The Okanagan Skaha School Board has approved its preliminary budget for the coming school year.
The budget amount this year is $58,368,245.
To balance the budget, the district had to rely on $1.4 million in funding protection and $825,000 in accumulated savings from the last budget.
“We are fortunate that funding protection and internal savings have allowed us to submit a status quo budget for the 2011-2012 budget year,” said Ginny Manning, chair of the school board. “We are very concerned that we have a structural deficit that will need to be addressed in future years.”
Student enrollment is projected to continue its decline in the school district.
Trustee Linda Van Alphen, chair of the school board’s finance and management committee, said the funding protection was set up several years ago to ensure school districts with declining student populations did not lose funding.
She said the province had promised to top up the funds to allow the school board to work with the same budget as in the previous year.
However, this year the province had prepared to restructure this funding. As a result, the school district would have been given just $80,000.
Van Alphen and others from the school board and school district lobbied the province and had the full funding reinstated. She said there is no assurance the school district will receive this funding in future years.
She added that the funding puts the school district in a position where the need for the additional money becomes more important each year.
“Even though we consider ourselves to have a status quo budget, we know we are traveling with a structural deficit with the $1.4 million,” she said. “One day this will probably catch up to us unless they change the funding formula.”
The school board has worked to cut expenses over the years, she said.
Although student enrollment is dropping, Van Alphen said school closures are not on the table.
She said numbers are down at middle schools and high schools, but increasing at the elementary level.
“We are almost bursting at the seams at Giant’s Head School,” she said.
Modular units are being set up at some elementary schools in order to accommodate the additional students, she added.
As elementary students work their way through the school system, Van Alphen said the existing middle schools and high schools will once again operate at capacity.