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MVSD Public Budget Forum - Mar. 7, 2024

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Mountain View School Division held a Public Budget Forum to present and discuss the draft 2024-2025 Operating Budget. A presentation related to the Division’s operations followed with an opportunity for discussion.

Show Transcript

Good evening everyone.
My name is Gabe Mercier and I am the board chair,
At least for this year, and I would like to welcome, 
Welcome you here today, 
Tonight. I see in the audience we have Reeves and we have the media folks here and we would like to thank you very much for showing up tonight.
We will begin with the Treaty Acknowledgement: 
Mountain View School Division is located on Treaty 2 and Treaty 4 territories, the original lands of the Anishinaabek, Ininiwak (Cree) and Dakota people, or 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 MVSD Motto is: Keeping Learners at the Centre.
The Mission Statement is: 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.
The Vision Statement:
If you were to look down from the top, what would you see?
The Vision Statement is: Mountain View School Division is a centre of educational excellence where all students become contributing citizens of a global society.
Our basic agenda tonight,
We'll have introductions and welcoming remarks,
Then we'll look at our strategic directions,
Then we'll look at the 2024-25 operating budget overview and then we will have discussions and questions at the end of it.
So we'll begin with the introduction of the folks who are here and we have here both our trustee as well as senior administration.
So we'll begin with our trustee on, all the way on the right.
Jason Gryba, Trustee and Vice-Chair; Suzanne Cottyn, Assistant Superintendent; Lori  Slepicka, Secretary-Treasurer; Stephen Jaddock, Superintendent/CEO.
Thank you very much.
I would like to mention instructions for the folks who are online.
You are free to make comments in the chat section.
You can always make any comments or any remarks that you'd like to make in the chat section and we’ll be able to answer the comments that you may have.
There are many issues in education as we try to provide the best possible education for our students, our kids. Over the past four years, we've had many distractions, disruptions, starting with the COVID pandemic, which in many cases did create it's own social conflicts between our citizens.
During that period, we experienced high inflation and high prices for goods and services and we are still suffering those high prices.
It hasn't all come down yet.
We haven't gotten over this yet, and we're still wrestling and trying to cope with the issues of inflation.
There were supply chain disruptions throughout the world and we, in this division, were not shielded or immune from it.
We suffered the same disruptions, supply chains disruptions as any place in this world.
We had issues of supply and demand and with low supplies the prices will go up in our economic system.
And sometimes in some cases, whatever the market will bear because of the system we have, we had high interest rates as well, which affected us as a school division because we have to borrow money to tide us over to pay staff and to purchase supplies. Because of the way we receive our funding from the provinces and the municipalities, we have to borrow money from banks in order to meet our demands.
And to tell the truth, 
I'd like to thank Senior Administration – I’d like to thank them for how they handled the budget during the those turbulent times.
We didn't crash.
You were able to cope and I’d sort of like to thank senior administration on that.
And so now I would like to turn it over to the Superintendent and CEO, Mr. Jaddock.
Thank you very much, Trustee 
Chair Mercier.
I would like to share this portion of the meeting, 
The portion of funding that goes to the education side and just to see how that's related to the budget.
So our strategic directions, currently we have two areas.
We've got the student learning area and under that area we've got three main strategic directions and that is under the area of numeracy, literacy and credit attainment.
So where do funds go from the budget to any of these areas?
So first of all, the budget that we have proposed is a budget to protect the frontline.
The frontline is where our teachers and our support staff for teachers are located and that's what we call the frontline of education. And we want to make sure that we maintain current teacher staffing ratios and we'd also like to propose an increase to educational assistant hours.
We are looking at a little bit of a pressure point on our educational assistants and this will bring us up to where we're actually, more in line with what we're actually paying out for our educational assistants throughout the school year.
So we needed to do a little bit of a correction there and get that to match with what we are actually paying out. When we have students that come to our schools from other school divisions or they're just new to the system and they require additional support, then we do need to put in, oftentimes, educational assistants to help with them.
So we are wanting to make sure that our funding includes an increase for those hours.
Also updated technology requirements.
As you know, we are using, that students are using technology on a daily basis in schools, and in order to do that we require software and hardware. We require hardware in terms of physical devices for the students to use in the classroom, and then we also require the type of working that those devices can work off of. And we often have talked about things like bandwidth, the amount of devices that can be connected at any one time and still make the use of that device profitable within the school and valuable for the students.
So we need to keep on paying attention to renewing those resources, both software and hardware, and we're looking at that in the budget as well.
Support for classroom supplies: 
We know that in order for a classroom to work effectively that teachers need to have supplies and schools need to be able to, principals of the schools need to be able to support the teachers with the classroom supplies that they require.
And so we are looking at an increase in the amount of support from the instructional budget that principals can give to their teachers in the classrooms.
We are also wanting to maintain our instructional coaches.
We've got a 1.5 FTE with our support for instructional coaches throughout the school division and that allows those teachers to go in and visit classrooms and work with teachers on staff and instructional development.
And it's a very valuable resource to have and we want to maintain that.
So we're not looking for an increase or a decrease, just in maintaining that.
We also want to support our industrial arts, human ecology and technical vocational courses for grades 7 through 12.
Those are very important to help with students as they are looking at what they want to do for a career choice and what they want to get involved with, so they can look at things such as small motor repairs or auto tech or collision repair or welding technology.
So we want to make sure that we have access to those programs for our students and that we continue to support staffing in those areas.
So we will continue to do that.
Also we have support for Reading Recovery and Alternative Education. So Reading Recovery we've got approximately 4.25 full-time equivalent for that.
So the schools that have grade one students can help them with those students that are identified that need extra support with reading.
Grade one is a pivotal year for students to learn to read, so that's where that resource is put in in a big way and we want to continue with that.
Also, Alternative Education for those students that might not fit within the regular confines of a classroom, and they need additional support to attain their credits, 
we have alternative education situation where they can go to that classroom.  
Oftentimes it might be within the school, but in a different area, or for the sake of the DRCSS and Dauphin, it's an off-site program and we have a memorandum of understanding with the Dauphin Friendship Centre, and we have our students located there for their alternative programming.
We also have a High School Apprenticeship Facilitator, 
That's what HSAP stands for.
Education is famous for acronyms, so High School Apprenticeship Program facilitator, we share that with Park West School Division and it's a neighboring school division.
And again, that's for students that are in high school, grades 9 to 12 who are employed in a apprenticeable trade in the province of Manitoba.
They can receive up to 8 credits in each of the apprenticeable trades within the province, so we want to encourage students and schools to take advantage of that and those credits that the student attained count towards the minimum of 30 credits that they need to graduate with province of Manitoba.
So it's a very valuable and again gives students a pathway to where they see themselves in the work environment after graduation. And also targeted professional development, making sure that our teachers are working with 
professional development in areas that are beneficial for students. We have been involved in the Manitoba Rural Learning Consortium for a number of years.
We're going to continue our participation in that Manitoba Rural Learning Consortium.
It's allows rural school divisions to have access to 
training that they otherwise might not get outside of the perimeter of Winnipeg. So that rural school divisions are the only ones that are participating in those professional learning, those rural teachers from those divisions are the ones that are participating in that professional learning, and it is very beneficial and it's brought back to the school division.
So there's a number of areas that are targeted for that professional learning and in particular note we have been involved in the numeracy achievement project called the NAP and that has been beneficial for our classroom teachers.
So moving along, we do have another area that is a focus for our strategic plan and that's student well-being.
And in the student well-being area we've got 4 subcategories and those are safe and caring schools, student voice, Indigenous education and mental health and wellness.
And we want to make sure that our schools are continuing to participate in proactive programming such as PBIS, zones of regulation, and we do have an overall goal in Mountain View School Division to see a reduction in out of school suspensions where we would like to make sure that students are in school and that we move to more of a restitution type model.
And I mean, there are situations where for safety’s sake, we do need to have an out of school suspension, but we certainly want to reduce them overall so that students can remain in school and have that contact time with the individual classroom teacher.
We also have school nutrition programs, and you may have heard that the province has increased their funding for school nutrition programs.
So now Mountain View School Division has been a recipient of additional funding for school nutrition programs to augment what is already happening in our schools.
So we have approximately an additional $275,000 to spend in that area.
We will be reporting twice during the school year to the province as to how those funds have been expended.
So we are just waiting for a further information from the department on how that reporting is going to take place and then we will be in communication with our schools as to how they can unfold that within each school in Mountain View School Division. The province has stated that their goal is that no student should come to school hungry and if they do, that they are being able to be looked at, looked after for breakfast and lunch.
So that is the goal of the program in all of our 16 schools 
in Mountain View School Division. The MVSD Student Voice Committee will be something that we want to continue for the next school year.
It's in operation right now and they're connected with the Board of Trustees and they are involved in student leadership 
programs throughout the school division and getting feedback from other students and presenting that feedback to senior administration and to the school trustees.
So that's very valuable, 
we want to continue with that. Resource and guidance in every school, 
that's resource teacher and guidance counselor, in every school.
It is getting more difficult, I will admit, to find qualified teachers who have certification in both resource and also in guidance counseling.
We do have a greater benefit of finding the teachers that have that certification because what they can do with students, in particular the guidance counselors, because if they’re a certified guidance counselor, then they can do one on one counseling with students on an as needed basis within the school that they are placed.
We want to increase Educational Assistants staffing levels, which I've talked to before, and again that's just support for students and teachers within the classroom.
I also want to turn your attention to our Indigenous Education Framework.
We have an extensive Indigenous Education Framework that we work on in Mountain View School Division and that forms the basis of the work that we've done with Umbay Nagamon, which is the project for Come Sing With Us, which is our work in reconciliation, bringing that to all of our communities and to all of our schools in a five year plan.
We received funding from the provincial government to have that program and the valuable work that is being done in that area is notable and has been certainly acknowledged at the provincial level and even outside the province of Manitoba.
So we're, we're very proud of that 
here in Mountain View School Division and that work continues.  We also have community connectors that are involved with helping with that Umbay Nagamon and connecting with students and connecting with families and making sure that students are coming to school and attending and making sure that their learning is continuing.
We also have funding for social workers, both school based and divisional, and that is important.
The work of social workers, it seems that many of our partner organizations that are outside of the education area are also stressed and taxed, and sometimes we can't get students to get that support outside of the school and certainly a social worker that is employed with the school division and an individual school can be able to assist with that.
We also have Mental Health First Aid, that is a program that is presented to our staff that they can take and get training on. And that is to be able to identify in students and other coworkers where they are maybe not flourishing as best they could, and they're able to have a conversation surrounding that and be able to turn them to the support and the help that they might need. And some of the help might be just listening to their story and having them share that with you.
And they get some training in that.
So that is ongoing and that is something that we would like to continue.
We have two individuals that are trained in delivering that in Mountain View School Division and that will continue. And also staff wellness,  
we want to make sure that our staff are taken care of, particularly as was mentioned by our Board Chair, Mr. Mercier, that coming through the COVID pandemic we find ourselves in what we call the echo pandemic, where the effects of the pandemic are now being felt and actually now coming out in the behaviors of students.
So, and the staff are on the front lines to have to deal with that.
And also it's no secret that many of the adults in our society have been affected by the pandemic as well and they need to remain healthy and they need to have support.
So we want to make sure that we're attending to that in Mountain View School Division.
And so we are looking at the Divisional Wellness Committee that we have had in previous years to be struck and to do work to be able to support, continue to support our staff.
We do have places that we can turn staff right now.
The Care for All in Education is an on online resource that all staff in all areas of the education sector can access and it's free of charge.
So we are happy to continue to offer those supports as well.
So that is the end of my section and I want to thank you for being attentive to that 
and where our monies do go from our budget to support our strategic planning.
I'll now call on Assistant, or on Secretary-Treasurer Slepicka to come forward and to continue with the presentation.
Thank you, Mr. Jaddock.
Good evening, everyone.
Believe it or not, this is a great turnout.
I appreciate everyone for coming out tonight given the weather situation that we had last night and everything else. We have about 7 people online as well, along with a few other Trustees. 
So just so that you know, we are online and we're being recorded in the meeting as well, just to share that with you.
So I am going to do a quick overview of the budget.
We will take a walk down memory lane and kind of take a look at the numbers that we've seen in the past.
I'll get some comparisons from the division to the province and then at the end we'll take a look at where we're at with the 24-25 budget.
So our budget development timeline, this isn't a short process.
We start in the early fall and we're still working on completing the financial statements from the previous year and we have to start working on next year and and still deal with the current year.
So fall is always a fun time.
We get our provincial funding announcement 
usually at the end of January or beginning of February. This year, we got it on February 1st.
We hold a budget consultation meeting in late February or early March.
That's what we're doing right now.
And then we have to have the special levy set by March 15th for the municipalities and we have to ensure that the budget is approved and submitted to the province by March 31st.
So the bulk of our provincial funding is based on enrollment, so it's good to take a look at our enrollment numbers and, and what's been happening, happening with them over the past 10 years.
There's definitely been some volatility over the last 10 years.
You can see in 2020 that's where our most recent big dip was, and we all know the reason for that.
But if you take a look at where we're projecting to be for 24-25, you'll notice that we're almost back to pre-pandemic numbers, which is, which is great.
Again,
the provincial funding is based on our eligible enrollment or supportable students.
A lot of these numbers are made up with some non-supportable students.
We have a lot of First Nations students that come to our division that also support our funding from First Nations.
So when we talk about factors affecting our budget, our demographics definitely play a huge role in it. We are geographically large and the area is sparsely populated.  Almost half our students are transported and we have the sixth-highest total annual kilometers in the province where we're 20th in terms of enrollment out of the 36 divisions. We have a very large footprint and a small and we have a number of small schools.
We have the second highest square footage per student of any division in the province and we have 6 high schools, 4 with 104 students, or less.
So the purpose of providing this information is just for context.
When we talk about cost drivers, we may compare to other divisions.
We are marginally higher and our demographics continue to contribute to those increases.
OK, revenue sources, so this is where like I mentioned, we're going to take a walk down memory lane. The province, in order to get the provincial comparison, the province only has 21-22 available on the website.
So these are some older numbers, but you can see where our provincial funding is a little bit higher than the provincial average.
Our municipal funding is a little bit lower and then our other is the remaining 4.3% and it is primarily from tuition fees, 
students attending from outside of the division and international students.
Municipal revenue.
This is probably the topic that brought everybody out today.
We've had restrictions on our municipal tax levies limited to 2% since 2018 and they continued on into 2021 when offset funding to school divisions began to equal municipal revenue increase of 2%.
This enabled divisions to keep their special levy at the 2020 levels.
So for 2023, again the tax offset funding continued so that levies could be maintained at the 2020 levels.
So our levies haven't increased for quite some time.
In 2024, divisions are now allowed to implement a tax increase.
The province has indicated that it needs to be at a responsible level, but with having the limited increases and the inability to tax, we definitely have seen some gaps over the years where we've just ** in increased funding requests.
So this picture here shows how the special levy has increased over the past three years, 22 and 23 being the same, and 2024 our proposed change.
So from 23 to 24, we're looking at an 8.11% change, which is an average of 4.1 over the past couple years.
You'll see portioned assessments have increased from 2022 to 2024 and just slightly from 23 to 24. And mill rates in 2022 were 14.54.
In 2023, they actually decreased to 12.8697 and we're looking at increasing it by about one point for 2024.
Property values - farmland decreased, residential increase by 0.1, and commercial property by 0.3.
So not much change in property values for 2024.
In 2023, there was an assessment year, so there were some huge increases in the previous year.
And then we just take a look at the effect of our proposed increase to taxes and what it would look like on a tax bill.
So residential would be approximately $26.01 for every $100,000 of value or assessed  value.
The province is still promising a rebate of 50% for residential and farmland, so that would be an increase of $13.00 for residential. Farmland, 
the effect would be about $45.02 for every $100,000 of value or $22.51 after the rebate.
And then commercial looking at $65.03.
So is just, again another picture of what assessments look like based on municipality.
You could see that this assessments and as indicated before, have increased by .3 of a percent.
And then when you look at it by municipality, anyone who increased by more than .3 will have a slight increase 
so their special levy and anyone who increased or decreased less than .3, will see a slight drop.
OK, so now where is where is the money spent?
If you take a look at regular instruction, we're slightly over in that area, but when you add regular instruction and student services support together, we spend approximately 3.16 less than the provincial average.
That gap has been narrowing over the recent years, and some of that difference just may be associated with salary costs or the level of needs and programming provided in other divisions.
Everything else is fairly, 
fairly consistent until you get down to transportation.
Transportation is significantly higher.
Again, that's because of our large geographical area and our huge transportation system.
Our maintenance again is higher than the provincial average and that's because of our high square footage per student.
And then if we summarize those expenses into two categories, you can see that our, the majority of our budget is made up of salaries and benefits, 83.3% and 16.7 for service and supplies.
The province is that about 84.1% in salaries and benefits and their service and supplies is 15.9. And I should correct that when I say the province that the provincial average is there.
So we spend slightly less than the average on personnel costs.
We have more schools, smaller schools, and our insurance costs and utility costs are slightly higher.
We have more buses, more mileage, which puts our supplies budgets up higher.
When we look at the cost, or the expenditure per pupil,  
in 22-23 our projected cost is 14,631 which is only $107 higher than the provincial average.
Now because our transportation system is so geographically large and we're sparsely populated our 
transportation costs alone are $402 higher than the provincial average, as you see in the second chart there.
So when we remove that single budget area, our cost per pupil is actually lower than the provincial average.
That's just an interesting point there.
If we take a look at the proposed revenue for 24-25, 
you can see that the provincial revenue increased by 1.8%.
Part of that is from the nutrition funding and the other part is about a $243,000 increase, just to some one-time funding that the province provides.
First Nations revenue we're seeing about her predicting about a 48% increase there.
And everything else is staying fairly static.
The private organizations is just a small number showing a slight increase there in revenues from the miscellaneous tuition.
So the biggest number again, like I said, what's probably brought everybody out today is our municipal revenue.
So we're looking at about a $2.98 million increase in the municipal revenue. The interesting thing, 
if you remember from a few slides back, our special levy wasn't increasing by 2.98 million because it about when we look at the municipal revenue, we have a special requirement.
A special requirement is for the school year.
The special levy is for calendar year. So for our requirement, the 2.975 million, 40% of that gets added to the 2024 special levy.
The other 60% will get added to your 2025 special levy.
So that's the confusing thing about school division, 
school years versus calendar years and then how that all goes forward.
So total revenue, we're looking at any 8.1% increase up to 50 million, $816,934.
And how are we going to spend all that money?
We've been deficit budgeting for the last couple of years.
Last year's deficit budget was $96,894.
So what we're proposing is to be at a balanced budget, so we have to account for that right off the bat. For salaries and benefits, 
we're looking at an increase of about 2.7 million that consists of those additional hours for the EA's and then budgeting for contractual obligations.
But contractual obligations are difficult to predict right now. Our teachers’ bargaining is being done at a provincial level, so we have no idea what those salaries are going to come in at.
And the contract has been expired for a couple of years already.
And then our non teaching union, 
is also expired, so we don't know exactly what that's going to be for next year to year.
So we're putting in what we think is a fair and reasonable amount into the budget to be fiscally responsible so that we have money to cover the salaries when we get the settlement of the contracts.
The province, as you know, gave us the 275,000 for the nutrition grant.
They also indicated that that had to be used for nutrition so that that's an added expenditure offset by that revenue.
Mr. Jaddock spoke about the technology upgrades, but we're looking at about an extra 118,574 to bring our technology infrastructure up to today's standard.  Transportation costs of fuels and some extra mileage costs that we're incurring about 47,571 projecting for next year.
And then when we get to the maintenance supplies and services again, that's another fairly large item, 
that's one of the areas where the gap has been for the last five years where we haven't been able to increase the taxes.
We actually had about an 8% increase in our maintenance service and supply budget.
So over the last five years, and anybody who's gone to the lumber yard or the hardware store knows that costs have now increased by 8%.
So we're looking at about a 30% increase in our maintenance supplies and service budgets.
On top of the increased cost, there's also higher demands, higher standards for 
accessibility, workplace safety health issues.
We have aging infrastructure, so we have to start building in those gaps of where we haven't seen increases for quite a while.
The next line, supplies.
That's where we're talking about classroom supplies and office supplies 
of $56,849.
And then we have some other miscellaneous adjustments and reallocations.
Just, there's a few items that were salaries before, but now are no longer salaries.
And then when we get to transfers, that's an additional allocation for our bus reserve and for our vehicle replacement plan. And that in a nutshell is how you spend $50 million.
If there's no questions, are there any questions of me at this time?

Participant: I don't know, maybe it's not of you, but so for the school nutrition they gave you 275,000 this year to use in 2023-2024?
Slepicka: 24-25
Participant: 24-25, OK, so but in that budget, it didn't reflect the 2023-2024 nutritious allocation.
Slepicka: There wasn't one.
Participant: There wasn't one.
Slepicka: Yeah, it's new money for 24-25.
Participant: OK.

Participant: What are you projecting for wage increase?
Slepicka: Ohh
Participant: You can't say. 
Slepicka: Yeah, because negotiations are going.
Participant: So explain to me then, how the teaching contracts being negotiated centrally, I'm assuming with an eye to fairness and equity across the province, but you're expected to cover whatever contract’s thrown at you with no additional provincial **?
Slepicka: Our hope is that we won't be, but they are not indicated, indicating that they will cover those.
How do you come up with a number?
I mean you kind of take a look at history, what other, what the last…

Participant: Has there been a reserve fund knowing that this is coming up?
Slepicka: We budget a little bit, we've budgeted a little bit each year.
So we just keep adding to it as we go along.
Participant: Negotiations are completed. Can you find out which **?
Slepicka: Sure.

Participant: In your calculations there you showed our assessment increasing between 1.9 and 3% between the farmland and residential.
That's way off what the province gives us when we're doing our municipal budgets.
Umm, but even if it's true, 
if it's only 1.9 and 3% increase, then why are municipalities being targeted at the 19.8% increase in the municipal funding?
Assessments going up that much.
Why is there so much more municipal funding being required?
And I'm only going from your steps here.
Slepicka: To explain, we take our revenue and we project what our expenses are and then we ask the municipalities to make up the rest. Does that make sense? 
Participant: So municipalities don't make up.  The taxpayer, the rate payer, hasn't had an increase and in this case it's almost 15 to 16%. They're getting a 15% increase in their taxes basically for school funding each year or for this year's in particular. Is that correct? That’s what's being shown for us to pay at the municipal level.  I've got to explain to my ratepayers why you're paying 15% more than what they're actual property value and everything else has gone up.
Slepicka: Yeah, it it's, it's tough to explain how exactly how that works. The actual amount for our special requirement is only going up about 13%, but then our special requirement is reduced by your, by the education property tax credit, tax incentive grant, property tax offset grant.
So we're, we're talking gross numbers when we're looking at these numbers too.
So the, the percentage is kind of skewed that makes sense.
Participant: Makes sense a little bit, but you're still showing that the municipal tax increase is 19.8%. Is that wrong or right?
Slepicka: Yeah, that, that's how it works out on that calculation.
But when we allot just the special requirement to special requirement, it's only about 13%.

Participant: Another question.
(**)
But if contract negotiations have been going on for a long time, like EAs and bus drivers and stuff since 2020, it's the longest in the province, I believe right now the latest contract.
Why is every year set amount not set aside knowing there's going to be an increase coming the end of whether it be a three year or four year contract for each year, so that come the 4th year we get a big contract to offset a very large increase.
So we can from there our budgets or the mill rates went from here and down and down and down and now we're going up to overcompensate for what we want.
I'm just wondering what and not be a better solution fiscally to set aside a certain amount of money every year knowing that there's a staff increase.
Slepicka: Absolutely we do, we do that and that's what this is so.
Participant: No, but it's obviously, not enough. It’ll be a big increase.
Mercier: It's hard to tell. Has to be negotiated.
Participant: I guess the other question is how come it takes over three years delay to get a contract?
Mercier: It’s the Union that had to make the move, it's that it's up to the Union to make the move to approach us.
Participant: OK.
Mercier: And I'm just telling you that that was the situation. We wanted them to approach us and never did.

Participant: And correct me if I'm wrong, but is it not going to be paid out over a time frame of like five years or so?  Because you're not going pay it out all in one year.
Slepicka: Being the contractual, so we would have to pay quite a bit of it out retroactively because that's a contract. So for example, the CUPE contract expired on December 31st of 2020. We would have to back pay. Say it was settled today, we'd have to back pay everybody back to January 2021.
Participant: That huge increase in your budget, it's going to be paid off incrementally.
No.
Slepicka: And there are, there is money in the budget since the time that the contracts expire. So when the CUPE contact expired, there was Bill 28 on the table, which put a freeze on salaries at 0%, 0%, it was 0.5% and then 0.75%.
So the expectation was that would be like that anybody who didn't serve that period was going to have to serve that period as well.
So there was a probably a small deficiency in the in the budget in that year, but not unreasonable for the year when that budget was being set, that was the expectation at that time and so we've been trying to put a little bit in each year to build it up to where we are and no expectation that it would have taken this long to settle the contract either.

Participant: Past governments had a freeze on closing schools and all those things?
Is that expired now? Or what is the decision that the provincial government has now in closing a small school. So we have a small school obviously and fluctuates quite a bit for our towns.
In the past, we didn't have to worry about it shutting.
Is that still the way it is now?
Slepicka: You know, I honestly haven't heard about the moratorium. Is that what they called it?
Jaddock: Yeah, I haven't either. I haven't heard anything.
Whether they've lifted that or not. I know that discussions can occur in school divisions regarding any school, if that is needed or they’re approached by community.
But most communities don't want to have those type of discussions.
They want to make sure that their school’s viable and remains, and so we are budgeting as if all the 16 schools in Mountain View School Division are remaining open for the next school year.
Participant: Alright, thank you very much.

Cottyn: And one more question online.
So Mr. Wieler just said overall very good summary, just to make sure that he heard things correctly, the proposed increase on taxes will be about 8%. Thinking if the meeting invite would have said 8% proposed increase instead of 1 mil increase, maybe even more people would have come out.

Participant: When do you expect to pass the budget?
Slepicka: We have to have the special levies set before the 15th of March, so we are going to have that passed on Monday, March 11th.
We have until the 31st of March to actually pass the budget, so we have to do something more number crunching before then.
Participant: Probably your meeting following the March 11th meeting?
Slepicka: Uh, no.
We would have to call a special meeting and pass it on the 11th because our next meeting is not until April.

Participant: I wondered how, so I'm here on behalf of the Friendship Center, and we have sent out a letter, I'm not sure if you read it yet or not about the nutrition increase?
(Yes, yes.)
And we're wondering how we would be able to work with you in the planning of that budget, because I've been speaking with Minister Alltomere’s Office, and he definitely thinks that the food for thought program falls into that and we think we could be a huge benefit to this budget.  So is there a way we can follow up and maybe talk more about it?
Jaddock: Absolutely, we are interested in working together.

Cottyn: OK, so this is John Bettner.
MVSD has generally sat somewhere low in terms of municipal portion of school funding, usually about five percentage points above the provincial average when considering municipal taxes as a portion of the total school funding. The provincial portion of school funding has dropped significantly over the last decade, from close to 70% and years ago to almost 60% now.
Do you have a sense of where Mountain View will fit relative to the province in terms of percentage of revenue it raises locally below the provincial average revenue.
Like to ask where we sit in terms of provincially revenues.

Slepicka: So I don't think it would like that slide, although it's a little bit historical.
Let's go back to the deck here.
So that provincially, on average it's 57.7 and we're at 62.6.
I see that number as a percentage decreasing for the provincial funding versus all the other revenue for 24-25. 
Jaddock: And most other school divisions are undergoing processes such as we are right now, so they're in the midst of it. So what particular school divisions are putting forward for an increase to the municipal portion of funding is unknown, although we are adhering to what the province has said to make it reasonable and make it that it is something that can backed up and we feel that we are doing so with the budget that we're proposing that we're not going crazy with any extravagant costs or anything like that. But we do have some amount of catch up to do then with the opening up of the ability to tax. We have come forward with the budget that we have before us.

Participant: Is the offset grant still in play even though you've been given their ability to?
Slepicka: Yes, but no change to it from the previous year.

Chairperson Mercier:
I'd like to thank everyone for attending tonight’s budget presentation.
I would also to thank the Trustees that were online.
I just want to recognize them.
Trustee Wieler is online, Trustee Martens is online, and Trustee McCallum.
I'd like to thank them for participating as well.
And again, thank you very much and if you have any questions, don't forget you could always call the Superintendent, you know, and ask him some hard questions.
OK.
Thank you.

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MVSD Public Budget Forum - Mar. 7, 2024

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