Reactions continuing to come in from those impacted by the 2019 Provincial Budget released yesterday.

Chief Financial Officer with the Southeast Cornerstone Public School Division Shelley Toth said their funding has not been restored.

“For Southeast Cornerstone Public School Division, we received a very minimal increase of 0.3 percent, which equates to $321,000,” she said. “It certainly won't be enough to bring us to a balanced budget.”

“Our current operating budget is $93.3 million, with $75 million of that allocated for salaries and benefits,” she added. “Even a one percent increase to salaries and benefits is 750,000 so $321,000 is certainly not going to be enough.”

She said the School Division will have their work cut out for them as they build their 2019-2020 budget.

“At this point, I don’t know how much short we will be, because we’re still in the process of building that 2019-2020 budget, which will need to be approved by the board and submitted to the Ministry by the end of June,” she said. “That would be a board decision, whether they if they want to go to balance, whether they look at things as staffing, or we do have money in the surplus we’ve been accessing the past couple years as we’ve been seeing the decrease in funding to our school division.”

She said with the decreases over the past couple of years they've done their best to keep the budget cuts out of the classroom.

“Some of the cuts that we have done aren't sustainable,” she said. “We've put off purchasing buses or fleet vehicles or hoping to get another year or two out of that aging phone system in the school, but you can only do that for so long.”

Fundraisers, not something discussed but maybe something to consider.