The education funding promised last month by Premier Alison Redford and Education Minister Thomas Lukaszuk will soon be in the bank, but school boards are really playing catch up with the cash they will receive.
"The money will flow out now to the schools and into their budgets," said Joan Trettler, board chair for St. Albert Protestant Schools.
"The government is returning what it took away when it set its budget in March," she added.
The Protestant district will not finalize how it will distribute its funds until the end of November.
"We have asked our school principals to submit their budgets by the end of November, and distribution depends on their needs," Trettler said. "Then it will be decided by the central office on how best to spend the money wisely."
School boards were promised an allocation based on the teacher-student ratio. The funding will be paid monthly until March, based on 7/12 of the school year. The first payment on Nov. 15 includes the retroactive funding for September and October.
Funds are split into two envelopes, with one portion to go towards increasing the grants that were cut last spring by the provincial budget. The second portion is designated for classroom and community support. Each jurisdiction will receive a base rate of $60,000 plus an additional $43.12 per student in grades 1 to 12.
The combined total allocated to the Protestant district is $1,041,504. Of that, $716,790 was allocated towards increasing the grant funding.
Trettler expressed mixed feelings over the allocation of funds, which she said would go a long way towards easing the budgeting woes her district faced at the beginning of the year. But she also worries about long-term budgeting concerns, since there are no promises from the provincial government to extend funding past March.
"We received funding for the teachers' settlement (of wages) last spring but at the same time the government also cut back the funds we received from grants. So they gave with one hand and took back with the other," Trettler said.
Without the grants, the Protestant district used its reserve funds to pay for previously granted initiatives in September. Now the savings are gone but the new funding cannot go to shore up those reserves, Trettler said.
"We've been told it needs to be spent now, not on fixing problems the cutbacks caused," she said.
GSACRD
Greater St. Albert Catholic Schools (GSACRD) received cuts totalling $1.25 million last spring but will receive $816,300 from the new funding allocation.
A large chunk of that will be used to recoup a deficit that would otherwise have occurred, said GSACRD superintendent David Keohane.
"We did not cut class sizes but instead we incurred a deficit of $500,000. We'll be putting back $500,000 to offset that deficit," he said.
The remainder of the funds will go towards hiring five or six part-time teachers, Keohane said.
"Last week we asked our schools to submit applications for the funding. Of our 17 schools, nine made application for more teachers," Keohane said.
To make the funding go as far as possible, the different schools will receive a part-time teacher, he said.
Keohane refused to dwell on the fact that his school division also has no financial reserves, but chose to focus on using the funding as the best way to address the current budget.
"We have to go on a year-by-year basis. So we spend today's money on today's kids," Keohane said.
Sturgeon School Division
The Sturgeon School Division will discuss its funding allocation of $799,368 at its November board meeting.
"The government has defined how the money will be split. We know $221,000 has been directed to classroom and community initiatives and the remainder is to replace 7/12 of the grant money cut last March," said secretary-treasurer Karen Parasynchuk.
