Wild Rose Public School Division is feeling the pinch of government budget cuts like the others across the province.
Brian Celli, superintendent of the Wild Rose Public School Division, said they’ve been able to find enough money to maintain all of the programming and staffing in the division this year by putting projects on hold and making a few minor cuts to supplies and services.
“More or less it will be business as usual this year,” Celli said. “Next year is when the pain will hit.”
Celli said money earmarked for other things, like technology work, will be used to keep things going this year.
“We made commitments to staff and we made commitments to professional development as being two things that we really need to take forward if we really want to move ahead in terms of 21st century teaching,” Celli said.
He said contracts had been negotiated with support staff before the budget cuts were announced and even though the contracts hadn’t been ratified the decision of the board was to honour those contracts. He said trustees felt it didn’t seem fair because someone changed the playing field that they go back on those deals.
“Next year all bets are off. We don’t know what that even looks like,” Celli said. “So we’ll just wait and see what happens.”