St. Albert's Protestant school district managed to turn a forecasted $1.7 million deficit into a $1.5 million surplus last year, largely on the strength of increased enrolment and the one-time sale of a controversial parcel of land.
The board of trustees for St. Albert Protestant Schools met Wednesday night to review its audited financial statements for year ending Aug. 31, 2011. The district nearly doubled its $722,000 surplus from 2010 and turned a conservative 2011 budget with a large deficit into a surplus.
Forecasted provincial government funding of $56 million soared almost $59 million as a result of increased enrolment, said associate superintendent of finance Michael Brenneis.
"On kindergarten to Grade 9, we are paid on students present. What we saw is actually our enrolment was higher than budgeted and that correlated to higher revenues," Brenneis said.
Chair Joan Trettler said the original budget, when passed in the spring, forecast 200 fewer students within the district, which did not come to pass.
"Last year there was an increase from the original budget. We then got some additional funds from what the first funding had been," she said.
Another large financial gain came with the sale of 70 Arlington Dr., a parcel the district purchased as a school site decades ago that it finally sold to Habitat For Humanity for an affordable housing project. The district realized an $840,000 profit from the sale, which has been placed in reserves for capital projects. Trettler said the board has not yet decided on how it will spend that money, but said putting the money towards building a Career and Technology Studies (CTS) lab at W.D. Cuts or a new school were the top two plans.
"We're just going to see what will work the best," Trettler said.
Clamping down
Another year of unpredictability in government funding also led schools in the Protestant district to cut expenses in the hope of preserving staffing levels for the year. While that has shown up in reserves, principals are ready to spend, Brenneis said.
"Schools carried forward a reserve and then plowed it back into staffing because they wanted to maintain staffing levels when they knew the budget was really tight," Brenneis said.
Another big help came in the form of donations, which Brenneis said is always hard to budget for. The budget for 2011 set expected donations at $1,500 but the district in turn received $180,000, most of which was cash.
"We have societies that work in support of schools, which we are happy for, but it's so hard to budget for," he said. "Maybe it's a year when we get a casino and maybe we don't. Also playgrounds are a big one. When a playground needs to be rebuilt, we tend to get a lot more."
The $3.2 million turnaround might be good news, but Trettler said it is another example of why predictable, sustainable funding from the province is so important, instead of having budgets cut with cash infusions later in the school year.
"If we'd had that money when we were doing our planning, it would have been a better planning process," she said. "It's wonderful to get the money that came out of there, but [the principals] wouldn't have had to be so careful."
