CBE budget includes more teachers, but loss of non-classroom staff and higher fees
Posted May 22, 2018 4:50 pm.
This article is more than 5 years old.
For another year, the Calgary Board of Education will dip into its reserves to cover its budget shortfall, and while there will be more teachers and educational assistants next year, there will be reductions in non-classroom staff.
The CBE approved its 2018-2019 budget Tuesday, which includes a plan to offset its expected $35 million shortfalls by cutting back on capital costs, school funding, service unit reductions and going into reserves.
Board of Trustees Chair Trina Hurdman said it’s due to the reality of the province funding for growth, but not inflation.
“This government has been committed to funding growth, which we appreciate,” she said. “But inflationary costs are not being covered, and so that is forcing us every single year to cut back a little bit more and more.”
Fees will also increase in the upcoming year, at 3.9 per cent for lunch supervision and parents who pay transportation costs will see an increase of 4.5 per cent.
In order to meet the shortfall, service unit budgets will be reduced by three to 10 per cent, making up around $15 million.
Chief Financial Officer Brad Grundy said the other big chunk will come from school allocation funding.
“We should’ve probably provided them with close to $40 million, what we did is we gave them $22.5 million,” he said.
The rest of gap comes from a reduction in non-facility capital costs, which includes furniture, technology, and staff vehicles, as well as a $2.5 million dip into reserve funding, which has happened for the last three years.
The service unit budgets cuts are the ones which will affect non-classroom staff, so employees in IT, communications, legal services, finance and human resources will be affected.
“Those are the impacts on people that aren’t in a classroom, but make the system work,” Grundy said. “If you are close to students, we want to maintain those, but if you’re one step back doing very important work, those are the people that we’re going to try and minimize the impact on, but they’re going to get the impact.”
The exact number of people who may lose a job is difficult to project Grundy said because of how the positions are staffed, but it works out to 69 full-time equivalent positions.
The good news is that the original one-time Classroom Improvement Fund funding is now being allocated for a second year, which means 106 more teachers and 43 educational assistants.
But there is some concern there as well because the CIF funding may not be there for a third year.
“That’s a theoretical possibility, yes, if the province doesn’t continue that funding, then we have no way of maintaining those positions, and so we’d have to figure out what we’re doing,” he said for the 2019-2020 school year.
The Board would have to find some other funding or potentially eliminate positions.
Despite the concern over funding, Education Minister David Eggen says his department and the board have a good relationship.
“You have to look at the arc of the whole year to see where budgets go,” he said. “Yes we have challenges up ahead in terms of class size and special supports for kids, but I’m willing to work together with the Calgary Board of Education, and we can only find a solution.”
The province is currently examining current transportation fee policies – where transportation is free for students 2.4 kms or over from their designated location – but recommendations would come out the year after next.
Alberta Education recently completed an operating review and audit of the CBE, but no significant recommendations were developed.
“We are working with them cooperatively,” Eggen said. “We’ve put in base operating funding to CBE by almost $100 million since I became the minister, so that’s a lot of money.
“I know there’s always issues around managing a very large ($1.4 billion) operation, but we will make sure that we have money in the classroom and that seems to be what this budget did.”
