Reflecting a trend with boards grappling with JK-12 funding shortfalls across Ontario, the Sudbury Catholic District School Board has pulled from its reserves to balance its budget for the 2024-2025 school year.
The board’s projected deficit for the next school year is $909,430, although it was able to balance its budget of $121 million by pulling from its reserves. With the 2024-2025 deficit, the board’s reserves dip to $5.48 million.
It’s a similar situation with the Rainbow District School Board, which also projects a deficit of $704,045 and is making up for the shortfall by pulling from its reserves. The Algoma District School Board in Sault Ste. Marie has also drawn $298,000 from its reserves to balance its budget.
School boards are expected to present balanced budgets, but reserves can be used if the money being taken out is one per cent or less of the board’s operating revenue.
“The reason we're going into the deficit is generally due to funding gaps that we're experiencing,” said Cheryl Ann Corallo, the Sudbury Catholic Board’s superintendent of business and finance.
She was speaking at the June 26 school board meeting, where trustees approved the board’s 2024-2025 budget.
Budget documents produced by the school board show funding gaps when it comes to hiring supply teachers ($1.8 million), statutory benefits such as increases in employer CPP contributions ($200,000), transportation ($500,000) and general inflationary costs (the board said it has not calculated the potential funding gap for all its expenses yet).
This is following changes to the JK-12 education funding model introduced in Ontario.
“The total of those funding gaps adds up to a lot more than the $900,000 that we're identifying in the deficit,” said Corallo. “However, we were able to cover the difference with our existing funds without having to impact negatively on the classroom, which is important.”
‘We are not the only board in this city or in this province in this kind of situation’
Sudbury Catholic board chair Michael Bellmore, who is also the president of the Ontario Catholic School Trustees’ Association (OCSTA), said he suspects “a rather substantive amount of boards” will be submitting deficit budgets to the province this month.
“I can definitely say that we are not the only board in this city or in this province in this kind of situation,” Bellmore said during the meeting.
With a recent provincial cabinet shuffle, there’s a new education minister in Ontario. Todd Smith has been shifted into the role, displacing Stephen Lecce, who had been the province’s education minister for five years.
In his OCSTA role, Bellmore said he has already had a brief conversion with Smith. “On behalf of all the boards, I’m looking forward to dialoguing with him on these issues, and all the issues that are impacting our publicly funded Catholic schools,” he said.
Sudbury.com reached out to the office of Education Minister Smith for an interview on these topics, but our request was declined, which is consistently the approach of provincial ministers' offices to media inquiries.
However, his office did provide us with a written statement on the topic related to both the Sudbury Catholic and the Rainbow board’s recent deficit budgets.
“To support families in Sudbury, our government has provided over $227 million in funding to the Rainbow District School Board for the 2024-25 school year, an increase of over $7.8 million from this year,” said the written statement from Smith.
“To ensure students are safely transported to and from school each day, our government has invested nearly $16.7 million in Student Transportation Funding during the 2024-25 school year, an increase of over $500,000 from the current school year.
“For students in the Sudbury Catholic District School Board for the 2024-25 school year, we have invested over $104.8 million in education funding and over $7.4 million in student transportation funding, an increase of over $247,000 from the current school year.
“While the government provides student transportation funding to school boards each board is responsible for making operational decisions on bussing at a local level. We will continue to support students in getting back to basics on reading, writing, and math in Sudbury classrooms.”
Transportation deficit woes
Given the Sudbury Catholic board’s $500,000 shortfall related to transportation and the Rainbow board’s $713,000 shortfall in the same area, we reached out to Sudbury Student Services Consortium executive director Renée Boucher on the topic.
Boucher said a new transportation funding model introduced for 2023-2024 does not properly compensate boards, for example, for the cost of transporting special needs students long distances or paying for bus monitors on wheelchair buses.
Another issue is that the Sudbury consortium just went through a request for proposal for a new school bus provider last year, and the province’s new funding formula based on benchmarks is not fully covering the cost of the new contract.
“Most of my boards have been running a deficit in transportation for many years,” said Boucher, who clarified that besides Sudbury Catholic and Rainbow, Conseil scolaire du Grand Nord is also running a transportation deficit.
“It's not new, but there are getting to be larger deficits. because the Ministry of Education has changed the way in which they fund transportation.
“I'm still working with the Ministry of Education on a regular basis, to try to modify this funding formula that they came out with last year. They have made some changes for next year. So they are open to suggestions and listening to boards and listening to consortia.”
Background information on transportation funding provided by Smith’s office said the ministry implemented a new funding framework for student transportation in the 2023-2024 school year which is “transparent, equitable and focused on reliability.”
“To build on the goals of the funding framework and to help school boards deliver safe, effective, and efficient transportation services, the STF (Student Transportation Fund) allocation is being increased by about $80 million (six per cent) in 2024-25 and is projected to total $1.3 billion,” said the information provided by the minister’s office.
The new funding formula supports growth in transportation needs resulting from enrolment changes, reflects the costs of purchasing new vehicles and wages, addresses sector feedback related to contracted special purpose vehicles and taxis and provides each board with an increase of at least three per cent, said the ministry.
To recognize the unique needs of northern communities, the funding framework recognizes factors such as variations in travel time and distances, provides additional fuel for additional warm-up times for cold days and includes additional funding for rural and northern communities.
Heidi Ulrichsen is Sudbury.com’s assistant editor. She also covers education and the arts scene.
