The school district’s budget is going up 2.63 per cent for the next school year but Thompson taxpayers won’t see an education property tax increase because the increase is being covered by a provincial offset grant and other funding.
School District of Mystery Lake secretary-treasurer Kelly Knott outlined the proposed budget in a public presentation at the district office on March 1. Trustees must approve the budget at a school board meeting before it is submitted to the province, The deadline for submission of school district budgets is March 31.
In exchange for not increasing the education portion of property taxes, the district will receive a property tax offset grant of $236,000 from the provincial government. Operating funding has also increased from last year and the district receives other targeted funding for special needs students and to maintain and improve student presence and engagement, as well as to deal with inflationary pressures. The last two grants, which brought $762,000 and nearly $1.6 million to SDML in the current school year, were originally announced as one-time funding but have been extended for the 2023-24 school year as well.
“I believe in today’s times with the inflation being able to present a budget with very small increases is a very good achievement,” said Knott.
For the first time in three years, the district will not have to use surplus funds from the previous year to cover operating expenses.This year’s budget used $358,000 of surplus to balance the books while the year before that $239,000 in surplus funds was required.
The overall dollar value that must be covered by local property taxes is lower in the 2023-24 budget than it has been since 2020.
SDML’s budget is highly reliant on provincial funding, with local taxes making up less than 17 per cent of revenues. Every category of funding from the province with the exception of the tax incentive grant went up at least slightly this year. The district has also been funded based on adjusted 2021-22 school year enrolment of 2,950 full-time equivalent students over this school year and next year’s. If it were based on the actual enrolment, which is about 200 students lower, the district would have to find an additional $2 million or so in revenues to balance the budget.
“Our provincial funding is 82 per cent of our revenue stream so we are very much dependent on the province,” Knott said. “We’ve been very fortunate that they see our needs, recognize what needs to happen here for our success and are in support of that.”
This school year’s budget is still subject to change based on adjustments from the province, which are made once actual enrolment figures are received after the start of a new school year. Those these adjustments are usually made in December, they haven’t been made for the 2022-23 school year yet. In the 2021-22 school year, actual funding was adjusted downward by about $756,000. Coping with such adjustments is part of the reason school districts can have a surplus of up to four per cent of the current school year’s budget, because such adjustments are not made in phases but come out of the next scheduled payment of provincial funding.
SDML expects to have a surplus of about $1.2 million at the end of next school year, equal to 2.6 per cent of the budget. It isn’t as big a cushion as it may seem, Knott, said, since monthly expenses for the district total about $4 million per month during the school year.
