WEYBURN — Shelley Toth, the Â鶹´«Ã½AV East Cornerstone Public School Division's chief financial officer and superintendent of division services, dug into the details of the 2025-26 budget during their June 17 open business session.
While the frontline operations budget shows total revenue of $130.3 million and operating expenses of $128.3 million, there is more to the story. And when that story is concluded, Cornerstone will be filing a budget for 2025-26 that will indicate another deficit, this time being around the $1.5 million mark, which is down from previous years.
Deficits have become a familiar story in most regions of the province, with one region now stating they have no past surplus revenues to fall back on, while others have witnessed slow erosions with Cornerstone being no exception.
Toth noted in her report that their available surplus had been $32.30 million heading into the 2017-18 school year, and would now register at $13.80 million coming into the new school year.
Toth’s report noted the budget overview showed the surplus of nearly $2 million that included a $6 million capital grant for a new school project in Carlyle, with costs not being expensed until the building is completed and then amortized over 50 years.
The division has shown an increase of nearly 21 full-time-equivalent (FTE) teaching positions plus just over 31 more FTE education assistants.
Salaries and benefits eat up most of the $128.3 million in expenditures, coming in at $94.7 million, or 74 per cent of the total budget. Cornerstone employs people who fill 1,157.29 FTE positions with about 526 of them being teachers.
Goods and services cost Cornerstone just under $26 million, or about 20 per cent of the total expenditures, while amortization comes in around $7.3 million and debt service is at a low $400,000 less than half a per cent in the overall expenditure file.
Other major capital expenditures heading into the new school year, besides the $6 million for the Carlyle school, will be $1.5 million for school buses and another $1.15 million for computer hardware and equipment to address the mandate to refresh six schools, along with adding to network, equipment and access point upgrades.
Fleet vehicle replacements, other than buses, will amount to $130,000, and furniture and general equipment purchases will add another $153,000 to the capital expenditures.
It was noted in Toth’s report that the $1,507,356 anticipated deficit budget that will be filed with the Ministry of Education includes nearly $42,000 in additional funds for future employee benefits.
Toth explained that conversion of the budget to a cash basis with the separation of capital from operating results in the operating cash deficit of just over $1.5 million.
“Should the deficit be realized, it will be funded using accumulated surplus from prior years,” she said. That will be a continuation of the process that has unfolded over the past eight or nine years.
