may be aware of the Early Childhood Intervention program that operates in some places in the province, within this school division that’s actually operated within the school division,” Keating explained. “So you have early childhood interventionists to go out and work in homes with students that need that support as well.”
Locally, enrolment noted a bump in the 2017/18 school year, followed by a slight decrease and an overall levelling off.
“You’ll notice that MacLeod Elementary School is at 94 per cent capacity and MacNaughton (High School) is at 75 per cent capacity, according to those Ministry (of Education) numbers,” Keating said. “The town itself is around 82 percent-ish, and when they look at putting portables on, they don’t just look at the overall number in one school. They look at the capacity within the community or the capacity within your schools, one or the other.”
Keating noted that the school division has applied for portables going to MacLeod Elementary in the past, but ran into some roadblocks.
“There’s two things that are the problem with that. One is that the community itself is under the capacity and numbers for the Ministry to give us funding to put those portables,” he said, adding that the government finds capacity numbers through a complicated formula. “The second piece is you need to be fairly well over 100 per cent before the Ministry actually allocates a relocatable to your particular space. You see some schools in the cities of Regina and Saskatoon that are population percentages of 140, 150 before they’re actually getting those portables.”
Keating next spoke about operating funding, which currently sits around $97.5 million, stating “When the government says more money than they’ve ever put into education before, that is accurate.”
He pointed out a problem related to the accumulated Cost of Living Allowance, which has increased by 21 per cent.
“What that means in a $100 million budget is if we saw an increase of $20 million, we could operate the way we’ve always operated,” Keating said. “We’ve had an increase of $2 million in actual operating funding, so what we’ve had to do with squish over time.”
Most of that “squishing” has been through making efficiencies at the division office level and creative use of a fortunate surplus.
“We do have some money in the bank, at one point in time we had $32 million in what’s called surplus, whether that’s internally restricted or just surplus, that’s the dollars that we actually have access to,” Keating said. “We’ve been eating into that surplus year over year, and we’re using it for a couple of things. Number one is the Ministry doesn’t fund any buildings besides school buildings. So the bus garage you see in Moosomin here, then we did some updating on facilities, offices, all of those different pieces aren’t funded.”
“And part of what we’ve been using it for is digging into it for operating expenses so we don’t have to cut teachers in classrooms,” he continued.
Since dipping into that surplus, the dwindling cushion is now sitting at around $17 million.
“At the rate we’re going, we probably have about five or six more years of doing what we’re doing; making cuts, trying to protect the classroom teachers, before we’re out of that surplus,” Keating said. “We’ve also had some people ask, ‘Well, why don’t you just spend the surplus, then the government will fund you at an appropriate level?’ And then the other piece of that is there are divisions who have don’t have a surplus. In other words, they’ve spent down the surplus; they weren’t lucky like we were at the start of amalgamation where we had a bit saved up in there. They’re not being funded any differently than we are, so we’ve seen school divisions that had to cut massive amounts of teachers across those divisions to keep operating at the level that they’re operating at.”
“So we’ve been protecting a little bit, spending a little bit each year to update bus fleets, update bus garages, continue to dig into that a little bit for operating, but also on some of the things that aren’t funded at the provincial level,” he continued. “That $17 million might seem like a large chunk too, but you think about $100 million budget that’s a little less than two months' worth of operating expense. So we’re not carrying a huge amount of operating expense, but we’re eating into it every year.”
An estimated 72 per cent of the school division’s budget is devoted to salaries.
“Teachers are in collective bargaining right now, you’ve probably heard that the government has funded the teachers’ raises with the exception of one year,” said Keating. “So we’re hoping that when they come to an agreement on that they will fund those particular pieces as well. They have in the past.”
Another 22 per cent of that budget is set aside for goods and services with examples given of insurance, fuel, technology upgrades, software, bus repairs and maintenance.
“For example, a school bus in 2018/19 cost us $96,000. The same bus now cost us $138,000,” Keating said. “So you see the some of the cost pressures the divisions across the province are facing in terms of just getting kids to school.”
Local school upgrades
Over the last decade, $1.2 million has been spent at MacLeod Elementary School and just over $1 million at McNaughton High School, according to Andy Dobson, Manager of Facilities and Transportation with SECPSD.
“Lots of people say, ‘Well, I don’t see anything that’s been done.’ A lot of it is roofs, heating systems—things that you don’t see,” he explained. “And that’s where that’s where that money has been spent.”
That doesn’t mean issues stop occurring, as Keating pointed to the recent air exchange unit report from McNaughton High School.
“We’re in a better position now than we were in terms of roofs and H-VAC systems, but even still, we see things go like McNaughton on Friday - their air exchanger,” he said. “So there’s another piece we got to figure out where we’re taking that money from in order to put it into that particular piece.”
Speaking of McNaughton High School, both Dobson and Keating addressed the plans for an updated fire system.
“Our mechanical engineers basically told us, ‘You should be able to do this for $600,000.’ So we went on to tender, it comes in double - it came in at $1.2 million - we didn’t have the money for that,” Dobson said.
The reason for the new fire suppression system relates to the proposed renovation and relocation of the Home Ec Lab. In doing so, the room would need to be brought up to code to the tune of $1.2 million.
“Right now we’re looking at doing … is maybe just the current Home Ec Lab renovation and kind of an upgrade on it,” Dobson said.
Air conditioning concerns, community meeting planned
Another hot-button topic was that of air conditioning, which is a concern Keating said he became aware of when it was raised in the summer.
He said the school division takes that concern seriously, and the division plans a community consultation for Moosomin to determine the community’s priorities for improvements to the school.
“What we’re proposing is coming out and having a community consultation, inviting parents and community members to say, what are the things that are most important for you for looking at PMR dollars?
“What are the things that are most important? Is it air conditioning, is it renovations? What would you put ahead of this or that? And inviting the administrators to come and speak to that as well,” Keating said.
“I know the staff and the administrators have a particular point of view in terms of what they see in terms of programming in those schools. We’d also like to hear from the community in terms of where would you like to see that over time. We can apply for a major capital or minor capital, you may or may not get there. There are some political pieces on top of the other pieces that are here. We all know it’s an election year coming up next year, you never know what might happen. But we’d like to have that conversation this year.”
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