The Saskatoon Board of Education has approved the operating budget for the upcoming school year, which includes addressing a shortfall of $4.5-million through reducing staff. Board Chair, Colleen MacPherson, explains that the provincial funding increased 2.1 per cent, which covers the negotiated salary increase for teachers, but doesn’t cover increases for other staff and the rising costs for employee benefits, transportation and inflation.
The budget includes a reduction of 12.7 full time equivalent elementary teacher positions and 6.9 full time equivalent positions in secondary schools. All of the cuts are full time equivalents. The budget includes one less elementary English as an Additional Language teacher, one less elementary resource teacher, and two other discretionary teacher positions. Three community school coordinators will have to be cut an educational psychologist, a coordinator, a consultant and a 0.5 full time equivalent speech language pathologist.
It also means a five per cent reduction to school budget lines and a ten per cent reduction to the Central Office budget lines. All affected staff will be redeployed or will finish the term of their contract. MacPherson says, “It is impossible to balance this budget without affecting the classroom experience for our students. Education is an important investment in this province’s future, but without appropriate funding that recognizes inflation, we cannot adequately do our job.”
To help balance the budget Saskatoon Public Schools will be introducing a fee for lunch-hour supervision at elementary schools. Family will be required to pay $100 annually per child if they stay for lunch, to a maximum of $200 per family. This offsets supervision expenses by about $500,000.
Additions to the budget include a 0.5 FTE secretary for each elementary school with enrolment over 600, a new intermediate Functional Life Skills program, $1.3-million to replace critical wi-fi infrastructure, $100,00 for furniture replacement and $1-million in targeted provincial funding to be used to hire 21 FTE educational assistants.
Expenditures for the next school year are set at $297-million, and increase of $9.3-million.
