Peace Wapiti Public School Division

By Liam Verster

School budget cuts

Peace Wapiti Public School Division loses $2-million in grants

Dec 2, 2019 | 4:32 PM

Cuts in Budget 2019 have caused a loss of three major grants to school divisions across the province, including the Peace Wapiti Public School Division.

School Divisions were expecting to lose the $730,000 Classroom Improvement Fund, but were not expecting the Province to cut the Class Size Funding and School Fee grants, which total $1.27 million.

Peace Wapiti Public School Division Superintendent, Bob Stewart, says though the cuts are significant, he doesn’t expect they will affect day to day life for students this year.

“That’s because we did not reduce staff or school budgets. With that said we have encouraged administration at each school to be much more conservative with their budgets this year, with the attempt to purposefully save some of their budget for next year.”

Stewart says they are able to mitigate the impact on this school year through funds they had in reserve, and through reductions they have already put in place.

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“So we reduced our central budget expenditures and general administration expenses. We reduced some of the maintenance department budgets, less funding for information technology, staff professional learning opportunities. We eliminated two transportation routes at the beginning of September.”

Stewart adds they will have to re-evaluate once the 2020 provincial budget is released, then work with school principals and collaboratively develop a budget to present for the School Board to approve in the spring of 2020.

At this time, no jobs are on the line, though Stewart says that may change.

“Anything suggested, when it comes to budget, would be purely speculative, as only the Board approves our budget. But since a large portion of our budget is used for staffing, it would be reasonable to assume that Peace Wapiti would have less staff the following year. This does not mean cutting staff though, we do hire new people each and every year, it may simply mean hiring fewer new people than in previous years.”

He says any other changes in the future may be speculative, and they have to wait to see what the budget looks like in the future before they get a full scope of the impact it will have on class size, staffing, and student life.

The PWPSD isn’t the only school district feeling the effects of these cuts, as the Grande Prairie Public School Division is also looking at ways to mitigate the loss of the grants, and planning for a futurue with less provincial funding.