Less than a week to go before school starts, but the Anglophone East school district is still trying to find ways to reduce its budget.
When the $160 million budget was presented in the spring, they were facing a $1.8 million dollar shortfall.
Superintendent Gregg Ingersoll says it has now been reduced to under a million dollars, but other adjustments still need to be made, “Big buckets are the teachers salaries, educational assistants, facilities, all of those areas. None are places where you would like to take anything from, but at the end of the day, we do have to balance the budget.”
Ingersoll says because the costs and the need for resources are always going up, they can’t seem to catch up year to year.
“As the costs and needs go up, we’re not keeping pace with the budget for that year. We catch up a little bit the next year, but then we go deeper and we have more the following year. There just always seems to be a circle that we just can’t seem to catch up,” Ingersoll says.
The shortfall is primarily due to an increase and need for Educational Assistants in the classrooms, “When you have as many as we have. We have some schools that have over 20 Educational Assistants and they may only have 25-30 teachers. For us and for staffing, and for resources, it is an issue that is getting more and more complex every year,” Ingersoll says.
