Division facing several challenges

Seventh-term Chinook's Edge School Division chairperson Colleen Butler says the division is facing a number of challenges in the 2016-17 school year.

Butler was re-elected chairperson by her fellow trustees this month.

“We always face financial challenges and there is never enough money to go around,” Butler told the Gazette. “We seem to always have more needs than we have money for them, but of course there is a lot of pressure on the whole economy right now.”

The pressure on the transportation department is particularly acute right now, she said.

“We seem to have enough money in the budget to cover the routes, but we don't have enough money to keep the fleet updated and we have to keep the fleet updated or we face huge amounts of money for repairs. That is a very big pressure point for us,” she said.

“Especially with transportation we have lobbied hard for more money, especially for rural transportation. I don't know if we will be very successful at this point.

“We used to get a fuel subsidy when the fuel price was higher than a certain point, but they did away with that. That has really hurt us.”

Another big challenge in the new school year will be dealing with the financial impacts of the new carbon tax, which comes into effect in January.

“That is going to affect us as well,” she said. “We are looking at ways to try to get more money into the budget.”

Asked if that might include more parent fees, she said, “It could. It's an ongoing kind of discussion.”

Among the division plans for 2016-17 is to increase communications with key stakeholder groups, she said.

“We want to connect more with our parents, so one of our committees is going to be working hard to make better connections with our parents and community members to get a better feeling of what they would like to see and what their concerns are,” she said. “That is going to be a major focus.

“We are going to be having a strategic planning meeting next month and work out exactly where we are going this year.”

Asked why the division wants to increase communication with parents, she said, “We've always tried to do that but sometimes it is difficult because our division is so large and sometimes what is a priority in one area isn't a priority in another.

“We've had a parents matter committee in place for the last several years, but we felt that maybe we can improve upon that.”

For her part Butler says she was pleased to be re-elected to the chairperson position for 2016-17. “I was hoping to be re-elected,” she said. “I think our board is pretty high functioning.”

With trustee elections now about a year away, Butler says she has not yet decided whether she will seek another term.

“I'm thinking about it. It is a definite possibility,” she said.

The Innisfail-based Chinook's Edge School Division has 40 schools in Mountain View and Red Deer counties.