Supervision in public schools will cost

The days of free lunch hour supervision in Regina Public Schools are over, starting next school year.

Families wanting their kids in elementary school to stay over the noon hour will pay $100 per year — about 55 cents per day. Students who have lunch at school because they take the bus will continue to be supervised free of charge.

“We’re trying to find a happy medium here,” said Mike Walter, the division’s deputy director of school services.

Before 2008, lunch hour supervision for a student in Regina Public Schools cost a dollar per day. Since the free program began, Walter said the cost ballooned from $630,000 annually to $1.3 million.

“That wasn’t because we had double the number of students enrolled in schools, it’s simply more students were accessing the program because it was free,” Walter said, adding that increases to the amount of money paid for supervision represent a much smaller chunk of the program’s overall cost.

Up to 94 per cent of students across the division were using the universal noon hour supervision program, said Walter. He estimates that if 60 per cent of students pay to use the program, the division will reach its goal of finding around $300,000 in savings, which represents about five per cent of the $6 million the division seeks.

The division is willing to work with parents and guardians whose children need the program and feel they can’t afford it. There will also be a $200 cap per family, so if there are more than two kids in school, the most that family would pay is $200.

Walter said changes to universal noon hour supervision were looked at as a result of a $6-million provincial funding shortfall. The division also reduced nine office positions and has been looking at finding savings across all of its budget lines.

Walter said he expects tough budgets to be the norm for the next few years.

“There will be years where you feel like you can afford to do some things and years where you feel like you have to cut back. That’s the nature of budgeting,” said Walter.

Walter believes implementing the $100-per-year model is a reasonable solution, based on feedback the division received. As part of the consultation process, the division met with representatives from school community councils and posted a survey online for staff and parents. Walter said people were interested in keeping the program with a desire to have it equally accessible and 75 per cent of respondents were willing to pay $1 a day.

Cynthia Raby, president of the Henry Braun School Community Council, described the meeting as a brainstorming session and said that when the meeting was over, ideas were written on a whiteboard with no indication of what the division would decide to do.

“It has been free for a while, so it might be a hard sell for some,” said Raby.

Since her kids come home for lunch, the changes won’t affect her family. She said she hasn’t heard concern from other parents about the changes.