Increased growth year after year makes creating a budget a tough job for RVS.

Although an anticipated deficit was expected for Rocky View Schools (RVS) 15/16 school year, the audited financial statements from September/15- August 31/2016 show a $4.1 million surplus attributed mostly to increased enrollment and Province funding costs. 

While expenditures did increase from the previous year most of the significant costs have come from salaries/benefits and new hires.

RVS, Chair, Colleen Munro, says the surplus budget from last year will now be put into reserves and act as a cushion for either this year's budget or year's to come. When planning and dealing with the budget they look at one year at a time.

"We tend to think of one year at a time, we just got done with one year with our audited financial statements we're in the middle of this year we will try to manage this year, the thing about school's is that it is public money and we try to spend public dollars on today's kids."

At the RVS meeting on December 1, an update of the fall budget was provided, and it is a fairly conservative budget. Munro says although we are likely going to experience a deficit this year; it is mostly due to one time costs and additional services.

"Even though we are at 50% more students than what we budgeted for we added extra services to accommodate that growth. Extra teachers, extra learning support, costs that we have applied for the classroom that become money that we spend on kids. The other thing in that is we have school start ups and those are one time costs like hiring new school principals, and hiring new school secretaries, so those are one time costs that get allocated into that equation as well.

Even if the board has to run a slight deficit to make sure services are available for all the extra kids coming in, they will, and there is no talk of raising fees at this time.

"I think we would have to contemplate that for quite some time because we have the cushion of some reserves. Some of those reserves are in capital and they have to spent on capital, we have the transportation reserve that we can use to augment transportation fees if we nee to, and we have a bit of an instructional reserve that we can look at to. I am 100% confident that this board would spend our reserves before we have any kind of substantial fee hike for our parents."

Colleen says the boards' budget priority is direct classroom instruction and that is where they want to funnel any extra money too.