The provincial budget provided some good news and some questions for Foothills School Division officials.

They were hoping the division wouldn't lose funding because of the lower number of students than estimated because of COVID.

Superintendent Chris Fuzessy says that seems to be the case.

"Each school division will receive the same amount of funding as they did last year so that Hold Harmless concept that many school divisions advocated to the minister about seems to have been heard, which is good news," he says. "Where we don't have a lot of detail yet is we're only receiving the detailed budget outline for each school division at the end of March."

Fuzessy says they do know they'll have the same amount of money as last year but they need to know where costs have increased like insurance.

"If we receive the same amount of money but we've also seen an increase in insurance costs then we can foresee that there will be an overall decrease of money because we have to pay off that insurance bill," Fuzessy says.

The division's insurance bill has jumped by about 500 per cent.

He says another positive is the federal/provincial COVID money that the division got this year seems to be covering off the cost of the pandemic.

"Going into a pandemic you don't know what costs are going to be having never experienced or lived it, so a lot of those costs seem to be coming in lower than we projected and the board had agreed to take an additional $1.5 million out of reserves to cover those costs, those costs seem to be getting covered off through those federal dollars which means our reserve will be healthier than we have anticipated when we passed last year's budget, so that gives me a little bit of optimism again that those increased costs perhaps could be offset with some discussion around reserves."

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