Surplus in Windsor school boards

By Maryam Farag

The finances of two local school boards are in good shape.

The Greater-Essex County District School Board closed its books for the 2016-17 school year Tuesday night with a $6.1 million budget surplus.

That surplus was helped in the middle of the year by an increase in the number of students enrolled.

“We’ve been very responsible in terms of our operating costs, making sure we’re using things like efficient lighting, efficient electrical, assistance within our capital projects,” said director of education Erin Kelly.

The board is now planning to increase its budget since the number of students has increased.

The growing number of international students, helped since they are tuition-paying students and increased revenues for the board.

“We’re very fortunate that we were in a good position and that will help us pay down what you call a capital deficit,” said Kelly. “In other words we have an operating constant budget and we have the structure of building capital cost.”

Kelly said the surplus will allow the board to reduce the capital deficit to $4.5 million and they are working on eliminating it in the next few years.

The Windsor-Essex Catholic District School Board reduced a projected $5.3 million deficit to less than $1 million for the 2016-17 school budgets.

The board had a meeting Tuesday showing a $994,000 deficit for the year ending Aug. 31.

On a board level, there is no impact financially from the five-week strike that happened last fall.

Executive superintendent of business Penny King said the biggest contributor in reducing the deficit was the post-retirement benefits agreement.

“We budgeted annual fees of $4.1 million,” said King. “Our actual fees were only $1.65 million, resulting in $2.49 million of expenditure saving.”

King also said the additional enrollment of 163 students was greater than estimated, which also helped financially.

“We’re for sure always forecasting most efficiently to hopefully getting back to a surplus in the near future,” said King.