Preliminary budget calculations were to be going out to Chinook's Edge School Division administrators on Thursday, the board of trustees heard on Wednesday at the board's regular monthly meeting. The division's central office leadership team is to be meeting with principals to further discuss impacts of how the numbers break out on Wednesday, plus an additional meeting on April 24.The education committee will then further discuss the b udget process the following day with a preliminary budget hopefully adopted at the June meeting.Because the division's central office leadership team recently changed the way funds are allocated to schools, division staff are now funnelling money to schools based on the needs of the school instead of on a per-pupil basis, said Susan Roy, the division's treasurer.As a result, Roy said this new allocation model will help direct funds at schools where they are needed – specifically in ensuring that administrators are making time to manage their schools and that teachers are collaborating with their peers to improve lesson plans. Principals worked with divisional administration on how that might look at each individual school.“I think it's going to do a better job in terms of meeting the needs of our students. What we were finding when we gave schools funding based on student allocation is … that quite often, especially in our really small schools, they would give themselves almost no (preparation) time to administer the school. We're saying, ‘…there's certain things that you need to be doing in terms of instructional leadership,'” Roy said.While enrolment is projected to go down about 146 students in September to 10,704, the number of teachers is planned to stay relatively constant – 564.54 teachers in September compared to 568.87 in September 2011. Roy said those teachers will be re-deployed in special education and curriculum support.Overall, the budget that's currently being built stands at a $1.1 million shortfall, but that includes a $1 million contingency fund. Roy said the division is striving to avoid a surplus, to spend current dollars on current students. Kurt Sacher, the division's superintendent, told trustees that at this point, that number is simply a guess and further refining will be done as the process moves along.“It is our goal to spend the current dollars on the current programming … so, yeah, you want reserves for a rainy day, but you don't want that so much that you're not providing services to your current kids,” Roy said.Trustees said they were generally in favour of the new funding allocations.“I'm really happy with this process. I really think it's the way to go,” Colleen Butler, chair of the board, told fellow trustees, adding that she isn't in favour of huge surpluses.
