Left to right, Education Director Brenda Vickers, with Board Chair Ronna Pethick and Chief Financial Officer Lonny Darroch at Wednesday's board meeting. (Angela Brown/battlefordsNOW staff)

By Angela Brown

Design focus

Living Sky preparing proposed budget for new school year

Mar 31, 2022 | 5:00 PM

Living Sky School Division is getting ready to prepare its 2022-23 proposed budget for the new school year.

At the board meeting Wednesday, administration discussed the process involved in designing the budget.

“The goal… is to take you through our process and our thinking as we began preparations for next year’s budget,” Education Director Brenda Vickers said. “Next time we’ll come in with all of the numbers behind everything. Tonight is just talking about what we want to focus on. And what we want to put our dollars behind.”

Trustee Kim Gartner was concerned if there are too many items earmarked for individualized improvements, there wouldn’t be enough money to go around for all the division’s bigger scope requirements in the budget.

“All I heard was: We are going to try and build an individualized budget…,” he said. “The idea of the sticky notes would be to try and address as many of them as you can…”

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He was worried if there are too many sticky notes for wants, “the majority of them are going to fall off.”

Vickers said rather the aim in the budget planning process is still to identify priorities in the budget, while also keeping in mind the common goal of having better outcomes for kids, including improved graduation rates.

Administration wants to keep their strategic direction top of mind when planning the budget. So now they will next need to focus on strategically deciding their priorities.

“Some of them are more work than money; some of them require money,” Vickers said. “So that’s what we actually are trying to do now. We have collected the budget to see what can we afford here.”

Administration will next bring the proposed 2022-23 budget to the school board for discussion on April 13.

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Angela.Brown@pattisonmedia.com

On Twitter: @battlefordsnow