During their Feb. 27 meeting, the board of trustees for the School District of Mystery Lake (SDML) unanimously approved their 2018–19 budget, which comes out to $42,734,725.
Compared to last year’s budget of $44,055,724, the SDML is going to spend approximately $1.3 million less for this upcoming school year.
While services will get a boost of $209,526, the rest of the large line items in the budget will be facing reductions, including salaries (-$868,677), employee benefits (-$617,091) and school supplies (-$18,140).
Board chairperson Don Macdonald said this overall reduction is a result of the fact that the SDML is working with a smaller operating surplus than in the past few years.
According to the board’s budget presentation, the SDML will be sporting an estimated surplus of $1,674,916 as of June 2019, which is roughly $1.8 million less than what they had in June 2017.
“One of the reasons for the increase [in last year’s budget] is we had come off several years of discharging surplus,” Macdonald said during Tuesday’s meeting. “There was just a period there where we were basically feeding tax money back, and that ended.”
Secretary-treasurer Kelly Knott went on to say that this budget aims to take pressure off the public tax base that maybe suffering from difficult financial times, especially since the Manitoba government raised public school funding by $6.6 million for the upcoming school year province wide, which included a 7.4 per cent increase, or $2,294,884, for the SDML from the adjusted 2017-18 amounts
“Once we received our provincial funding announcement, collectively we as a board did not want to put more pressure on the community for an increase in tax structure,” she said. “So, once our funding was finalized we wanted to keep a line on our special levy request that was going to the City of Thompson. We wanted to keep that fairly consistent. As a result, we’ve had to use a portion or our surplus to balance the budget. We used $350,000 in surplus.”
Macdonald also took the time at Tuesday’s meeting to talk about how this limited tax base will affect the district’s ability to provide full-day kindergarten in the near future, since local taxpayers fund 50 per cent of that program.
“I’m just giving everyone a heads up that not next year, but the year after, the 2019–20 school year, we’ll be making changes to full-day kindergarten. There will still be some, but most of them won’t be able to continue.” he said. “Anyone that’s got children of that age should be aware that that option is not going to be there the same way it is right now.”
After finalizing their special levy to the City of Thompson, the SDML will have to submit their 2018–19 budget to the province by March 31.
To read the school district’s 2018–19 budget presentation in full, please visit the SDML’s website.
