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MVSD 2023-2024 Public Budget Forum - Mar. 7, 2023

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Mountain View School Division held a Public Budget Forum on March 7, 2023 to present and discuss the draft 2023-2024 Operating Budget.

Show Transcript

I would like to welcome you to our public budget meeting to discuss the budget for the 23-24 school year. I'm Floyd Martens, the Chair of Mountain View School Division Board of Trustees and on behalf of the Board I want to thank you for joining us this evening. I'm going to begin by acknowledging that we are located on Treaty 2 and 4 Territories, the original lands of the Anishinaabek, Ininiwak (Cree) and Dakota peoples, and the homeland of the Metis nation. We respect the Treaties that were made on these territories and we dedicate ourselves to move forward in partnership with Indigenous communities in a spirit of truth and reconciliation. The Mountain View School Division motto is "Keeping Learners at the Centre" and our mission statement is that "Mountain View School Division will provide an inspiring, respectful and safe learning environment where every student is valued, nurtured and enabled to realize their full potential." Our vision statement is "Mountain View School Division is a centre of educational excellence where all students become contributing citizens of a global society." This evening, here is the agenda for tonight. We're going to provide some introductory remarks, we're going to focus on our strategic directions and then give an overview of the upcoming budget. We'll also share a bit of information about the upcoming strategic planning process and we're going to provide an opportunity for questions and discussions at the end. In this hybrid model with folks present here as well as online, I'm going to give just a couple of instructions. The meeting is recorded and will be posted at a later date along with the slide deck so that's going to be here as well. Please keep your camera off and your microphone muted during the presentation part. When we come to the question and discussion part of the meeting you can turn your camera on, unmute yourself, but wait till you're recognized - someone is monitoring that part. We're not able to do that easily from here so someone is monitoring that. You can also use the chat function if you want to, even if you want to offer something, just a question or discussion point, I encourage you to do that, even say, "I have a question or I want to comment on something," that would be great. That will be helpful for us. I encourage you, as we go through the presentation, if there's things that, you know, strike you, you'd like to ask about or talk about, you may want to jot those down as well. We'll deal with all the questions at the end of the presentation. It's probably just easier in this environment. In the room with me and online, we have trustees and so I'm going to give a moment to have them introduce themselves to you and so we're going to begin with those in the room and I'm hoping the owl will catch everybody around the room so you can see who is here in the room, that would be great. So we're going to start here. Trustee Misko from Roblin. Trustee Scott McCallum, Dauphin. Trustee Charlene Gulak, Gilbert Plains. Trustee Gabe Mercier, Ochre River. Trustee Jason Gryba, also Ochre River. Trustee Kerri Wheeler, Dauphin. And online Trustee Paul Coffey from Ethelbert area, Ward 2. I think that's everyone, right? Covered everybody. Also with me are Superintendent Stephen Jaddock and Secretary-Treasurer Lori Slepicka.  Both will be providing information for us and I'm going to turn things over to them to share the Strategic Direction and the budget presentation right after that. so Mr. Jaddock. Thank you very much. I just want to go over the focus for the strategic directions that we're doing this current school year and I want to turn your attention to the student learning area, and that's the slide that you have in front of you right now, and you'll see that student learning has three focus areas: numeracy, literacy and credit attainment. So those three areas are what we are focusing on and they are important and we feel that we need to continue in those areas. One of the items that we have as a bullet is protecting the frontline - maintaining current staffing ratios. So what we're saying is that as we move into this next budget area is it's a status quo budget in terms of holding the line and full-time equivalents, that's FTEs, or our staff, making sure that it's the same number that we had last year and we're not decreasing that to any extent. So that would mean that we are planning for 239.95 FTEs in that area. We're looking at numeracy and literacy coaches. We have a Numeracy Coach that is full time and a half time Literacy Coach that work with our teachers in the School Division and we feel that they are important to have working with our teachers. They work with professional learning communities and they conduct professional learning sessions for individual teachers and/or groups of teachers that are working together, perhaps it's in cohorts where they come to the division office and receive instruction there. So that's very important. We want to make sure that those types of interventions can continue to occur and also working with teachers with respect to Response to Intervention strategies which have become very, very important coming off of COVID-19. So making sure that we have that expertise in our schools. The next area that I want to stress speaks to credit attainment, and that is making sure that we have support for our industrial art and our technical vocational areas and our human ecology areas and courses for students in grades 7 to 12, making sure that they've got the variety of courses that they can choose an area of interest and something that is in addition to the traditional academic streams that we have in our schools. So making sure that we have that variety and that we are allowing all of our students to access that programming so we have some of our schools, even though the programming is not directly in their schools, those students are bused to sites where that programming is taking place. We are planning for that in our budget. We also want to make sure that we have Reading Recovery and alternative education opportunities available to our students and again, that is key for credit attainment. We have approximately 4.25 FTE in each of those areas, so again, we are putting staffing aside to make sure that those types of interventions are occurring in our schools. Also we do share a High School Apprenticeship Facilitator, that's what HSAP stands for, High School Apprenticeship Program Facilitator, and we share that with Park West School Division and we're planning to again, to have that individual working with students and working with schools, primarily at the high school level, making sure that we have students that are looking at maintaining what they're interested in, and receiving credit for working in the field of their expertise for anything that is an apprenticeship field of expertise in the Province of Manitoba. And also, we want to make sure that we have targeted professional development geared towards numeracy, literacy and credit attainment areas so that we can use our established amounts of professional development towards those areas. And just to give you an idea of, just an overview of where some of our dollars go to in our budget, some of the categories that pertain to student learning and also to the area that I'm going to talk about next, which is student well-being, is instructional staffing Student Services. So all of those extra supports that come in, so when we have our EAs working with students and teachers at our school, making sure that that amount of EA coverage that we had this year is going to continue into next year, that we're not decreasing that by any means, and those are very important helps to have in our schools. Professional Development, Indigenous Education, Technology, Library Services and Resources, and International Education. So just to give you a flavour of some of the highlights that we have on the education side in terms of where we go in our budget. The next area is Student Well-Being. So it's in our Strategic Direction and that is divided into four different areas. We have Safe and Caring Schools, Student Voice, Indigenous Education and Mental Health and Wellness. So each of those areas are areas that we support through our budget and we want to make sure that we have proactive programming in our schools using such things as positive behavioral interventions and supports, zones of regulation and to look at an overall reduction in out-of- school suspension. So making sure that if we can be proactive, if we could train our staff in those areas and allow fewer out-of-school suspensions to encourage keeping students engaged in the school - that's what we want. We also have the MVSD Student Voice Committee, which works directly with our Board of Trustees, and provides input and has communication with them as feedback and what's happening in the school division. I understand that the Student Voice Committee is preparing a survey for some feedback that's going to go out right away, so that's great to have that type of interaction and that would be continued as we move forward in our budget. Resource and Guidance in every building, making sure that all of our schools and all of our students access to quality resource and guidance and that is available in all of our schools and that's part of our regular staffing component. Maintaining EA staffing levels, as was already mentioned, making sure that we have that quality and the adequate amount of EA staffing in our schools. Also, making sure that we are continuing with our implementation of our Indigenous Education Framework, and we've made great strides in that area in recent years. We want to continue to do that and certainly Mountain View School Division is considered a leader in that area. So we want to continue with that to make sure that the work with the reconciliation that we are doing with Umbay Nagamon does continue and our anti-racism initiative. So those are important and we want those to continue. We have Youth Support Workers and Community Connectors, making sure that the important link with families to the local school and working within the Indigenous Education Framework is continuing. So the Youth Support Workers are the ones that are focused on attendance and focusing on those students that need to increase their engagement with attendance. So they help the schools with that and then the Community Connectors are the ones working with our Indigenous Education Framework and with our staff that are focused on that work of reconciliation and providing those supports in schools. We also want to make mention of social workers, both school-based and divisional. Those workers, those social workers are more and more important for us in our schools and across the division. So our divisional social workers will spend time and divvy up all the schools that don't have their own social workers, so that type of additional support is able to occur. We have Mental Health First Aid that is occurring within our school division with the goal to train all of our staff, our teachers and EAs, with the Mental Health First Aid so that they would be able to become safe individuals for students to confide in for them to be able to refer to adequate resources when necessary. So we need to make sure that the adults in our schools are able to meet the needs of our students at a basic level for mental health needs and that's what that's all about. So we've made great strides in that area as well, and we will continue to plan to do that in the next school year. And then staff wellness is also important. We have dedicated funds to make sure that our staff are available and able to get together and celebrate things at the school level and to be together especially in this time coming out of the pandemic, where we need to re-form those relationships and be together, one-on-one again, and that is so important. So we're looking at re-forming the Divisional Wellness Committee and we're planning to have a meeting either just before or just after the spring break to make sure that what was started prior to the COVID-19 pandemic continues to be an area of focus in Mountain View School Division. So that's just a brief overview of those areas that I wanted to share with you this evening and we will have more talk about that later. I'm now going to turn things to our Secretary- Treasurer Slepicka. Thank you, Mr. Jaddock. Welcome everyone. A special warm welcome to our guests this evening.  I appreciate people taking time out of their busy schedules to have an interest in the future of Mountain View School Division and what we do with our budget. So, great to see some guests online and in person. Welcome. This evening I'm going to give you a brief overview of the budget for 23/24. We'll start by just kind of reviewing our budget process. We'll do a bit of divisional information, we'll take a look at our revenues, the special levy, the expenditures and kind of where we're at currently in our budgeting process. So our budget development timeline, in early fall we start with the collection of budget submissions from schools and various departments like Maintenance, Transportation, and Student Services, and start compiling that information and the requests from those departments. As we work through the year and we get our funding announcement, usually at the end of January or beginning of February - this year it was February 2nd - and then we hold our public meeting which is today. By March 15th we have to have the special levy set and communicated to municipalities, and then the budget is approved and submitted by March 31st to the Province. So that's just a summary of our timeline. Lots of work goes on in between there. We meet weekly and have lots of discussions with the Board and Senior Admin. The next slide just kind of shows an overview of what has been happening with our enrolment. A lot of our funding is enrolment driven so it is imperative that we kind of take a look at what the trends have been. You can see that there's been some volatility in our enrolment in the past few years with COVID-19 in 2020.  We had seen a huge drop in our enrolment; it kind of rebounded a bit by 2021/2022 and we're kind of just plateauing, projecting a small drop in students for 23/24. Interesting fact about our enrolment is from 2003 to 2012, we lost 214 students and if we go even further back from 1994 until now we lost about 880 students but most of those students were lost in the first part of those two years and recently we've only lost about 98 since 2013. So we've kind of plateaued. This is just kind of an overview of the Division. As you can see, it's a very large geographical area. We have the 5th highest annual kilometres in the province and we're 16th in the terms of enrolment. We have a very large square footage per student ratio when we talk about buildings and this just kind of outlines the context of some of our cost drivers, just because of the very large geographical region that we cover. So this next slide here is just a picture of our revenue and the sources, where they come from. Approximately 61.3% comes from provincial funding municipal funding is about 34.3% and the remaining 4.4% is primarily from tuition fees from students attending from outside of the school division, and that includes our international students. Along the left, or right side, depends which way you are looking at it, is a bit of a comparison of our revenue to the provincial levels. It's kind of interesting just to compare the two. When we talk about municipal revenue, in 2018 the Province implemented restrictions on increases to municipal revenue to 2%. That continued until 2021 and then an offset grant was issued by the Province which enabled divisions to keep their special levies at no more than 2% - or special levies remained at the 2020 level. So for 2023, for 2023 the tax offset funding continued and so levies are still at the same level that they were in 2020. Property tax assessment increases this year were 13% and within that number there were differences. Residential property assessments increased 3.5%, farmland property assessments increased 27.1%, and commercial property increased 6.2%. There were changes between municipalities anywhere from 5.9% to 27.3%. So government is not allowing divisions to increase their levy above the 2020 level, as I mentioned before, and they provide an offset grant to ensure that divisions receive an additional 2% in revenue. You can see that the mill rate has decreased from 14.54 to 12.87 and the special special levy will remain unchanged for the fourth year. There will be differences between property owners in municipalities based on your own individual assessments and how those levels changed. This next slide is a little bit deceiving and maybe a little bit irrelevant in this budget year. This slide is showing you if you had $150,000 property that did not change in value from the previous year and everything stayed the same, you would see decreases in your property taxes. Chances are everyone's going to see an increase in their property taxes, just based on it being a reassessment year and lots of other factors with rebates and how the taxation is shifting. So we won't spend too much on this slide because it's probably irrelevant. This next slide here kind of shows the differences between the municipalities. So if the property tax assessment increased in the municipality more than the 13% average, then you will see there will be a slight increase in the special levy for those municipalities. Two of our 11 municipalities will actually see their levy requests drop slightly, based on that. Gilbert Plains Municipality and the City of Dauphin are below the 13%, so as a whole, those municipalities will see a decrease and RM of Mountain will remain basically unchanged. But all of the other eight municipalities will see an increase in the request for special levy from the School Division. So now where is the money spent? We've seen where it comes from, now where does it go? Our expenditure allocations are consistent with other divisions in the province on an average, with some exceptions. When we look at regular instruction and student services, or Student Support Services, we spend approximately 3.53% less than the provincial average and in the recent years that gap has been narrowing and is not quite the drastic differences.  Our admin costs are only slightly higher than the provincial average but are below our admin cap that is set by the Province. Where we get into bigger differences are in transportation areas and the maintenance costs. I kind of touched on that earlier with our large geographical region, our transportation system is much larger than a lot of school divisions, so the costs obviously are going to be higher for us and then our maintenance costs are also higher than other divisions because we have a large number of schools and our overall square footage is quite a bit higher. So again, that just shows that the geography impacts the statistics as well. This is just a further summary of how the money is spent. You can see that salary and benefits makes up the bulk of our expenditures at 83.3%. Services and supplies are only 16.7%. When you compare that to the Province, we're still a little bit lower in the salary and benefits but our service, materials and supplies is at a higher percentage. Again this is more schools, smaller schools - when you have more buildings you have more utility costs, more insurance costs, office equipment and resources needing to support all those schools. For transportation, more buses, more mileage, more fuel, more insurance. So having a larger area, we also have two bus garages as opposed to maybe some other divisions who only have one. And then we have parts inventory costs to support both those garages. So our supplies, materials and services are slightly higher than the Provincial average. This chart just further depicts our transportation costs and how it affects their budgets. When you look at 21/22 in the Expenditure per Pupil chart you see that our expenditure per pupil is quite a bit higher than the Provincial.  Ours for 21/22 is $14,096 and the Provincial is $13,608. But if you look at the other chart where it shows the transportation costs per pupil and you remove that transportation cost, MVSD is at $13,052 and the Province is at $13,004. So not quite the drastic difference there. So that was a little bit of history and background and now we're going to get into the meat and potatoes of the 23/24 and take a look at our draft budget. So showing here is the revenue, budget to budget. Provincial funding shows an increase of $963,617. This increase is intended to deal with increased contractual costs, inflationary pressures and also includes the property tax offset grant. Within that number, there's an increase to our formula support of $235,826, a slight decrease to our general support grant of $1,838, the property tax offset grant increased by $370,387 allowing us to maintain the special levy at the 2020 level. And there's some one-time supports for staffing and other inflationary costs of $863,703. There was a decrease in the education property tax offset credit and a slight decrease in some student-specific grants that we removed from the revenue and there will be an offsetting decrease in the costs on that one. So when you see a decrease in the education property tax offset, you also see an increase in your municipal revenue because now the municipal revenue is not being used by the same amount. So there's an increase of municipal revenue $446,344, which is very close to being the same as the education property tax decrease. There's a slight increase in tuition fees for First Nations students, and that's just the cost of tuition has increased slightly. We're not predicting a very large increase in number of students, just staying at the same level as 22-23. There is a small increase for revenues from other school divisions, and an increase to our International Student Program revenue of $9,650. So overall, our operating revenues are projected to increase by $1,431,320. So here is the expenditures for 23/24 that we are projecting at this time. MVSD budget deliberations are based on the premise to minimize the impact of funding costs, or funding cuts on classrooms. So although it's naive to think that any cut in the budget does not impact classrooms, the draft budget reflects this principle to minimize impact on classroom instruction. So with staff costs totalling approximately 83.3% of our operating budget almost all budget discussions involve a review of staffing needs. The proposed budget identifies total salary and benefit increases of $1,137,457 for the following items: contractual obligations and benefit changes, maintaining current teaching staff levels, adjustment to Student Services supports based on specific student needs, and the elimination of one bus route. Our staffing costs are in all these areas that are listed here under Regular Instruction exceptional, admin and instructional, so that's not just any one number in the chart that's shown there. They're allocated throughout all the different areas within the Division. Another increase in our expenditures is in the International Student Program. There was an increase in revenues, so just an offsetting increase in the expense. Our International Student Program runs a fairly, a very close to balanced budget, with sometimes just a small amount of profit shown in budget. We have some increases in our connectivity cost of $16,495. That would be reflected in the numbers of the regular instruction. Insurance premiums increased another $104,919, which is about 20%. That's reflected in our Operations and Maintenance amounts, as well as our Divisional Admin. Insurance is an area that has been increasing significantly over the past two years for 23/24 we've put in a 20% increase as well so it's just accumulating each year. Bus fuel, we've shown an increase there of $61,518 and then our utility cost we've seen a significant rise in utility costs of approximately 25% $261,011. Utilities again are reflected in our Operations and Maintenance in that $419,266. A lot of that increase is due to utilities. Library Services increased by $1,531 when all is said and done. We have an increase in our school based budgets of $7,013. We allocate out a portion of our budget to schools based on their enrolment and several other factors, so because of enrolment increases a few more dollars are being allocated out towards the schools, and that's the same with our field trip budgets. We've seen those go up by $5,593. Again, mostly due to enrolment. Another area where we're seeing a significant increase is in interest. We've added an additional $80,000 into the budget to cover some of the increase in interest costs projected for 23/24. So overall our total draft expenditures are projected to increase $1,680,331. We also put an increase into our Capital Transfers of $20,486. That's just to support the bus reserve schedule. We typically try and keep our buses at 12 years old on the regular routes and then our field trip buses we allow them to go a little bit older to like, anywhere from 15 to 19 years, depending on how they're running but we set up a reserve each year so we can support that schedule. We've seen a huge increase in bus costs this year so our schedule is going to look a little different. It's going to be a little bit more challenging to keep up with the same rate of replacing the buses when we've seen the cost of buses go up approximately $60,000 from last year for the exact same bus. So there's different things that we can do there, but if we look at apples to apples, we would be looking at an additional $60,000 per bus. So that brings us to our bottom line, which is showing a deficit of $440,163. So this leaves us in a bit of a place where some decisions need to be made and I think I will hand the screen over to Trustee Martens. I was thinking Secretary Slepicka and I watched a little bit of a budget that was announcement today and a person would say something and they would clap, and I thought about doing that but I didn't want to throw her off in her presentation. It's also a difficult budget for lots of different reasons. As it's been mentioned, we're looking at draft budget and basically it's the status quo that kind of maintains the services levels that we provided and there's always some adjustments that happen but it's really trying to keep things the same. There will be some increases in some revenue through the Teacher Idea Funds but there's also corresponding expenditures.  So that has some impact on the budget. Part of the challenge we've had this year in the status quo, looking at a status quo budget and trying to come to your balanced budget has been because of some external factors that are present. You see them listed on the screen and I'm going to address them briefly just to give you kind of a sense. One of them is the funding model itself. It was anticipated that we would have a new model by this budget cycle. It was announced in December that that was going to be delayed. It does provide some consistency for the Board because it's the model we are familiar with working with. We don't have to adjust to a new one but it's a model that needs updating because right now, you have money that's inside the formula, you have money that's outside of the formula that's allocated, and so it's harder to plan when you're not quite sure where that is going to be. And so having a new model is really important, particularly for future planning, it would help if we knew exactly what that was going to look like going forward. And we hope that will hear about that shortly. Provincial bargaining is taking place for all teachers. You've hear us previously talk about that. While it's occurring and while the settlement of teacher salaries is still in the process of being negotiated. Contracts of teachers ended June 2022 so they're you know, six months old. The process is happening. When it will be resolved, when a collective agreement will be put in place, is unknown at this point. And knowing what the impact of that will be is hard to guess until it's completed. It's hard to know what that's going to look like. It's hard to know what the impact will be. It's also hard to know how the collective agreements, how they will be supported, and what the revenue streams will look like for that. So that leaves lots of question marks when it comes to Board trying to navigate through the budget for this year. Because that's a big unknown - obviously in a system where it's predominantly people driven, it's hard to know if you don't know for sure what that's going to look like. So that's kind of where we are. It was alluded to the inflationary pressures that are existing and we all know inflation's an issue every time we purchase something, we get a sense of that. It's had a huge impact on us. The cost of living for Manitoba went up 7.9% in 2022, second-highest in Canada and PEI was only one that was just slightly higher than that. That's having an impact on people, what people expect, what they are looking for, what costs are, and it affects the Division in lots of different ways. We've heard some of those, we talked about increases to utilities of $260,000, that's a significant impact. The interest one, we put money into the budget, were not sure where that one's going to go. One of the things with interest for school divisions is that we operate in a line of credit for good portion of the year. In part because we have surplus and there's only a certain amount that we can hold, so that helps offset some of that, but it's limited by the provincial requirements when it comes to surplus. It affects our cash flow. We also have cash flow issues because we receive money from municipalities when they collect money. So depending on when that is, some are in the summer, so we receive some revenue, some are till later in the fall, and so we'll receive revenue then, but those are larger portions. Provincial government funds school divisions on a 10 month basis at the end of September, so there's a period of months where we don't really see much revenue but we still have expenditures. And as fall comes your expenditures increase but the revenue isn't always right there when you need it. And so that puts you in your cash flow scenario and so interest costs and the change in interest rates has an impact on school divisions. We budgeted, I think we said $80,000 increase in that area, we're not sure depending on where rates go, if that's enough to address the needs for that and that's been an ongoing kind of challenge. The 10 month as opposed to 12 month is a factor when it comes to cash flows for school divisions. The transportation and maintenance one, we require buses and drivers of course, and we're really really grateful to see the influx of people who've looked into taking their drivers test to become a school bus driver. That's been really positive to see. We're working with MPI trying to get in just in testing appointments in place. That's not always going as quickly as we'd like it to be, but we are still working with that process to try and see that happen. At the same time, we will have drivers who may have medical challenges and so then we need for sub so we have some fluctuations and that, so there's always a need for sub drivers. So if you're out there looking and thinking, maybe I can do that, sign up, call, call the Division office. We need people to be engaged in that process. It's really important for us. The provincial tender of buses, and again it's provincially done, the increase in cost of a bus at about 28% is unheard of. At least I've never seen that kind of increase, for a while. It does present challenges when comes to addressing the current fleet. And how much you put into reserve, how far that actually goes, replacement parts so that's something we're going to maybe have to look at. I know there's discussions with municipalities about transportation areas and there may be some ways to talk about that and supporting one another in that. That would be helpful. We also have aging buildings and that impacts not only the maintenance of those facilities with the increased cost of doing that, but the timing of some repairs. There's one prime example and I couldn't help but want to mention that, you know delays in just manufacturing stuff that seems really simple, like an apparatus for a basketball hoop, that should be easy but it's not. And you know when we we got good news it is in the process of being manufactured, now we don't have to do extra stuff, but it's been frustrating on how long something that simple can take to get done. Just getting materials, making that happen, and that's been an ongoing challenge. And the cost of those projects is escalating and causes some significant delays. We got word, I think it was the last Board meeting, that the tender was awarded for Goose Lake High for a lift in that facility so students can get to the second floor who need access to a lift to get there. The price tag on that is about three times what it was initially thought it was going to be and I think there was one that came through today and again it's going to be significantly more than what was anticipated. Now those are provincial dollars that are going to it but sometimes because of that increased cost it delays on how quickly that can actually happen. Because no one anticipated this kind of thing. The other one is the revenue source part. The desire to remove education from property taxes hasn't come about yet. The announcement today about increasing the rebate process to 50%, exactly what that's going to look like, how that's going to unfold, I don't know the logistics of what that will be. The offset grant of 2% in a time when assessments have gone up 13%, that has an impact as well. Revenue that you could be collecting, it doesn't necessarily cover inflation, doesn't necessarily cover what our increased costs are, so that's the challenge. It may be bringing us closer to almost an 80 when you factor in all the rebates and other things that go into that process, and offset grants, it may come closer to an eighty-twenty split, but it becomes more challenging when you don't have any real voice in that 20% and what that looks like. So it's hard to raise extra revenue through this process. It's become very difficult to even understand the process of how the taxation to revenue part works. Those are some of the areas that are really hard to account for in budget - you have a sense of what they may be but it's hard to identify exactly where those going to end up. At the moment, as you saw, we're projecting a deficit budget for 23-24. The Board's continuing to work to bring that closer to balanced before we finalize our budget and that's some work we have to do obviously to get there. Make some decisions and work through that process to try and come there. It's just the number of unknowns that are hard to predict where they're going to be as we work through the budget. One more area I want to touch on before we look at questions or comments, this spring were going to be engaging with our communities in the development of our next strategic plan. Information is being prepared to share with our communities to provide the opportunity for dialogue and future directions of the School Division. We will be doing that in the various communities across the Division so we can have conversations and roundtable discussions and dialogue with with folks about the future and direction for the school division. I encourage you to stay tuned for information about that and will be coming out in the next little while and I encourage you to be engaging in those conversations. It's been a while, we were scheduled in 2019, 2020 to have those conversations and things kind of got sidetracked in that process. So we're re-engaging in that process this year and we will be working toward the next strategic plan, whether it's a 3 year plan and whatever length of time would be part of that conversation with communities and we really need your valuable input in that process. With that, I'm going to open the floor - are there any questions, whether in the room or online? If you're online, type in the chat, or turn your camera on. Let me know where we are in that process. If you do have questions or comments to make. Any online questions? Any in-person questions? Let me just say, first and foremost, being in municipal politics the challenge continues and I think the time has come that the province needs to be more engaged of revisiting the funding of education in the Province in Manitoba. I say this simply because we've gone through the reality if we have students that aren't given proper education, some of those students will become a cost to society and to the government. And we cannot continue to assume that we want to penny-pinch dollars of the importance of education in our school divisions throughout the Province of Manitoba. So, with me saying that, I think we need to revisit their funding formula that presently has existed. Have we gone outside the country of Canada? Have we gone out to some other European countries and maybe investigate how we can find alternative sources of revenue to sustain a proper education in Manitoba or in Canada? I think that we need to do it. The fact that you indicated was that the fact the costs have gone up, and being the last term I was on council, I think like a municipal grader jumped up like a hundred fifty to two hundred percent cost, so unfortunately we're all kind of struggling financially and the dollar chain of supporting the importance of school divisions in the Province of Manitoba. It's great for the province to provide the 50% rebate on the education tax but I think it's so much challenging for trustees to do the undercurrent to sustain a budget that's challenging, as you indicated, in your budget and everybody else. So I guess in conclusion to my commentary, the sooner we start to sit around the table and with the province and have some other clear direction where we're going to go with financing because, if it's simply because they think or the province thinks this is the only strategic way we should do it, there is a cost factor of not providing a decent education for the upcoming students in the long range because there is a cost of social services and uneducated individuals in today's society and there's no reason for that to happen in my personal opinion. That's my two cents' worth. I appreciate that. Thanks. Are there any other, online? I think, just in terms of a comment, you've heard me say, I've written about it several times in Mountain View Matters about the funding model, and sitting on that committee we really need, that needs to happen sooner rather than later just because I think it would help bring some clarity to what needs to be in place and how that may work. So I'm hoping that that happens sooner rather than later and there's going to be more consultation after budget process is done, so we anticipate that we are going to have those conversations about the model because it currently it is not working. I think everyone recognizes that, it's just how do you get from that point to where it needs to be. I think there are some ways to get there, we just haven't got there yet, so I agree with that portion of it. How do you think provincial bargaining has affected the local budget planning process because of provincial bargaining? My only comment would be it raises a little higher level of uncertainty just in the fact that when you're bargaining, like locally, when you're bargaining with your staff you get a sense of where you're kind of at, and you try and work through that.  It's a little closer to the ground and you kind of know where it's going to end up, or closer to where it may end up. When you deal with the provincial one and pulling all the collective agreements together and I get all the dynamics of that is where we are, you don't know what that's going to look like, and you also don't know, I think it's because you're coupled with not only the bargaining process, but you're coupled with the funding, the move toward provincial funding of education as opposed to provincial and municipal, and those components.  At least that conversation about where it's going. If that's the case, then you would anticipate that the money will be there but you don't know what that's going to look like yet. So I think, I think that raises just uncertainty and that makes it harder to navigate because you don't know where that will go. There's lots of different models across Canada, because we're not the only place that has provincial bargaining with teaching staff and provincial funding of education like lots of jurisdictions, most jurisdictions do that, and most use property as some component of raising revenue as well as the general revenue by provincial treasury to do that. But we're not, we're kind of in between those models right now because we haven't we haven't got completely to provincial funding and we haven't got provincial bargaining kind of settled. That first contract's going to be important as when you're bringing all the school divisions together in one collective agreement, you don't know what that, how that's going to shake out with every clause that everybody has. And the impact of those, because there's lots of components to that, is varied, depending on what that looks like. So, things like prep time, which is varied in various parts of the province, that might have an impact on some school divisions more than others, depending on where that ends up. The actual salary component is probably not significantly different, but some of the other things might be, like impact of them might be, and you don't know until it's done. So it's lots of uncertainty in the process. The only other comment that I was going to make, as our Secretary-Treasurer was going through the components and as our Superintendent was talking about some of the Strategic Direction, one of the things that probably needs to be factored in is jurisdictional funding. When we talk about social workers, mental health supports, etc., school divisions have stepped in to do some of those things because that's one of the only ways that you're actually securing someone to do those, have those roles in your school division. If you're waiting for Public Health or other areas to step in and fill those roles, you will be waiting a long time, so school divisions have stepped up to do that. We've done the same when it comes to infrastructure for communication stuff, technology, those components. Divisions step in and do that because we could never get to a place where there would be a model that would work otherwise. It would just take away too long and costs would necessarily be better in that process so divisions stepped up to do it. But there's jurisdictional parts to that, where if some of those areas were covered out of other dollars than provincial budgets , that would alleviate some and it would become beneficial for school divisions. So those are other components. Maybe I should, for the record, my name is Ron Kostyshyn. But I think you bring up a very good point, is the fact that by having mental health workers, where kind of the onset, there should be some dollars that are brought in from another department because that's a major asset to identify students before things continue to get worse for those individuals. So there is a financial support from social services or from the health department, whether it be a percent or two, or whatever dollar amount, but I think that's a very good point because as school structures or school teachers or guidance counsellors, that's the first indication of some student that's going to have some challenges and it's probably no better than that point in time to identify that problem and deal with it before it continues to escalate and cost society or cost the government in another department additional dollars. And I think it's a very good template to consider using in the future of finding other sources of revenue to justify. So those are areas and all those conversations that happened with provincial governments over the years, it's one of those ongoing dialogues. One of the reasons school divisions have stepped up to employ people is because you then know that you have them, as opposed to relying on other departments to hopefully have that support there. Because I know that can be really challenging across the division. It depends on where you are in the division, obviously. But in some of our communities, if you're wanting to see a mental health worker, you're waiting a long time and that doesn't help students. So divisions try to step up to help those areas but it is a bigger conversation and again you need the people who are able to be employed or at least helped some element of identification, some type of resources to make that happen. Anything further from anyone? Not seeing anything online, not hearing anything online. We're thankful that you're able to be part of this conversation tonight as we talk about the budget. It's been a challenging one. Obviously, we're are not done yet in the work and we'll hopefully pass it in the next little while and that information will come out to you through our media sources and we look forward to seeing and talking to many of you in public consultation about the Strategic Plan in the months to come. So thanks so much, have a great evening.

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