The Rocky View Schools (RVS) Board of Trustees set its budget priorities heading into the 2023-24 school year during its Feb. 9 meeting, fully aligning its financial priorities to its four-year strategic plan.
Trustees passed a new strategic plan at the end of 2022, and included four main priorities: “Improving Students Learning,” “Strengthening our Workforce,” “Bolstering Infrastructure,” and “Connecting our Community.” Each of these priorities also outlined specific achievable goals within them.
In the past, such strategic plans were broadly defined and considered largely aspirational, with specific details and financing to be worked out later, based on the limitations of the annual budget.
Essentially, argued Superintendent of Schools Greg Luterbach, who recommended the change on Feb. 9, the new budget-driven focus around the strategic plan means the public school division will be putting its money where its mouth is.
“It is administration’s belief that the strategic plan priorities should be the budget priorities,” he stated. “There needs to be a connection of coherence between what we say is important and then how we are going to fund our organization.”
Luterbach said this means, in administration’s interpretation, in keeping with the board’s newly amended Policy 2, that the 2023-24 RVS budget must refer back to this four-year strategic plan focus when under consideration by the Board of Trustees later this spring.
Ward 3 (Airdrie) Trustee Melyssa Bowen took umbrage with Luterbach’s assessment, saying she “felt a little misled about the process.” When passing the strategic plan at the end of last year, Bowen stated she and her fellow trustees were not explicitly informed by administration it would be so strongly binding on the upcoming spring budgetary process.
“I appreciate the desire to align our budget priorities with our strategic priorities, which, I think, is what we intended to do,” she said. “But I don’t see alignment as exact duplication. I think we have the opportunity when developing our budget priorities to separate priorities with a more specific financial focus.”
Bowen said she also did not see how the board was supposed to reconcile setting a one-year operating budget based on a broadly defined, four-year strategic plan.
“We set budget priorities annually,” she said, “so I am thinking, are we no longer going to be looking at setting budget priorities (as a board) because we have strategic priorities? So am I going to be sitting here next year watching the same priorities being passed? I would much rather have an opportunity to set direction with an (annual) focus.”
Ward 5 (Bragg Creek-Springbank) Trustee Judi Hunter disagreed with Bowen, and felt the alignment of the board’s four-year strategic plan and its annual budget priorities was a step in the right direction.
“We have had a lot of input already into developing the strategic plan, with input from community, from parents, from teachers, from admin staff,” she said. “It has been well-developed, and if we are going to have a world-class learning organization, we need all the pieces of the puzzle to come into place.”
Hunter then put forth a motion that the Board of Trustees follow this new process for setting its 2023-24 budget priorities, as recommended by staff.
The motion passed by a vote of 7-1, with only Bowen opposed.
