Rod Steeves, Secretary-Treasurer for Red Deer Catholic Regional Schools

By Sheldon Spackman

looking ahead

Forecast budget deficit not a concern for Red Deer Catholic Regional Schools

Jun 27, 2019 | 1:51 PM

Despite a budget deficit of just over $400,000 forecast for the upcoming school year, officials with Red Deer Catholic Regional Schools are confident it will have minimal impact on students.

Secretary-Treasurer Rod Steeves says they have reserves available to offset the projected loss.

“We’re not really concerned with that,” says Steeves. “We decided at this point to cut in a couple of areas, and then we would go forward and hopefully be able to balance our budget in the following year.”

Steeves says there are two areas they’re not expecting to receive government funding for.

“We initially had felt that we would be able to balance our budget this year,” says Steeves. “But because we have no idea what the budget (provincial) looks like for next year yet, we felt likely the current government would reduce Classroom Improvement Funds and also the nutrition grant that was available to us in the past.”

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However, Steeves notes those upcoming changes will not result in any staff reductions.

“We feel that there’s going to be a one per cent increase in the student population next year,” adds Steeves. “Obviously anytime you have to cut back on a couple of services that we’ve had available in the classroom, there’s going to be less support I guess in schools but it’s not significantly less support.”

At this point, Steeves says they anticipate continued growth in the coming years, albeit at a slower rate.

“Other than the reduction in funding, it’s a pretty common budget for us,” he explains. “The growth has helped us to reduce what our deficits are and so it’s something that we’ve been sort of looking towards, that this growth would basically help us to balance that budget. Even though we feel that there’s going to be a little bit of reduction in funding, we’re able to deal with it.”

Elsewhere, $2.4 million in renovations will soon be getting underway at the Montfort Centre and Cultural Services Building on 39 Street, which the District still owns.

Steeves says they plan to move both their Finance and Information Technology (IT) staff to the Cultural Services Building once renovated.

“We have been packed into this Montfort Centre building for a number of years as we’ve grown to over 10 thousand students,” says Steeves. “We’ve just been running out of space in our current building and so we decided to move those two departments to the Cultural Services Building, seeing as that building was no longer going to be used (by the City of Red Deer), we felt that it was time to do that.”

Steeves says the Cultural Services Building will essentially be ‘gutted’ before nearly 20 staff move-in sometime next spring.

“We’ll be setting up office space so that it’s more conducive to offices, as opposed to what it was used for before,” he exclaims. “We’re going to do a mini-renovation here (Montfort Centre) as well, where we’ll have more meeting space available to us for professional development, things that we do here. So that will be something that we’re looking forward to because generally we have had issues where we’re trying to find space for meetings and that type of thing.”