BONNYVILLE – The local public and Catholic school boards are both anticipating a surplus in their 2020/21 budgets.
The board of trustees for Northern Lights Public Schools (NLPS) and the Lakeland Catholic School Division (LCSD) broke down the numbers before approving their 2020/21 school year budgets in their meetings last week.
During LCSD’s May 28 meeting, they anticipated their total revenues will come in at just over $38.5-million and while expenses will sit at $38.2-million, resulting in an overall surplus of about $392,000 for 2020/21.
According to LCSD secretary-treasurer Tessa Hetu, two potential capital expenses of a new recovery server, part of their disaster recovery plan, and a vehicle for the division’s speech-language pathologists to travel within the division for work had a combined anticipated price tag of up to $47,000.
As a result of the NLPS board's decision to change insurance providers, they found $1.7-million worth of savings.
“Approximately $1 million of that will be used to retain staff that otherwise would have been cut due to funding restraints. The rest will be used to balance the budget, with any remainder going to reserves,” detailed NLPS board chair Arlene Hrynyk in a statement to parents.
Northern Lights’ total budgeted revenues for the 2020/21 school year are estimated at roughly $82.8-million.
They anticipate receiving around $72.7-million from Alberta Education, $3.5-million from Alberta Infrastructure, and about $2.9-million from the federal government.
Before the savings from switching insurance providers, expenses for NLPS were sitting at $82.8-million, with $60.7-million going towards classroom instruction and $5.7-million for transportation.
The budget for plant operations and maintenance decreased by $1.6-million to $10.9-million as a result of the board’s decision to join Alberta Risk Managed Insurance Consortia (ARMIC) for insurance.How the coronavirus pandemic is going to impact NLPS is still unknown and it’s caused some difficulty for the division in planning for the future.
“Next year, we don’t really know how it’s going to impact us yet,” noted NLPS secretary-treasurer Paul Elock. “For this year, it provided us with a lot of difficulty in determining what our surplus will be on an annual basis and an accumulative basis because of the way the government was changing the information coming to us. We just want to be mindful that we’re still grappling with really understanding the impact of COVID-19 to our division as a result of reductions in funding from Alberta Education.”