Prairie Rose School Division secretary-treasurer Ryan Boser presents a budget update to the division Tuesday afternoon - Photo by Charles Lefebvre

By Charles Lefebvre

Deficit increase

Prairie Rose reporting increased deficit for school year in revised budget

Nov 26, 2019 | 4:44 PM

DUNMORE, AB — The Prairie Rose School Division is forecasting a higher deficit for the current school year than they originally projected.

The division discussed an update to its budget Tuesday afternoon during a special meeting.

According to documents presented in the meeting, the division will be running a deficit of $1,298,518 for the 2019-20 school year. This is a significant increase from the deficit originally predicted at the start of the year of $190,945.

The school board gives two main reasons for the increased deficit.

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In the 2019 Alberta budget, three grants from the province (the Classroom Improvement Fund, Class Size funding, and school fee allocation) were ended by the province, as the government will begin implementing a new funding model for schools in the province next year.

“Those three grants amounted to about $2 million dollar loss in revenues for Prairie Rose,” said secretary-treasurer Ryan Boser, who added the division received roughly $1.1 million from the province as transition funding for the new model.

The other reason for the deficit, Boser said, was a 240 per cent increase in insurance premiums for the division.

Prairie Rose is a member of the Alberta School Boards Insurance Exchange, along with 45 other school divisions, who are also seeing increases. According to Prairie Rose’s budget documents, this year, they will be paying $971,733 for insurance, up from $235,899 last year.

“It’s mostly due to the catastrophic losses around weather losses in Alberta over the last number of years,” he said. “The program had significant paid-loss ratios, meaning the claims that were coming in were significantly larger, up to around 500 per cent of what the actual premiums paid were.”

Boser says the division received the update in late August while they were creating their budget, and says the news came as a shock.

“We’re taking significant steps to fix this, including looking at local insurance quotes for the upcoming year, as well as advocating to the government to have some sort of government interference as well on this,” he said. “I know the Government of Alberta, for certain ministries, they look at an option of self-insuring, so one of the ideas is to maybe take that with regards to school buildings as well.”

Boser says Prairie Rose will be able to cover the shortfall with reserve funding this year, though he understands it’s not a sustainable long-term solution.

Despite the shortfall, Boser adds there will be no staffing losses for the division this year.

Prairie Rose is reporting 3,021.5 full time equivalent students this year, up 19.5 from their spring budget.