Contending with a new provincial funding formula and the COVID-19 pandemic, Rocky View Schools Board of Trustees approved the 2020/2021 budget.
At the Rocky View Schools Board of Trustees meeting May 21, Chair Fiona Gilbert said she knew there would be challenges with budgeting for the upcoming school year.
Gilbert noted that enrollment is expected to increase by 3.9 per cent – about 857 students – and operational funding from the government is only increasing by 1.3 per cent.
The budget will have a revenue of $281.4 million and expenditures of $282.6 million.
“To support our budget priorities and the feedback heard from stakeholders during our budget consultation process, the board made the difficult decision to redirect over $2 million from governance, system administration and centralized learning budgets and $1 million from technology and learning commons to the classroom," Gilbert said.
In February the province introduced a funding formula based on the Weighted Moving Average of a division.
The formula looks at how many students are in a division over the course of three years. It is weighted based on the average of three factors — 50 per cent on how many kids are expected to move into a division, 30 per cent based on the number of current students and 20 per cent based on the number of students in the previous year.
Despite this change in funding, Gilbert said the board remains focused on supporting direct classroom funding, student success, students with complex needs, wellness and literacy/numeracy skills development.
The new model has changed how funds are received for school divisions, RVS Superintendent Greg Luterbach said, explaining that the biggest challenge they face with the Weighted Moving Average is the growth across the division as a whole.
Luterbach added that RVS will not be using a Weighted Moving Average within the division. The funding from the government is pooled and then allocated to the nearly 26,000 students in the division to create a common and consistent level of education for all students.
“For a rapidly growing school division like RVS, the formula does not work in our favour," Luterbach said. "The Weighted Moving Average means that we’re going to have more students and some of those students we’re not getting the base instruction grants for. It is certainly challenging for RVS.”
The most important thing, he said, is the board has been able to add more teachers to schools and ensure that class sizes remain around the same size in the coming school year.
Based on the budget about 28 school-based teaching staff will be joining the division in the coming school year.
Luterbach said maintaining class sizes was a major priority for the board and they chose to redirected money to ensure numbers were supported.
“At the end of the day we felt schools need resources and supports for all students,” he said.
To help ensure the division is still able to provide the services needed by their students and families, the board chose to redirect funds and use $1.3 million in operational reserves to support classroom instruction, limit fee increases to parents and balance the budget.
Luterbach explained that the board needed to draw from the reserves because the funds they received through the province and fees from students' families did not match what was needed to provide services to students and families in the division.
“Rather than having more fees or having less services, the board decided they were going to reach into the reserves and allocate some of that [funding] to continue to provide services and not increase more fees,” Luterbach said.
At this time, RVS' goal is to get students in front of teachers – be it online, in the classroom or a blend, he said. The budget was crafted with the idea that flexibility may be needed in the future, depending on how provincial health measures play out and when students can return to the classroom.
He noted that a fluid mindset will be important given the number of unknowns now faced due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
“We’re going to need to be flexible and we might be going back to the board,” Luterbach said.
Now that the budget has been approved by the Board of Trustees, it will be sent to Alberta Education for review.
