The Greater St. Albert Catholic School board got its first look Monday at how the budget will impact its bottom line in the upcoming year.
Although they don’t know any of their final numbers yet, Secretary-Treasurer Iva Paulik walked board members through the different funding envelopes they received and flagged areas that may be getting less funding.
In the past, the board was working with 36 funding envelopes, but this year that has been reduced to 15, so it is hard to make a direct comparison to the funding they received last time around.
One area of concern is changes to Program Unit Funding (PUF), which is set up to support young kids with severe disabilities. Currently, the program is offered for a maximum of three years for kids who as of Sept. 1 are at least two years and six months old and less than six years old.
Under the new rules, the third year of PUF will be eliminated and only funded for the two years before Kindergarten. Once the little ones start Kindergarten, they will get their funding through a specialized learning support grant that will be funded from Kindergarten through to Grade 12. Private schools are exempt from the changes and will still receive three years of PUF funding.
The board thinks the Kindergarten kids who would have received PUF won’t be funded as well as the old system, although they noted there would still be funding available.
“I don’t believe it covers the shortfall,” Paulik said.
“It’s not the same dollars but I don’t believe they expect the same outcome either.”
Greater St. Albert Catholic School board chair Joe Becigneul said he, too, is concerned about PUF.
“It’s a negative thing for children with severe disabilities across Alberta and it’s a negative thing for us. We have always spent above and beyond the PUF envelope because we have always addressed the individual student needs.”
While the board has had a look at the funding changes, they aren’t sure exactly who will meet the funding requirements, so they are waiting to find out how they will be arranging their programs.
Another area where the board thinks their bottom line will be impacted is in a new envelope that calculates the socioeconomic factors in the community. The envelope takes into consideration factors like single mothers, education level of parents and average income from the recent census data and doles out money to areas that may need more support.
The local Catholic district will likely be impacted negatively by this calculation because they will be lumped in with St. Albert and their rural schools will not be a factor in the calculations.
Becigneul said around 40 per cent of their schools and students are rural and there are different socioeconomic challenges related to their rural areas that they won’t get support for.
“That really penalizes a community like St. Albert when taken as a whole,” Becigneul said.
The division will also struggle to get adequate funding for their outreach programs.
Typically the division’s outreach programs will have lower enrolment during their first semester and then higher enrolment in their second semester, as kids are trying up upgrade courses before they go off to post-secondary. They also see kids returning during a gap year when they want to upgrade some of their marks. But the new calculation won’t take into consideration that second semester's influx of students.
“It would be only funded on this primary registrations, which would be students who are registering with us in September,” Paulik said.
Trustees were concerned with the change and how they will be able to put a teacher in front of an additional 200 students registering in February.
“This really is some concern because it's not promoting lifelong learning,” Trustee Noreen Radford said.
“Nor is it promoting finishing your high school,” Becignuel added.
Another issue with outreach funding is they are only able to get money for one location. Becignuel said that is a detriment to a board that caters to both urban and rural areas. Morinville and Legal students will have to come into St. Albert to take any outreach programs.
When looking at all of the new funding envelopes together, the local Catholic board didn’t fare very well but the province made up for it by giving them a large amount of bridge funding, tasked with helping divisions transition to the new funding model.
The funding is slated to last for two years and Becigneul said he is hopeful the province will alter some funding models to help support boards that serve both rural and urban areas so they are able to get more money through the new funding envelopes.
The board will be sending in their enrolment numbers at the end of March and they are expecting to get a look at their final funding numbers in April.
