With the provincial budget out for Saskatchewan, numerous organizations are taking a close look at the figures and what they'll bring for the year ahead.

For education, the budget allocates $2.5 billion in school operating funding, a number which breaks down into funding for multiple programs.

Dr. Sean Davidson, President of the Saskatchewan School Boards Association, says there weren't any big surprises in the budget.

"Overall, for the education sector, I think it's close to what we expected. The budget recognizes the government's promise to continue to expand the specialized support programming that was expanded last year, and they've committed to an additional 50 programs this year. So we're happy to see that they're fulfilling that commitment."

Funding Concerns

Despite the overall maintained funding levels, Davidson says there are still areas where the education sector hopes to see more funding.

"On the operating side, we would have liked to see a larger investment in education. I think overall this budget will be fairly status quo as far as the level of services that school divisions will be able to provide. It's not going to provide for any enhancements in services outside of those specialty support programs, but certainly, we'll cover the majority of the inflationary pressures that school divisions are seeing."

"We do continue to have concerns around transportation because we've seen things like the cost of school buses has nearly doubled in the last five years. So that's very significant for us. We're also disappointed that we didn't see further investment on the capital side. We were really hoping that we would see an enhancement in preventative maintenance and renewal funding in this budget, and we didn't."

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Fueling Students' Education

A current concern, especially when it comes to transportation for students, is the current surge in gas prices being seen worldwide.

Davidson says that the budgets may not be able to keep up with the increased costs coming in.

"Interestingly, fuel prices over the last several months have been maybe a little lower than some divisions budgeted, but they're certainly spiking now. So that will be another inflationary pressure within that transportation area that, of course, we'll be watching and are concerned about."

"Transportation of students in this province is an enormous expense compared to most other jurisdictions. We have a very spread-out population here. We have one of the most rural populations in the country, and all those kids need to get to school on a bus. So transportation is a very significant challenge for boards here, and it's something that we have certainly seen some underfunding in the past years, and we're not really optimistic that this budget is going to address all of that."

Overall, the province's budget represents a $819-million deficit this year.

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