Chinook reports lower than expected deficit in past school year

A smaller than expected deficit was reported at a special meeting of the Chinook School Division Board on November 26 when the board approved a draft version of their annual report.

Their deficit for the period covering September 1, 2017 to August 31, 2018 was just under $4 million, but an improvement from their projected $5.94 million operating deficit for the year.

“For the most part we were on, or under, in all areas of our operation, with the exception of facilities. About $1.95 less million of a deficit than what we expected. So our deficit ended up about around $4 million instead of $5.95 million,” explained Chinook School Division’s Chief Financial Officer Rod Quintin.

Quintin explained that a careful watch over spending this past year, combined with a series of cost saving initiatives, helped them save right around $2 million.

“I would say primarily it was a watching very closely our costs. Like everybody pitched in. Whether it was the board and their expenses, or the staff and reducing PD expenses, or even the transportation where we finally realized some of the savings from buying right size buses and their consumption is less than the bigger buses that we had. It was really all throughout the enter budget spending plan,” he said.

“Some challenges related to facilities are energy related really. It was kind of a cold winter, and higher than anticipated costs.”

“But for the most part everything else went better than planned. We watched our expenditures very closely last year so that we could make sure we weren’t over budget.”

Their $4 million deficit this year comes on the heels of a $965,682 deficit during their 2016-2017 reporting year, but that deficit was also significantly less than the $5.7 million they were forecasting to run.

Chinook’s annual report has not been approved by the Ministry of Education, so a full financial breakdown of the deficit totals will not be available until they are tabled in the Legislature.

Quintin conceded that one of the largest savings areas was instructional costs.

“We saved a significant amount of money related to substitute teacher days. And that was a concerted effort on our part, where we would change the way that we handled the deployment of sub teachers in schools for teachers that may be away.

“A lot of it was due to our reduction in professional development where they weren’t out of the schools. And a lot of it was due to their effort just to find ways to either schedule their appointments differently, or cover off internally. And that was a plan that we put in place last year that was, at least for last year, quite successful. We saved about $200,000.”

Quintin said they also saved a significant amount of funds by having fewer teachers on extended sick leaves.

“You never know with 400 plus teachers what your experience may be around long term sick leaves. We didn’t have the long term sick leaves that we reasonably should have. Over time it does cycle, so we’re in a bit of a low point in the cycle in terms of those types of leaves. That would have been a big, big difference there.”

He noted the 2017-2018 report does not contain the teaching staff reductions which will be reflected in the current budget year. However, the changes in the 2017-2018 report reflect a decrease in the central office staff where roughly 34 full time equivalents were experienced over the previous two years.

The largest portion of Chinook’s deficit is related to amortization on tangible capital assets.

“The bulk of our deficit is related to amortization, which is really not cash. It is the amount of dollars that are shown as the value of the properties that we have that depreciate a little bit every year. About $800 - $750,000 was the amount drawn on our unrestricted reserves, which would be our actually more or less cash reserves. So that’s the bulk of where we draw our deficits from.”

While the Division also experienced a savings in the area of professional development, Quintin explained that this area can not be underfunded over the long term.

“We have been saying at length to the Ministry that we can’t sustain this for long. We know that we have to continue to build up capacity,” he said.

“We know that we need to start to reinvest in professional development as we go forward. This was more or less our year to really try and cut our costs. But we have not eliminated those particular costs, we’ve just deferred them.”

“But we know we have to do something. I mean this can not be sustained for the foreseeable future without adding more money back into the PD effort.”