INNISFAIL - With Chinook's Edge School Division officials now working on the 2021 budget, officials are having to deal with several new challenges.
“There are a few things that are more challenging to predict as we move forward with budgets than has been in the past,” said superintendent Kurt Sacher. “There is always an element of professional guessing whenever you are doing a budget, and there is just more of that because of COVID and trying to anticipate the COVID costs and things like that.”
One of the current challenges involves enrolment and its impact on budgeting, he said.
“The biggest thing we are dealing with at the moment is trying to do enrolment projections,” he said. “We are no different than any other jurisdiction in that we have lost some students to a variety of external sources like home education.
“So, we are trying to anticipate whether some of those students will come back. We are confident that we will get a significant number returning back to our schools once things get closer to normal.”
The anticipated ending of federal COVID relief funding is also creating challenges.
“We are really appreciative of the federal injection of funds in the neighbourhood of $3.9 million for us as a school jurisdiction, and that has essentially helped with a good chunk of the additional COVID costs,” he said. “We are certainly not expecting that to continue in the future and we have to prepare for that.”
There are COVID costs to the division that go beyond that covered by the federal funding, he said.
