By Charles Lefebvre

College passes budget for 2019-2020 school year

Jun 21, 2019 | 11:18 AM

MEDICINE HAT, AB — Medicine Hat College says their budget for the 2018-19 school year is focused on ensuring high quality programs and instruction remains for students.

The college’s board of governors passed the most recent budget of $58 million for the school year, a similar total to last year’s budget.

“It was a very collaborative process,” said Kevin Shufflebotham, president and CEO of the college. “It started well before I came into this position. The whole focus of the budget was really on students, and our role in serving the communities, and with those roles at the centre, we came up with a balanced budget.”

The budget includes approximately $37 million for salaries and benefits, and $11 million for supplies and services. Approximately six full-time equivalent faculty positions will be added at the college starting in the fall.

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The new positions will be in some of the popular programs at the college, such as paramedics and health services, and there will also be positions added for the Aviation Management Certificate program being launched in the fall.

Shufflebotham says the funding for positions at the college is based on demand in those industries.

“We need to be really responsive to industry in our programming,” he said. “If there’s high student demand, and high industry demand, it’s really our obligation to expand programming. So, those faculty decisions are in those high program demand areas.”

Shufflebotham adds the college’s main priority when developing the budget is ensuring students are supported.

“We wouldn’t be here without the students, and we wouldn’t be here without the community that we serve,” he said. “Everything we do has to focus around the student, absolutely everything. Every decision we make, every budget decision we make, that’s our primary purpose here.”

With the provincial budget not being released until the fall, Shufflebotham says universities and colleges across Alberta worked together to help plan their budgets for the coming years.

“What we understood was most post-secondaries were assuming a zero per cent increase in our Campus Alberta grant, so we took the exact same approach, and we’ll just wait until fall and see what happens,” he said.

Shufflebotham adds the budget could change depending on what is in the provincial budget.